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whole.
    Edie, he said, edging across the mattress, pressing against her. The replica galaxy shone down, dull and green. Hey, Calum murmured — nudging, grinding, stroking. Edie, hey. Edie? But she was either asleep or pretending.
    LOOK, SAID CALUM , his voice coaxing, squeezing Edie’s hips. Look at these two appleheads, he said, and Edie sighed and looked: a couple, thirtyish, pushing a fancy stroller up the hill toward Orchard Parkway. Calum waited for Edie to ask what was so wrong with them. When she didn’t he said, I bet they don’t even do it. Edie let his words hang. He crossed his arms around her waist and pressed himself into her backside and said, Hey?
    She wriggled away and left Calum holding air. Voices called from within the trees, their friends emerged, watches were tapped, they should go to school. School? said Calum. Come on, Edie. We could go back to my place, my ma’s at work all day. But Edie shook her head firmly. No way, Calum. You might not care about your future but I do. I want to graduate, thanks.
    Their friends were moving up the path, behind the stroller couple, in pairs. Calum gazed across the common, at the stage where the famous magician had wowed everyone that morning, and he wondered how it felt to have so many people, together and all at once, say your name.
    THE MONDAY after Edie’s party Calum awoke to his mother, Cora, leaning her head into his bedroom, eyes ringed with dark, voice a reedy crackle: Okay Cal, up you get, go to school. But he just lay there thinking. After a time his little brother Rupe appeared in the doorway. Ma said you have to take me to school. Take your fuggin self, said Calum, and went back to sleep.
    That afternoon he walked up F Street, slushy and unplowed, through the Zone, past Blackacres Station, past the Room, into Whitehall, the factory district, and the ICTS Barns, where the trains went to sleep every night, unlaced sneakers flopping and soaked through to his socks. Past the Barns he entered the industrial district: abandoned warehouses, factories, plants, various Concerns no longer concerned with much, their gerundial purposes (Shipping, Receiving, etc.) painted onto pale splintering wood. At last he came to the massive concrete panpipes of the Favours Brothers silos, long decommissioned, where Calum ducked through a peeled-back section of chainlink. The loading dock was open. Inside was dark as a throat.
    He peered into this blackness. There was no sign of the Hand or any of her people. But this was their way: invisible unless and until they wanted to be seen. Yet the gloom seemed to dance with firefly sparkles — dozens of eyes, catlike and glittering, watching him . . .
    Calum ran. Back through the fence, out of the docklands to the Piers. Here he hopped out along the blunt-headed stumps of a drowned jetty to the breakwater, the most western point in the city, and sat, heart hammering and dangling shoes refracted in the lake. The air smelled of wet wool and sewage. To the north was the mainland: tan-coloured fields, chalky cliffs, a gravel beach prodded and coaxed with waves — close enough to swim to, but Calum had never been.
    HE REACHED FOR EDIE, to hold her, to hold on to anything. But her back was to him. He tapped her shoulder. A half-swivel of her neck: an acknowledgment of what he’d done, but not him.
    What?
    Nothing, said Calum.
    Well are you coming? There was exasperation in Edie’s voice. You can’t skip, you’ve already been suspended. Calum?
    The only people left in the park were the NFLM , hollering, taking down barricades, rolling up the welcome rug, collecting garbage on spiked sticks, their voices resonated as the woofs and hoots of animals.
    One of the men splintered off from the group. He was coming over, crossing the common in a delicate mincing way. Calum said, Look at this guy, but Edie was moving up the hill to join the rest of their friends, waiting to go to school.

    LOOK AT THOSE KIDS, said the one named Starx. Hey,