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it so outrageous that Poppu and I couldn’t keep humming in the background because we were laughing so hard, and I’d lose my step and crash into Ciel or trip over his feet. This time, he was barely moving with me and refused to open his mouth. I’d never seen him look uncomfortable dancing, like his body weighed more than he wanted to bother lifting.
    “I can’t stand this song,” he groaned.
    “Oh, please!” twelve-year-old me begged. Poppu gamely kept humming, in case Ciel decided by some miracle not to be a killjoy.
    “I can’t do this anymore,” Ciel said, dropping his arms, motionless now with conviction. “That song is simplistic bullshit.”
    Poppu stopped strumming. His face had gone limp. Ciel was moody lately, and it wobbled our family orbit in a way I didn’t understand. He sometimes stayed out of the apartment all night with no warning or explanation. When he was home he worked in his room with the door closed well into the day, when he should have been sleeping.
    On the path to the south I could see dark figures approaching us. The moonlight wasn’t bright enough to identify them, so I took my flashlight from its holster and shone it on the ground near their feet, which was the polite way to assess strangers among Smudges.
    I took a breath when I saw in the halo of my beam the black clothes and red shoes of a pack of Noma. And now I saw that their body language was Noma, too: even in silhouette they had a distinct swagger, a willingness—maybe an eagerness—to hurt you.
    The Noma were an itinerant population of thugs. Physically, they looked part clown, part goth, part serial killer. The girls always chewed gum; their hair was black and spiky, with a mullet in the back; they wore pancake makeup so that you could only see skin-color differences in their extremities, and red rouge circles on their cheeks, plus red lipstick. The men had crew cuts so short their heads were nearly shaved, and they all bleached themselves blond. Piercings and tattoos abounded. Noma clothing was as varied as the outfits ordinary people wore, but it was all black, with occasional red accents, and always red shoes. No one understood their social structure, but they were at least loosely formed into tribes, and there was a rumor that Noma barely trusted Noma—that they’d just as easily kill each other as other Smudges and Rays. The Noma were supposedly all Smudges; at least that’s the way it was when I was twelve.
    Ciel said, “Put the flashlight away.”
    Poppu’s eyesight was already too diminished to see anything without bright lighting, but he sensed something was wrong. “Come sit by me, Sol,” he said. I obeyed. He found my hand with his and held it down against the bench.
    A girl Noma said, with no preamble, “Gimme the little guitar, old man.”
    “I … Do you really—” Poppu stammered, obviously trying to think his way out of giving up the instrument.
    “C’mon, guys,” Ciel spoke up, making his voice friendly but confident. “He’s had that since he was a kid.”
    I wasn’t prepared for the suddenness of their attack. The girl slammed into Ciel and knocked him over, the boy fell on him and began punching him. The girl turned her attention to ripping the ukulele from Poppu’s grasp while the others hung back and laughed. Stealing a ukulele from a senior citizen was apparently just a two-man job.
    It turned out there was a reason Poppu was holding my hand down. It was to prevent me from doing what I did next. I wrenched away from him and leaped onto the back of the boy who was beating Ciel. I clawed at him like a cat, pummeled his stupid shaved head, and finally resorted to biting his shoulder so hard that I felt something sinewy crackle between my teeth.
    Until that bite, I was an annoying fly, not even worthy of shooing. After the bite, I was a violent menace, and I saw with a little flash of regret that the searing pain of the wound had flipped a switch in him. He lashed backward with his