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arm, grabbing my shirt, and in one motion threw me to the ground. He climbed off Ciel and onto me, punching my face, shouting, “You little Smudge bitch!” The weight of him was crushing me, and the blows to my face made my teeth cut into my cheek until I tasted blood. I closed my eyes and felt a massive slam against my nose, causing a burst of brilliant red behind my eyelids that turned into a bloom of stars.
    And I was dazed enough not to care. Somehow, each blow came to represent exactly what I would do for Poppu and Ciel. Each blow turned the confusion of my world into a pain that I could suffer on my body instead of in my brain, trapped, where it had no way of getting out.
    “Sol!” Poppu cried. “Ciel!” He heard the commotion but couldn’t see what was happening.
    Someone pulled the boy off me, and he grabbed at me so hard, wanting to finish the job, that I was lifted for a moment, suspended in space and time. When I returned to earth, I felt him being peeled away from me like a dead layer of my own skin.
    I opened my already-swelling eyelids to see that it was his compatriots who had stopped him from killing me, and that both Poppu and Ciel had been restrained during my beating.
    “What the hell are you doing, Dice?”
    “She’s a kid!”
    “She’s just a kid, you psycho!”
    The guy holding Ciel said, “Gimme your phone.” He was hoping for some liquid assets to steal—something to make the inconvenience of our fight worth their while. Another boy with a tattoo of a crucifix on his forehead frisked Ciel, took his phone from his pocket, tapped it on, and in a moment said, “Holy shit!”
    We were so poor, almost none of our money was stored as cash. I personally had enough to buy two banana chew candies at school.
    But that’s not what he meant.
    “Listen, my bitches!” Crucifix said. “This little prick is none other than Ciel Le Coeur.”
    The girl stopped plinking a non-tune on the ukulele and said, “Who the hell is that?”
    “He’s the hacking genius Dice’s brother has been looking for.”
    Ciel shouted, “Give it back!”
    Crucifix entered something on Ciel’s screen, hit one final tap distinctly like a “send” command, and said, “Let them go.”
    Ciel lunged for his phone. Crucifix gave it up willingly. I was on the ground, unable to get up on my own. The euphoric emotional release of Dice’s blows had morphed into a throbbing, nauseating agony that my body desperately wanted to escape with unconsciousness.
    Crucifix pulled out his own phone and it pinged with a new text message, which spiked a disgusting grin on his face.
    “Sweet. I have his contact info. I bet Dice’s brother will pay a pretty penny for it.” He barked at the girl, “Say thank you to the geezer for your new toy and let’s roll.”
    “Fuck you, geezer,” the girl said sweetly.
    They loped off, pushing and shoving, as loud as Rays, arguing over who deserved the reward.
    Through my good eye I saw that Ciel had squatted down over me, with his arms folded on his knees and his face buried in his elbow. His shoulders rose up and down in quiet sobs. But he wasn’t crying from the beating. It looked more like … grief. As if he’d lost something he loved. I closed my eyes, suddenly afraid of how much I depended on Ciel’s strength.

 
    Wednesday
2:30 p.m.
    The Hour Guard took me from lockup to the hospital in a squad car. Day Boy sat up front with him and I was in the back, where it was ridiculously hot. There was a partition between the front and the back, with two clear bullet-resistant sheets and a metal screen in the middle. Aside from the heat, and a gas pain in my stomach that was stabbing me, I was just as glad not to have to talk to either of them. Their windows were open, and the rushing breeze was enough to dull the sound of their conversation but not enough to refresh the air in the back seat. I took off my hoodie and shook my T-shirt away from my chest.
    The sun was blazing, and I had never