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She had a last look at Vic, huddled on the couch, fists balled under her chin. This time Maggie couldn’t help herself. The door was over there, close to the couch, and as Maggie went by, she paused, and bent over, and kissed her temple, lightly. In sleep one corner of Vic’s mouth turned up in a wry smile.

Maggie went looking for the boy in the shadows. She stepped out into what had once been the children’s library and eased the door shut behind her. The carpet had been peeled up into mildewed strips and rolled over against the wall in a series of stinking bundles. The floor beneath was wet concrete. Half of an enormous globe occupied one corner of the room, the northern hemisphere upended and filled with water and pigeon feathers, sides streaked with bird crap. America turned upside down and shit on. She noticed, absentmindedly, that she was still carrying her bag of Scrabble tiles, had forgotten to put them back in the desk. Dumb.

She heard a sound not unlike butter sizzling in a pan, off somewhere to her right. Maggie started around the U-shaped walnut desk, where once she had signed out Coraline and The House with a Clock in Its Walls and Harry Potter. As she approached the stone gallery that led back to the central building, she saw a leaping yellow glare.

The boy stood at the far end of the gallery with his sparkler. A small, stocky black figure, hood pulled up to hide his face. He stood staring, his sparkler pointed down at the floor, pouring sparks and smoke. In the other hand was a long silver can of something. She smelled wet paint.

“.myself stop can’t I,” he said, in a hoarse, strange voice, and laughed.

“What?” she said. “Kid, get out of here with that.”

He shook his head and turned and wandered away, this child of shadow, moving like a figure in a dream, lighting a path into some cavern of the unconscious. He swayed drunkenly, almost careening off one wall. He was drunk. Maggie could smell the beer from here.

“Hey!” she said.

He disappeared. Somewhere ahead she heard echoing laughter. In the remote gloom of the periodicals room, she saw a new light—the guttering, sullen glare of a fire.

She began to run. She kicked syringes and bottles clattering across the concrete floor, ran past boarded-over windows. Someone, the kid possibly, had spray-painted a message in red on the wall to her right: GOD BURNED ALIVE ONLY DEV1LS NOW. The paint was still dripping, bright red, as if the walls were bleeding.

She ran into the periodicals room, a space as big as a modest-size chapel and with ceilings just as high. During the flood it had been a shallow Sargasso, a scum of magazines covering the water, a swollen mass of National Geographics and New Yorkers. Now it was a big, bare cement chamber with dried, hardened newspapers stuck to floors and walls, rotten piles of magazines drifted in the corners, some sleeping bags spread where bums had camped out—and a wire trash can, boiling with greasy smoke. The drunk little bastard had dropped his sparkler in it on top of a mess of paperbacks and magazines. Green and orange sparks spit from somewhere deep inside the burning nest. Maggie saw a copy of Fahrenheit 451 shriveling and blackening.

The boy considered her from the far side of the room, from within a dark, high stone archway.

“Hey!” she screamed again. “Hey, you little shit!”

“.late too it’s but ,can I as hard as fighting I’m,” he said, rocking from side to side. “.me follow don’t ,please ,please ,Please”

“Hey!” she said, not listening, unable to listen, none of it making any sense anyway.

She looked around for something to smother the flames, snatched up one of the sleeping bags, blue and slippery and smelling faintly of puke. She held her Scrabble sack under one arm while she crammed the sleeping bag in on top of the flames, pressing down hard, choking the fire. She flinched from the heat and the smell, an odor of cooked phosphorous and burned metal and charring nylon.

When she looked up again, the boy was gone.

“Get the f*ck out of my library, you little creep! Get the f*ck gone before I catch up to you!”

He laughed somewhere. It was hard to tell where he was. His laughter was a breathless, echoing, untraceable sound, like a bird flapping its wings high in the rafters of some abandoned church. She thought, randomly, God burned alive, only devils now.

She went on toward the lobby, her legs shaking. If she caught the crazy, drunk little bastard, he would not think God had burned alive. He would think God was a dyke librarian, and he would know the fear of her.

Maggie was halfway across the periodicals room when the rocket went off with a great whistling scream. That sound was a jolt straight to the nerve endings, made her want to scream herself and dive for cover. Instead she ran, ducked low like a soldier under fire, all the breath shooting out of her.

She made it to the vast central room, with the sixty-foot-high ceilings, in time to see the bottle rocket hit the roof, spin, bounce off an arch, and ricochet down toward the dull marble floor: a missile of emerald flame and crackling sparks. A chemical-smelling smoke coiled throughout the room. Embers of fey green light tumbled from above, falling like flakes of some infernal, radioactive snow. Burn the place down—the f*cking pint-size lunatic was in here to burn the place down. The rocket was still flying, hit the wall to her right, and exploded in a bright, fizzling flash, with a crack like a gunshot, and she shouted and ducked and covered the side of her face. An ember touched the bare skin of her right forearm, and she flinched at the sharp stab of pain.

In the far room, the reading room, the boy laughed breathlessly and ran on.