Something small darted ahead: a boy, no older than eight, hair plastered to his forehead with river gloss, eyes wide with a knowledge that tasted old. He didn’t run from them. He ran to them.
The thing tilted as if amused. Its reflection in the water rippled independently. “Alone is a long word,” it said. “The light remembers. You remember?”
“Are you with the light?” he asked, breathless as a bell.
Elliott’s throat tightened. He had rehearsed bravery in a dozen ways: sprinting into the dark, flinging the bike down the stairs, jumping from roofs. None of them included being addressed by a thing that called itself lost. “Are you… alone?” he managed.
The light climbed—no, it rose, a ladder of beads that spilled upward and within the glass the comic-strip astronaut seemed to straighten. The hum changed pitch, the things outside the windows recoiled, and the seam in the night closed like a book being shut.