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often tried to interfere. They could sometimes be put to sleep, but not always; a kid with big steam
could block even Snakebite Andi’s best efforts in that regard. So sometimes people had to be killed.
Not good, but the prize was always worth it: life and strength stored away in a steel canister. Stored
for a rainy day. In many cases there was even a residual benefit. Steam was hereditary, and often
everyone in the target’s family had at least a little.
7
While most of the True Knot waited in a pleasantly shady rest area forty miles east of Council Bluffs,
the RVs containing the three finders turned around, left the turnpike at Adair, and headed north.
Once away from I-80 and out in the toolies, they spread apart and begin working the grid of graveled,
well-maintained farm roads that parceled this part of Iowa into big squares. Moving in on the ping
from different directions. Triangulating.
It got stronger . . . a little stronger still . . . then leveled off. Good steam but not great steam. Ah,
well. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
8
Bradley Trevor had been given the day off from his usual farm chores to practice with the local Little
League All-Star team. If his pa had refused him this, the coach probably would have led the rest of the
boys in a lynch party, because Brad was the team’s best hitter. You wouldn’t think it to look at him—
he was skinny as a rake handle, and only eleven—but he was able to tag even the District’s best
pitchers for singles and doubles. The meatballers he almost always took deep. Some of it was plain
farmboy strength, but by no means all of it. Brad just seemed to know what pitch was coming next. It
wasn’t a case of stealing signs (a possibility upon which some of the other District coaches had
speculated darkly). He just knew. The way he knew the best location for a new stock well, or where the
occasional lost cow had gotten off to, or where Ma’s engagement ring was the time she’d lost it. Look
under the floormat of the Suburban, he’d said, and there it was.
That day’s practice was an especially good one, but Brad seemed lost in the ozone during the
debriefing afterward, and declined to take a soda from the tub filled with ice when it was offered. He
said he thought he better get home and help his ma take in the clothes.
“Is it gonna rain?” Micah Johnson, the coach, asked. They’d all come to trust him on such things.
“Dunno,” Brad said listlessly.
“You feel okay, son? You look a little peaked.”
In fact, Brad didn’t feel well, had gotten up that morning headachey and a bit feverish. That wasn’t
why he wanted to go home now, though; he just had a strong sense that he no longer wanted to be at
the baseball field. His mind didn’t seem . . . quite his own. He wasn’t sure if he was here or only
dreaming he was—how crazy was that? He scratched absently at a red spot on his forearm. “Same time
tomorrow, right?”
Coach Johnson said that was the plan, and Brad walked off with his glove trailing from one hand.
Usually he jogged—they all did—but today he didn’t feel like it. His head still ached, and now his
legs did, too. He disappeared into the corn behind the bleachers, meaning to take a shortcut back to
the farm, two miles away. When he emerged onto Town Road D, brushing silk from his hair with a
slow and dreamy hand, a midsize WanderKing was idling on the gravel. Standing beside it, smiling,
was Barry the Chink.
“Well, there you are,” Barry said.