Aries had felt it the moment they pulled up.
The location Halloway had given them was a bus shelter on a B-road, the kind of place that existed for no obvious reason in the middle of nowhere — a single sheet of corrugated plastic and a bench, the bus route it had once served long since cancelled, the shelter itself slowly being absorbed back into the verge.
Standing beside it, motionless, was a child.
A boy. Perhaps nine, perhaps younger — it was hard to tell, the way it was hard to tell ages with all of Halloway's constructions, something about the absence in them flattening the usual markers. He stood with his hands at his sides, and his eyes had the same thinning blankness Lena had described feeling from the first one, but his lips were moving.
Aries got out of the car slowly.
He h
