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gray-brown sludge doesn’t churn forth so much as it sluggishly crawls forward. The smell at this level is truly overpowering: a sugary fist to the nose with a sour stink-slap after.
    But that’s not what matters now.
    What matters is they see Rigo.
    He’s not alone.
    A man stands on the far side of the river, opposite them. He’s got the look of a hobo. Older. Hunched over in a pair of dirty denim overalls with nothing underneath except the worn and leathered skin of a well-traveled vagrant. The man looks up at the two of them with dark eyes under a single knitted brow, his face so scruffy with black stubble it looks like coal silt.
    Cael and Lane scream at him, but the man ignores them.
    The hobo reaches back and pulls up a long pole—really two poles bracketed together, by the looks of it—that dead-ends in a copper wire loop. They see Rigo, suddenly, bobbing back up to the surface.
    And heading right toward the man.
    The man dips the looped end of the pole into the river.
    “He’s going for Rigo,” Cael says, panicked.
    “Maybe he’s trying to help.”
    But Cael doesn’t want to hear that. Even after everything with Pop and the garden and Martha’s Bend, he still doesn’t know if he trusts vagrants—he hears tell of all kinds of stories about what the rail-riders and other wanderers are like. Thieves and madmen, exiled from their towns. Some of them killers, or kiddie-catchers, or even cannibals.
    Cael screams for the man to stop, but he doesn’t pay attention. Cael snatches the rifle out of Lane’s grip and points it just as the loop of the pole catches around Rigo’s head and arm, cinching tight.
    Like the man’s going fishing or something.
    Cael whoops a wordless threat and cocks the rifle’s lever action.
    Ch-chak .
    It’s loud enough to get the vagrant’s attention.
    He looks up. Rigo thrashes and splashes. The man doesn’t say anything. He just stares. Cael feels those dark eyes like two black seeds tucked into the dirt of the man’s face.
    The hobo grunts, looks back down toward the river. He begins hauling Rigo up to the cracked, dust-blown bank of the slurry river.
    “I’ll shoot!” Cael yells. Finger curling around the trigger.
    The rifle’s not loaded.
    But no way for the vagabond to know that.
    All the hobo hollers is “So shoot.”
    The rifle wavers, the iron sights like horns of Old Scratch framing the man. Cael wonders if he could do it. Shoot a fella the way Pop shot Mayor Barnes. Wasn’t in cold blood. No matter the temperature of the blood, it ended the same way, with a dead man lying there.
    Of course, Cael has his own dead man, doesn’t he? Pally Varrin. Empyrean Babysitter for the town of Boxelder. Throat closed and crushed by a single ball bearing from Cael’s slingshot.
    It haunts him, suddenly: the image of Pally on the ground, gasping and gurgling. Legs shaking. Feet juddering as everything went to hell outside Cael’s once-safe homestead.
    He shudders.
    Meanwhile, Rigo flops onto the bank with a splatter—looking like a shuck rat pulled out of an oil barrel.
    But, whoa-dang, he’s still holding the bag! The bag that contains their food, their ammo, a host of other minor necessities.
    Cael bares his teeth but lowers the gun.
    “Rigo!” he yells. “You all right?”
    Rigo looks up from his place on the ground. He wipes sludge from his eyes and finally sees that the person who rescued him is neither Cael nor Lane. He screams.
    The hobo just frowns and shakes his head.
    He looks across the murky river span.
    Then he points to the trestle.
    “Meet me up there. I’ll bring your friend.”
    The man smiles suddenly. Cael can’t help but think it’s meant to be friendly—but damnit if that smile doesn’t look feral .
    The hobo hauls Rigo to his feet, then begins to climb back up the hill.
    “What the hell?” Lane whispers to Cael.
    “I don’t know, but we better go make sure Rigo’s all right.”
    They climb back up to the trestle, and as they walk, they