By the time the afternoon light went gold across the yard, Leon was tired in a way that went past his muscles and into his bones. Doc led him to a back room in the clubhouse, a small, plain room with a cot and a blanket and a window high in the wall that let in a square of light, and he told Leon he could rest there, and that nobody would wake him, and that the door did not lock from the outside. Leon lay down on the cot, and the blanket smelled faintly of laundry soap, and the sounds of the garage came through the wall in a low, steady hum — tools, and voices, and the idle of a motorcycle, and the clink of something metal being set down. It was the sound of people working, not the sound of people hunting, and Leon, safe for the first time that day, closed his eyes and fell asleep with his hands unclenched at his sides, while the garage hummed around him like a held note.
Brad came back the next afternoon, and he did not come quietly. Leon heard him before he saw him, because Brad's voice carried the way it always did, loud and certain, and it came from the direction of the fence, from the place where the gap was, and it had an edge to it that Leon recognized at once: the edge of a boy who has been embarrassed and has decided that embarrassment is someone else's fault. Leon was in the doorway of the garage, holding a broom Doc had given him that morning, and he froze with the broom in his hands, and for a second his body tried to do the old thing, which was to run. Then he remembered where he was, and whose ground he was standing on, and he stayed.
Stanton! Brad shouted. "Get out here! You can't hide in there forever, you freak! I know you're in there!"
Kevin and Tyler were with him, hanging back a little this time, not quite so eager, their eyes on the fence and the cameras and the black windows. Brad did not hang back. He strode up to the fence and grabbed the chain link with both hands and rattled it, hard, the way he had rattled it yesterday, and shouted Leon's name again, and then a string of threats that Leon had heard before, about legs and about what would happen on Monday at school, about how the clubhouse could not protect him forever, about how hiding behind bikers only proved what a coward he was. Each threat landed in the yard and echoed off the garage walls, and Leon felt each one the way he always had, as a small, cold weight settling in his stomach. Kevin, standing a little behind Brad, shouted something too, but his voice did not have its usual edge; he kept glancing at the cameras, and at the black windows, and at the fence, as if he were suddenly aware that this place was not a school hallway and that the rules here might be different. Tyler said nothing at all. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at the ground, and Leon, watching from the doorway with the broom gripped so tight his knuckles ached, thought that Tyler looked less like a boy enjoying himself and more like a boy who wished he were somewhere else. It was a small observation, and Leon did not know what to do with it yet, but he tucked it away, the way he tucked away all the small observations that did not fit the story Brad told about how things were.
Iron came out of the garage before Brad had finished. He did not hurry. He walked across the yard with the unhurried pace of a man who has never once in his life run toward a shouting boy, and he stopped on his side of the fence, a few feet from where Brad stood, and he looked at Brad the way he had looked at Leon the day before: directly, and without any hurry at all.
That's enough, Iron said. His voice was not loud. It did not need to be. It had a weight to it that made the yard go quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone important walks in. "You need to leave."
Brad stared at him. He was a big boy, and he was used to being the biggest person in any confrontation, and Iron was bigger, and older, and calmer, and Brad did not seem to know what to do with that combination. He puffed his chest out anyway, because that was what he did when he did not know what else to do. "You can't keep him in there! He's trespassing! My dad—"
Your dad can come and talk to me, Iron said, evenly. "You can't. You're fifteen, and you're shouting threats at a twelve-year-old through a fence, and that's over now. Nobody gets hurt on our ground. Nobody gets handed over. That's the rule here. You understand it?"
Brad's face went red, and then a strange, mottled color, and his hands tightened on the fence until his knuckles went white. He opened his mouth, and for a second Leon thought he was going to say something worse, something that would make Iron angry, and Leon was afraid, suddenly, of what Iron's anger might look like. But Iron did not get angry. He just stood there, calm as a wall, and waited, and then, when Brad tried again — "He's trespassing! He broke in! You can't just keep somebody else's—" — Iron cut him off, not