Fox Kirby was twelve the night he left the red brick house for good. He slipped out the back door with a heel of bread in his pocket and his father's shouting still ringing in his good ear. The right eye had been dead since he was nine. The left one, hazel so pale it looked gold, was sharp enough for both. He used it now to pick his way down the alley, counting doors, watching the wet cobbles shine under the gas lamps. He did not know where he was going. He only knew he was not going back. By the third night the bread was gone. He learned fast. He learned which bakers threw crusts out at dawn and which shopkeepers threw stones. He learned to sleep sitting up, with his back to a wall, so no one could come at his blind side. The city pushed him toward its edges, and the edges were the slums — a leaning stack of shacks and crooked stairs, one shanty built on the roof of the next. He curled under a stairwell there and told himself he was free. Free men, it turned out, still got hungry. On the fifth morning he tried to steal an apple from a cart. He missed. The costermonger caught him by the collar and lifted him off his feet. Fox kicked, bit, and got nowhere. Then a stone cracked the man square in the temple. The costermonger dropped him and staggered. A second stone took the lamp off the cart. Apples rolled everywhere. "Run, you eejit!" The boy shouting had red hair wilder than Fox's own and a slingshot still raised in one freckled hand. Fox ran. He scooped two apples on the way and did not stop until the red-haired boy pulled him sideways into a gap between two shacks and shoved him down behind a barrel. They lay there breathing. The other boy grinned at him like they'd known each other since birth. "Rhys," he said. He tucked the slingshot into his belt. "You're rubbish at thieving." "I'm learnin'." "You'll learn faster with me." Rhys tossed him one of the apples he'd already lifted from Fox's own hand. "What do they call you?" "Fox." Rhys chewed, considering him. "Fox what?" Fox thought of the red brick house. Of the name stitched inside his collar. He pulled the collar out and tore the stitching loose with his teeth. "Fox nothin'." Rhys laughed. "Then you're Fox Kirby now. Same as me. Brothers share a name, don't they?" Fox stared at him. Nobody had offered him anything in five days but the back of a hand. He nodded once. Rhys clapped him on the shoulder and stood, brushing dust off his jeans. "Come on, brother. I'll show you where we sleep." Fox followed him deeper into the crooked stack of shacks. He was still hungry. He was not alone anymore.

Rhys led him up through the leaning stack of shacks. Ladders climbed to doors that opened onto other roofs. Wash hung between the windows. Boys came and went on the crooked stairs, some no older than Fox, some near grown. Rhys called each one brother. None of them called Fox anything yet. He was the smallest by a head, and he could feel them measuring him as he passed. The room at the top was warm and close. A older boy sat cleaning a knife on an overturned crate. He looked at Fox the way a butcher looks at a thin hen. "He eats, he earns," the older boy said. "That's the rule." "He'll earn," Rhys said. "How? He's a stick. He can't lift a purse without falling over." Fox's face went hot. He had nowhere to go if they threw him out. Five days on the street had taught him that much. He looked at the floor and counted the knots in the boards so he would not cry. Rhys pulled him back down the stairs and out to a narrow yard between two shacks. He took the slingshot from his belt and pressed the smooth wooden frame into Fox's hand. "You've one good eye," Rhys said. "That's one more than most need." He set a tin cup on a barrel ten paces off. He handed Fox a smooth stone. Fox drew the band back. His hands shook. He let go. The stone sailed past the cup and cracked into the wall. "Again." He missed again. And again. His shoulders climbed toward his ears. Upstairs, he knew, the older boy was waiting to hear he had failed. Rhys stepped behind him and turned his chin a hair to the left. "Aim with the gold one," he said. "The dead one lies to you. Trust what sees." Fox breathed out. The pale hazel eye found the cup. He saw the dent in its rim, the way the afternoon light bent along the tin. He drew. He let go. The cup jumped off the barrel and rang against the stones. Rhys whooped. Fox stared at his own hand. "Do it again," Rhys said. He did. Five stones. Five hits. A bottle. A nail. A knot in a plank across the yard. He did not miss. Rhys took him back up the stairs. He set the slingshot on the crate in front of the older boy and told him what Fox had done. The older boy grunted, picked up a copper coin, and flicked it into the air. Fox tracked it with the gold eye, drew, and struck it clean out of the light. It rolled to the older boy's foot. The older boy picked it up. He looked at Fox a long moment. Then he nodded. "Marksman earns," he said. "Get him shoes." Rhys grinned. Fox closed his hand around the slingshot and did not let go.

Seven years passed on those rooftops. Fox grew into his height and his aim. Rhys stayed at his shoulder through every job. They worked the docks, the alleys, the coach roads outside the city. They ate. They earned. They were brothers in the way the older boy had meant it, and Fox had stopped counting knots in floorboards a long time ago. The accident took Rhys on a wet night in spring. A cart wheel broke on a slope above the market. The horse bolted. Rhys was crossing below with a sack of stolen bread. Fox was ten paces behind him and saw it happen with the gold eye, saw the shift of the wheel and the angle of the shaft and knew before Rhys did. He shouted. Rhys turned the wrong way. Fox held him in the wet street until the freckled face went slack. Someone tried to pull him off. He shot the slingshot at the man's ear and would not let go until the body was cold. He buried Rhys the next morning. He did not go back to the rooftop. He walked to the harbor with the slingshot in his belt and Rhys's knife in his boot, and he bought passage to New York with coin he lifted on the way. He was nineteen. He had never been on a ship. He was sick for four days and slept on the deck for the rest. New York rose out of the water like a wall of teeth. Towers stacked on towers. Glass and stone in colors he had no name for. He stood at the rail and looked at it with the gold eye and could not find the edge of it. He took work at the docks the day he stepped off. He slept in a stairwell for a week. He did not speak unless he had to, because his mouth still carried Rhys in it and his accent drew eyes. A woman found him on the eighth night. She was short, dark-skinned, with locs twisted through with gold thread. She was sitting on the step above his with a paper cup of something hot, watching him like she had been watching him a while. "You're going to freeze," she said. "Honestly. You've been shaking an hour." He looked at her with the good eye. "I'm grand." "You're not." She held the cup down to him. "Take it. I'm Nadine. I live upstairs. I've watched you not eat for three days." He took the cup. His hands shook against hers. She did not pull away. "Come up," she said. "There's a couch. That's all it is." He followed her because he had nothing left to guard. On the landing she stopped and looked back at him, and he felt her reading him the way Rhys used to read a lock. "What's your name?" "Fox," he said. "Fox Kirby." She nodded once and opened the door.

Fox slept on Nadine's couch for a week before he learned the shape of her days. She left at dawn and came back at dusk. She brought bread. She did not ask him questions. She watched him with the same patience she had used on the stairwell, and he felt the gold eye catching on her the way it caught on light before a storm. On the eighth night she came home late. He had cooked. He did not know why. He had cleaned the pan and set two plates and stood at the window looking out at the city, all those stacked towers and lit glass, the skyline she had opened her door onto. She stopped in the doorway. She looked at the plates. She looked at him. "You cooked." "I did." "Honestly, I thought you'd bolt by now." "I thought so too." She set her bag down. She came to the window and stood beside him. She was a head shorter. The gold thread in her locs caught the streetlight. "Why are you still here, Fox?" He kept his good eye on the glass. "You didn't ask me to go." "That's not a reason." "It's the only one I have." She turned to him. He turned to her. He had been looking for a way out of the room for eight days and had not found one, and he understood now that he had not been looking very hard. "I've been trying to find something wrong with you," she said. "For months. Since before the stairwell." "Months." "I saw you at the docks in October. You didn't see me." "What have you found?" "Nothing yet." "Keep looking," he said. "There's plenty." "I know there is. I don't care." He put his hand on the side of her face. She let him. Her skin was warm under his palm. He kissed her because he could not think of anything else to do with his hands, and because the part of him that had been counting exits since he was twelve had gone quiet for the first time in years. She kissed him back like she had decided a long time ago. They ate. They talked until the window went black behind them. She told him about her mother in Kingston. He told her about Rhys, the first time he had said the name out loud since the market street. His voice broke on it. She did not look away. Later, in her bed, she put her hand flat on his chest and said, "Stay." "I'll stay." He meant it when he said it. That was the trouble. He had crossed an ocean to get free of everything that could hold him, and he had walked up a staircase and let a woman with gold in her hair put a hand on his chest and been held anyway. He lay awake and watched the city burn its lights against the ceiling. He had found a home. He had not planned for one.