What We Know
The evidence, laid out on the hayloft floor in Finn's careful columns:
Column one. He is not a boy. The shadow, the blinking, the iron, the ears. He came with the storm, he asks about unusual animals, and there is exactly one unusual animal in this county to find. He is a scout, and the thing he scouts for is the thing in your cellar, and every day he stays in town he is one lucky guess from ending everything.
Column two. He gave his sandwich to the ducks after holding it for an hour, because — you'd bet the farm on this now — nobody ever taught him that food could be for him. He watches kickball like a boy watching a lit window from a cold road. He said the word given like it was a jewel he'd found in the street. He has been in town nine days, and whatever he was sent to do, he has spent those nine days standing very close to warm things, learning what they are.
“So,” says Finn, tapping his pencil, prosecutor and defense in one grubby package. “Two plans. Plan A: it's a spy, Madison — we trap it, we expose it, we drive it out of town before it finds her. Safe, sure, and settled by Saturday.” The pencil hesitates. “Plan B is stupider and I can't stop thinking about it. Plan B: what if the reason he hasn't found her yet… is that he's stopped looking very hard? Plan B, we don't trap the wolf.” He looks up. “We feed it.”
Below the loft hatch, Sera has been listening in silence. Now she says, quietly: “I told you once — nothing that hesitates before a name has finished deciding what it is. Someone is about to help him decide, loves. The only question is which column you water.”