The blood had already started to cool by the time he looked down at it, spreading out beneath him in a shape too irregular to call a pool, more a slow continent finding its own borders against the stone. It was his. He knew that the way he knew most facts about his own body — without alarm, without the urgency other people seemed to keep in reserve for exactly this kind of knowing. His side had opened somewhere between one breath and the next, and the wound sat there now, wide and wet and serious in a way that would have meant something different to someone still capable of being afraid of it.
He looked up instead, past the blood, to the man who had put it there.
Red hair, the colour of it too bright, too alive against the grey of everything else in the alley, standing up off the man's skull in a frenzy that owed nothing to wind or effort, as though the hair itself had caught some of whatever was loose behind the eyes beneath it and simply refused to lie flat anymore. The face under that hair had come apart from whatever ordinary shape it once held — mouth stretched into a grin too wide for the bones holding it, eyes bright and wet and utterly without depth, the kind of shine you saw on broken glass, reflecting light without holding any of it. Laughter came out of him in short broken bursts, not quite laughter, more the sound laughter makes when something underneath it has snapped and the noise keeps coming out of habit rather than joy.
He looked, in the plainest sense of the word, like a demon wearing the leftover shape of a man.
The boy watched him the way he watched everything, flat and unhurried, his own grey eyes finding no particular reason to widen at the sight of a knife still slick and dripping in the man's hand, the same knife that had opened him a moment before and now simply hung there, forgotten, at the end of an arm too loose in its socket to be entirely under its owner's control. His expression didn't change. Whatever the wound was doing to the rest of him — and it was doing plenty, blood loss already pulling at the edges of his vision, a cold spreading up from his side that had nothing to do with the night air — none of it reached his face. His face had learned a long time ago not to answer things like this.
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The man crouched lower, grinning wider, head canting to one side with the loose, delighted curiosity of a child examining an insect it had just pulled the legs from.
"Not screaming," the man said, delighted, the words coming out singsong and uneven, stretched too long in some places and clipped too short in others. "Not screaming, not screaming, not *screaming* — " He said the word a third time like it had personally offended him, some flicker of genuine confusion crossing behind the manic shine of his eyes, as though the boy's silence were the one variable in the night he hadn't accounted for.
The boy said nothing back. There wasn't anything in him reaching for words. He kept his eyes on the blood instead, on the shape it had made of itself against the stone, watching it the way he'd watched the water in the gutter outside the brothel — not because it meant anything, but because it moved, slow and dark, the one thing in the alley behaving the way things were supposed to behave while everything else in front of him had come completely unmoored.
It kept spreading. It should have stopped somewhere, thinned out, found an edge the way blood always eventually did, but this pool only widened, dark and endless beneath him, soaking into stone that never seemed to fill, and somewhere above him the laughter went on with it, looping the same broken notes over and over without tiring, without breaking, a sound with no bottom to it either. His limbs had gone distant by then, present only as the memory of weight rather than weight itself, the cold no longer arriving from any one direction but simply everywhere at once, inside him as much as under him.
The last thing he held onto before the dark folded over completely was the laughter, still going, still climbing in pitch the further away from it he drifted, and then even that thinned out into nothing, and there was only the blood, and the floor, and the endless spreading dark closing in behind his eyes.