Griffin glanced at me and shrugged, and I tried to give him a look that said to just go along with the idiot.

“And what’s your names, anyhow?” Quinn said. “If you got any names, that is.”

Some Odds didn’t have names, or didn’t need to remember them.

“Ben.”

And before Griffin could say a word, Quinn snapped, “Ben’s a easy name to remember. Okay. Good enough. Ben and not-Ben.”

He smiled his toothy, freckled, redhead smile at Griffin, who was now going to have to endure Quinn’s permanently calling him not-Ben.

“My name is Griffin Goodrich.”

“That’s fine, not-Ben. You just hang on to that memory. You never know when you might have to tell it to someone who cares.”

Now, I was sure, at least two of us wanted to punch him.

Then, naturally, Quinn showed the boys where to pee, and how he had his big urinal trough hooked up to a collector so he could make drinking water from piss.

“Heh-heh … we’re going to have plenty of new drinking water, ain’t we?”

And Quinn rapped his knuckles against the lower lip of his steel urinal, so it made a ringing sound like a church bell.

“Turning our pee into water. You’re just like Jesus in reverse,” Griffin said.

Quinn’s smile vanished. His face went blank. “Who?”

“Jesus,” Griffin said.

“I don’t know what that is. No one never showed me nothing about making water out of my pee. I figured it out on my own. From intellectual reasoning, not-Ben.”

Griffin said, “Oh. Okay, Quinn.”

*   *   *

I think it rained harder that night than any time I could remember here.

I slipped into the shorts Quinn had given me; everything else I owned was wet or falling apart. Quinn didn’t offer any dry clothes to the “partner boys,” but he did provide plenty to eat and lots of drinking water.

Ben and Griffin insisted that I drink first, and they watched my face to see if I’d show any sign that it tasted like anything other than what Quinn promised it to be. Griffin must have drank more than a gallon on his own. He said he was trying to make himself pee, because he wanted to see how Quinn’s still worked.

Eventually, everything had to be turned off in the night with the exception of one dim oil lamp, so we lay there, all of us just staring up at the ceiling, listening to the incessant roar of the storm against the concrete of the firehouse.

When Quinn finally lowered the mantle on the lamp and everything went black, I could tell that none of us had fallen to sleep. You know how you can hear guys breathing, moving around, flipping over, so you know they’re thinking; and the thinking is what kills sleep every time.

So I said, “Do you remember anything, Quinn?”

“What are you talking about, Billy? I remember saving your hide when you were two feet underwater with a big buck Hunter straddling you like he was going to make you his special boy, ha-ha!”

What a prick.

I sighed. “I meant, do you remember anything from before? From the beginning of the war.”

“Don’t you, Billy?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, what about your partner boys?”

“None of us do,” Ben said.

I heard Quinn roll over in his bed, could feel how he was looking straight across the room at me. I wondered if the little freak could maybe somehow see in the absolute dark of the firehouse.

“I remember being about half the size of not-Ben, without even the first strand of hair on my nutsack, and how we all were living inside a basketball gymnasium with wood floors. That is, to be honest, the first thing in my life I remember. Nothing else. I don’t remember having a mommy or daddy, or nothing about no brothers or sisters. Just us Odds.”

“How long was it like that?” Griffin said.

“Shit.” Quinn laughed. “Did you all three fall out of the sky?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Well, not-Ben, it’s been like that forever. For-fucking-ever. But then there were a lot more of us Odds. Thousands, in places like that all over the city, too. Then, most of us started getting sick. We didn’t know what it was at first, but it was the bug. The Rangers came, took the sick ones. You know, just got rid of them. Who needs more Hunters, anyway? They took all the girls, too. That was … Shit, that was so long ago.”

“Yeah. Before you had hair on your nuts,” Griffin said.

“You fucking with me, not-Ben?”

“Well, it was, wasn’t it?”

I realized that Griffin Goodrich had a much more stylized way of fucking with people than Quinn Cahill did.

“I suppose it was,” Quinn said. I could hear how he lay back down in his bed, and his voice sounded relaxed, like he just assumed that Griffin, not-Ben, was a stupid little kid.

“How did you end up here?” Ben said.

“Well,” Quinn began. He sounded like he was an actor onstage, and he had waited all his life to have an audience for the incredible epic that was his story, even if his only listeners were stupid, lost kids. “Things got bad. They ran out of food, and the Rangers stopped bringing it around, since we were only boys left in the Orphan Detention Dormitories. Did you know that’s where Odd come from? Just boys. Odds. So, one day, this old Ranger come and he tells us to all get out and go, or else they were going to come kill us all. I don’t know if he was telling the truth or not, because he got killed not two days after that. And so four of us came here to the firehouse, and we fixed the place up like this.”

“What happened to the others?” Griffin said.

“Shit.”

I could tell it was probably the only time Quinn Cahill didn’t have that annoying smirk on his face.

“How long have you been alone?” I said.

And Griffin blurted out, “Since he had hair on his balls. Oh, wait … he still doesn’t. Never mind.”

I heard Quinn’s feet slap down onto the floor, the relaxing of his cot springs as he got out of his bed.

“You fucking with me, not-Ben? You want to fuck with me? Let’s see who’s got balls, little shit.”

Something happened. I heard Griffin grunt.

“Get the fuck off me!”

Then Ben must have gotten up. From the sound of it, he threw himself onto Quinn, and in less than a second, both boys came sliding across the floor until Quinn’s head ended up banging into my knee.

“Don’t you fucking touch him!” Ben said.

I slid my arm down between the boys and pushed myself off the bed, taking Ben down onto the floor. Ben would have killed Quinn in a fight. No two ways about that.

“Hey!” I pushed my face right into Ben’s ear and pinned him against the jumble of twisted sheets where he and Griffin were supposed to be sleeping. “Fucking cool it! And you back the fuck off, too, Quinn! The kid was just joking around. Back the fuck off, all of you!”

For a moment, there was nothing, only blackness and the sound of the three boys panting like they’d just run a footrace. I felt around on the floor until I found Griffin’s bony bare knee and gave him a little swat.

“Apologize,” I whispered.

Griffin didn’t attempt to keep his voice down. “That fucking pervert had his hands on my fucking balls, Jack.”

“Apologize, Griff.”

“Screw it. I’m going to take a piss.”

And Griffin slapped his feet across the floor toward the shower room. In no time there came the echoing sound like someone was emptying a garden hose into a tin drum.

He called back, “I’m sorry, Quinn. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Which was just another way for Griffin Goodrich to fuck with the kid. But for all his ingenuity at game playing and survival, I didn’t believe Quinn had any idea what was going on when it came to communicating with other boys.

Quinn didn’t say a word, just stepped over me and Ben and went back to his bed.

“I made this place,” he said.

Griffin came back. “I filled that shit up.”

Then he lay down on the floor next to his brother, and I went back to my bed.