And so she resolved to help her brother, because when it's your fault that something has turned to shit, you have to wash shit. And so she resolved to help her brother, which meant that, step one, she had to get him to stop screwing up. "He took off," the girl said. Her pancake makeup had sweated away during the day and her acne wasn't so bad that she'd needed it. "He took off running, like he'd forgotten something important. Looked scared." "Why don't you go get more beers," Link said angrily, cutting her off, and Alan had an intuition that Link had become Krishna's Renfield, a recursion of Renfields, each nesting inside the last like Russian dolls in reverse: Big Link inside medium Krishna inside the stump that remained of Darrel. And that meant that she had to take him out of the company of his bad companions, which she would accomplish through the simple expedient of scaring the everlasting fuck out of them. She sulked off and the remaining girl looked down at her swinging toes. "Where'd he go, Link?" Alan said. If Krishna was in a hurry to go somewhere or see something, he had an idea of what it was about. Link's expression closed up like a door slamming shut. "I don't know," he said. "How should I know?" The other girl scuffed her toes and took a sip of her beer. Their gazes all flicked down to the bottle. "The Greek would bar you for life if he knew you were bringing underaged drinkers into here," Alan said. "Plenty of other bars in the Market," Link said, shrugging his newly broad shoulders elaborately. Trey was the kid who'd known her brother since third grade and whose puberty-induced brain damage had turned him into an utter turd. She once caught him going through the bathroom hamper, fetishizing her panties, and she'd shouted at him and he'd just ducked and grinned a little-boy grin that she had been incapable of wiping off his face, no matter how she raged. She would enjoy this. "And they all know the Greek," Alan said. "Three, two, one." He turned on his heel and began to walk away. "Wait!" Link called. The girl swallowed a giggle. He sounded desperate and not cool at all anymore. Alan stopped and turned his body halfway, looking impatiently over his shoulder. Link mumbled something. "What?" "Behind Kurt's place," Link said. "He said he was going to go look around behind Kurt's place." "Thank you, Link," he said. He turned all the way around and got down to eye level with the other girl. "Nice to meet you," he said. He wanted to tell her, *Be careful* or *Stay alert* or *Get out while the getting's good*, but none of that seemed likely to make much of an impression on her. She smiled and her friend came back with three beers. "You've got a great house," she said. Her friend said, "Yeah, it's amazing." "Well, thank you," he said. "Bye," they said. Link's gaze bored into the spot between his shoulder blades the whole way to the end of the block. #