~4.30~

John realized the bus had reached its final destination and was switching out the signs for the trip back uptown. He disembarked, stepping out into the cold sunlight and looking around the masterpiece of urban planning that was the landscaped and sculpted open-air shopping mall, blinking his eyes against the glare.

Each time his lids opened he noticed more of the children… the foundlings, the witch’s charges. There were so many of them, and their number didn’t seem to have been at all diminished by the attacks. If they had not been included, had the exclusion been deliberate, a mark of mercy? Or had the attackers not known about them or not reckoned them as part of tribe? Or was the sweetshop witch’s protection that potent a dissuader? That was certainly possible. None of the greater witches had been attacked, that John had heard about.

For how little attention they attracted, the kids were very active… there were kickball games and at least one game of soccer going on. A battered ball dinged off the side panel of a police cruiser parked halfway up on the sidewalk near where one of the traffic-bearing streets terminated against the pedestrian mall. The bicycle officer stationed near it shook his head and started to scold the girl who came chasing up after it, but then seemed to change his mind and forget about her. John himself, though he knew full well just how many dispossessed youths called the Mile home, was already losing track of them all.

He’d expected the bus to lead him to an answer… or failing that, an obvious signpost pointing him in the direction he should next look, but nothing presented itself save the mall itself, the children, and a fluttering banner advertising ten percent off at the Old Forest Sweet Shoppe.

He felt discouraged, but he decided to press on with his investigation.

“Thou know’st we work by wit, not by witchcraft,” he reminded himself. “And wit depends on dilatory time.”