Greta held out the lemon for the middle Alex. He sniffed it and made a face. Greta tried not to laugh. "It's a lemon."

The smallest Alex was staring, and Greta held it out for him. His chubby fingers grabbed it and tried to lick it, and he made a curious face, unsure whether he liked it or not.

Over at the table, the eldest of the boys watched, ( Read more... )

Alex slips out of the workshop quietly--he knows where Marshall's gotten to, but if Macy finds he's snuck off to the docks again, none of them will get dessert over at Mike and Kevin's tomorrow night, and if Nick's baking, there is no way in hell Alex Johnson is missing that.

Singer's probably with him, too. Some role model he is, Alex thinks, ( Read more... )

In the end, Nick has to ask, "Are you enslaving Joe's kids?"

"What do you mean, 'his'? It's not like they belong to him. They belong to themselves. Also, they love it. Don't you love it, my little Alexes?"

The three skinny boys all nod furious before they go back to scrubbing tables. Nick scowls. "You know Kevin's opinions on making the kids work ( Read more... )

When Bob Morris starts working with Greta, he is awed by her innovative ideas, impressed by her welding technique, and utterly baffled by her choice to allow a truculent pre-adolescent thug of no readily apparent relation to both live with her and assist in her workroom. The kid's hardly trained or fully educated, he probably doesn't know half of ( Read more... )

Johnson's different from the other boys, growing up. He's more of a rough-and-tumble boy than the other two--more wild than Marshall, but more frivolous about it than Singer, who only really gets that feral look when he needs to defend himself--he's much more practical, perhaps because he needed to be.

He spends more time with kids from the school  ( Read more... )

Ian is fascinated by the kid with the apple. He returns to his lodgings that night replaying their conversation, reminding himself of their agreement to meet at noon the following day ( Read more... )

Ian should have known that the longer he stayed in the City, the more likely it was that the law would catch up to him. And after chasing him across the Continent, the police weren't inclined to listen to any wanderer's stories of a set-up, how he was an innocent man framed for the crime he was accused of but didn't commit ( Read more... )