A shoeshine boy, a dog, a watch that steps between stars. What hunts them doesn't kill. It keeps.
A complete standalone novella. Hardboiled 1930s voice, a wide-open universe, an orphan and his dog.
Bobby shines shoes and reads the men who sit for him—where they've been, what they're carrying, what they kicked on the way over. Theodore Rattletrap pays him a sawbuck for a shine, calls him "little mouse," and does not travel by jump train. He thumbs open an old pocket watch, and the room simply stops being the room, and a shoeshine boy is standing on the far side of the galaxy with stars under his shoes.
The apprenticeship is real. So is the bill. The watch leaves a trace every time it moves them, and something out there is reading those traces the way Bobby reads mud in the welt of a boot. It isn't hunting them. It doesn't have to. It was always going to be there.
When it arrives, it won't hurt anybody. It will offer Bobby a home where nothing is ever lost, nothing ever ends, and nothing ever grows.
He has wanted a home his whole life. He is about to find out what one costs.
First of a series. It begins here and it finishes here.
