His fingers were beginning to ache in that particular way that meant the next stage was numbness.
After the numbness came the pale, waxy skin.
After that came the part where you stopped feeling anything at all and went to sleep and did not wake up.
He had seen it happen the winter before to an old man named Gregory who had taught him how to fold cardboard for insulation.
They had found Gregory frozen to a bench in Cass Park in March.
Eli had cried for a man he had known for three months as if he were blood.
He was thinking about Gregory when he heard the crash.
It came from the avenue two blocks west.
The sound traveled strangely through the snow, muffled and yet enormous, the unmistakable sound of metal failing, glass breaking, and something heavy leaving the road.
Then, cutting through it, came the ugly throat of a heavy truck engine accelerating away.
Eli froze inside his blanket.
He knew the sound of an accident.
He also knew the sound of an accident that was not an accident.
The streets had taught him the difference.
He held his breath.
He counted to 100.
He listened for sirens and heard none.
In this part of the city, on a night like this, the police would come when they came.
Then he heard footsteps.
They were wrong.
That was the first thing he noticed.
They did not have the rhythm of a person walking.
They had the rhythm of a person trying to walk and almost failing.
Drag.
Step.
Drag.
Step.
Something heavy being pulled by a body that did not have much left to give.
The footsteps came down the side street and turned into his alley.
Eli pressed himself deeper into the cardboard, pulled the blanket tighter, and prayed to the God his mother had believed in that whoever it was would pass by.
She did not pass by.
She made it ten feet into the alley before her legs gave out.
Eli heard the soft, heavy sound of a body meeting snow.
Then he heard nothing except the wind.
He waited.
He counted again.
He told himself, Mind your own business.
That was the rule.
The only rule.
The rule that had kept him alive for two years on these streets.
Mind your own business.
But the silence stretched.
The silence was a kind of death.
And Eli Carter was the son of a woman who had told him on her last day that he was going to build beautiful things.
He pushed the blanket off his head.
She was lying on her side about 12 feet from him, half buried already in the blowing snow.
A woman.
Older than him by a lot.
Maybe 45.
Dark hair coming loose from a braid.
A wool coat that had once been good, now soaked dark at the shoulder.
Under the coat, half visible, was the black leather of a motorcycle-club vest.
Even in the dim alley light, Eli recognized the colors on the back.
His breath stopped in his chest.
He knew enough about the streets to know that certain club insignias were things you did not stare at and did not ask questions about.
You walked away.
She was going to die in five minutes.
Eli knew it the way he knew the temperature, the way he knew the position of the moon, the way he knew his own hunger.
The snow was already covering her.
Her breathing was so weak he could barely see it.
He crawled out of his cardboard shelter.
The cold hit him like a hand across the face.
He gasped against it and felt the inside of his nose freeze almost instantly.
His eyes watered.
The water froze against his lashes.
He scrambled toward her on his hands and knees through the snow.
"Ma'am," he whispered.
He did not know why he whispered.