He stopped at the edge of a property called Sterling Oaks, an old brick building dressed up with ivy, copper lanterns, and an elegant sign lit from below. Cars that cost more than the apartment he had once shared with his mother sat in tidy rows beneath the trees. Behind the building, a delivery entrance opened onto an alley with recycling bins, a locked storage shed, and a dumpster that kitchen employees used throughout the evening. Miles knew places like this, because learning which restaurants discarded food safely and which ones used bleach on it was part of surviving outside.
He did not think of himself as a thief. He took what people had thrown away, and sometimes he asked for food when an employee looked kind enough to risk it. Tonight the top layer of the dumpster held an unopened packet of crackers, a paper bag containing a bread roll, and the end pieces of two loaves wrapped separately from spoiled vegetables. He set them on a dry stone ledge and inspected each carefully, the way his mother had once checked dates on discounted groceries at the supermarket.
Then he saw the journals.
They lay in a blue recycling container beneath a stack of glossy real-estate magazines, three damaged medical publications that someone had discarded after spilling coffee over them. Miles lifted the magazines, reached inside, and drew out the journals with both hands. Their pages smelled faintly of old paper, coffee, and damp cardboard, a smell he had come to associate with opportunity. He carried them behind a row of decorative shrubs where light from the dining patio fell across the ground.
Most children his age searched for toys when they found a promising box. Miles searched for words, diagrams, and explanations of the human body. He laid out the readable pages, smoothing curled corners with the heel of his hand, and found an article describing an unusual episode of severe hip and leg pain associated with a sudden muscle spasm. There was a drawing of the pelvis and surrounding muscles, with the path of the sciatic nerve sketched in a different shade of ink.
He leaned closer. He had seen an anatomical drawing like that before, on a poster through a hospital corridor window, but this illustration was clearer. The article discussed an unusual case where symptoms had improved very rapidly after a clinician evaluated the patient and the spasm released. Miles read every paragraph, looking back and forth between the diagrams and the text until he could close his eyes and see the page without holding it.
When Miles was six, a school counselor had called this ability extraordinary. She had shown him a crowded picture containing dozens of objects, removed it from view, and asked him to describe what he remembered. Miles listed the objects, their positions, the colors of their shadows, and a tiny number printed on a license plate near the bottom of the image. The counselor tried a paragraph next, then a longer page, and finally a series of unfamiliar symbols.