10/02/2026 16:16

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Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had been a boy, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Overhead, a full moon came out from behind a scrim of cloud, painting the clearing and the stream in the tawdry hues of pawnshop jewelry. “In any case, it wasn’t really the Affiliation that sent us,” he said. There was another loud explosion, and Dave Hollis—a young man only two years older than she herself—was flung backward with a smoking hole in his shirt between two points of the star he wore.

She glanced over her shoulder at the footprints—all of them bare—leading down the bank. 5The shrieking from beneath the mono stopped. It must have worked, at least to a degree; the book is here, after all. But that was before the hungry glass had entered her life.