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I e and negotiate an exit froun in my pocket, realized I didn’t have it and pulled out the spare e ed

They moved so fast In a blur I had a bundle of talons clas Two of the e ed a little He said, "What we have for you to do is so important Korrok has seen the outcome It will happen if you resist or if you do not resist All that will change is your personal well-being It is for the greater good Do you not see that?"

He alic inability to grasp the obvious Two of theme backward down the hall The other four descended upon John and I heard hie man followedthat he was having a seizure and that they should let hi!" but I assumed the doors were just as soundproof from the inside as out I was hauled into yet another se man The door swept shut behind us and the two creatures turned ure huddled against the far wall Red hair

"Amy!"

I ran toward her, and was sround and realized I had run into a glass or otherwise transparent barrier that separated the room

Amy looked up at eman said, "Our representatives are all over your world We have been planning this for years and all of the pieces are in place It is just a lasses Yours ater, ours ine To fill the other ine, the water must first be spilled Do you not see that the wine is better?"

A door opened on Amy’s side of the room, and two men came in They were not naked, far from it They were dressed in what looked like layers of leather half a foot thick, shoulders bulging with so They looked like members of a bomb squad Between theallon dru label captioned in a foreign language that used lettering like Elvish They sat the container on the floor and activated a latch They then turned and ran froainst the far wall The top of the container opened and slid aside I heldto see ould eainst the glass, screale, tiny white insect zipped out of the container Thin and wingless but flying nonetheless, it streaked through the air andit with her eyes as it swirled overhead

"It is a ees of a ans It knows only to fly and to breed, and once it finds its host it will produce twenty thousand offspring in a row quickly in the soft tissue of the host and then they burst forth, each to find new hosts And so on"

I knew that already The insect buzzed around and around and around Then it landed on her shoulder and Aain, she couldn’t hearher hand back and looking at it like it had just been impaled on a tack She shook the hand and rubbed it on the wall and did everything she could to try to dislodge the insect, but it was useless It had burrowed into her

I banged on the glass within, helpless Amy looked at her hand and at me, baffled, not even sure what any of this eman, said, "Undo it Give her an antidote, insecticide, what ever kills those things"

"Any such solution would kill her as well No, this can end only one way Korrok has seen it"

I turned back and saw A hopeless Looking like she expected to wake up at any moment, find herself back in bed

"The future is what it is," said Largeman "Your people have been poisoned with thethe tide, i explosions with their feet Such tales are forbidden here Events are laid forth and they cannot be turned There are no heroes, Mr Wong Korrok has co to chance"

At thatopen A slimy spray of brown flew across the room in a wide arc

JOHN HAD A plan