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The door to our compartment slid open Millard quickly flipped up the hood of his jacket to hide his face--or rather, his apparent lack of one

A young wooods for sale "Cigarettes?" she asked "Chocolate?"

"No, thanks," I said

She looked at avea nice trip

You picked an aard tihed "So I’ve been told"

She went out Millard shifted his body to watch her go "Pretty," he said distantly

It occurred to me that it had probably been a lot of years since he’d seen a girl outside of those feho lived on Cairnholirl, anyway?

"Don’t look at me like that," he said

It hadn’t occurred toat him any particular way "Like what?"

"Like you feel bad for me"

"I don’t," I said

But I did

Then Millard stood up from his seat, took off his coat, and disappeared I didn’t see hiain for a while

The hours rolled on, and the children passed the stories They told stories about fae, exciting, early days of her loop, and eventually they ca their own stories Some I had heard before--like how Enoch had raised the dead in his father’s funeral parlor, or the way Bronwyn, at the tender age of ten, had snapped her abusive stepfather’s neck without quiteto--but others were new to me For as old as they were, the kids didn’t often lapse into bouts of nostalgia

Horace’s dreams had started when he was just six, but he didn’t realize they were predictive of anything until two years later, when one night he drea of the Lusitania and the next day heard about it on the radio Hugh, froe, had loved honeyhoneyco with it--so ravenously that the first time he accidentally sed a bee, he didn’t notice until he felt it buzzing around in his stoh said, "so I shrugged and went on eating Pretty soon I had a whole hive down there" When the bees needed to pollinate, he’d gone to find a field of bloo aee fro food for the people in her village during the fa a witch and chased out This is soleaned only after years of subtle, nonverbal communication with Fiona, who didn’t speak not because she couldn’t, Hugh said, but "because the things she’d witnessed in the famine were so horrific they stole her voice away"

Then it was E her story

"Why not?" whined Olive "Come on, tell about when you found out you were peculiar!"

"It’s ancient history," E And hadn’t we better be thinking about the future instead of the past?"

"Soot up and left, heading to the back of the car where no one would bother her I let a minute or two pass so that she wouldn’t feel hounded, then went and sat next to her She sawto read