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Hollow City Ransos 20430K 2023-09-01

I heard the sure even Millard was accounted for--because of course by now, having spent the last three days with us, he knew all of us, knew everything about us

I was pulled to h the doors into the hallway Stu next to me was Emma, blood in her hair, and I whispered, "Please, just do what they say," and though she didn’t acknowledge it, I knew she’d heard e and fear and shock--and I think pity, too, for all I’d just had snatched away from me

In the stairwell, the floors and stairs beloere a white-water river, a vortex of cascading waves Up was the only way out We were shoved up the stairs, through a door and into strong daylight, onto the roof Everyone wet, frozen, frightened into silence

All but Eht to her and grinned in her face while a soldier held her cuffed hands behind her "A very special place," Caul said, "where not a drop of your peculiar souls will go to waste"

She flinched, and he laughed and turned away, stretching his ar From his shoulder blades jutted a weird pair of knobby protrusions, like the stes: the only outward clue that this twisted man bore any relation to an y More soldiers They were laying down a collapsible bridge between rooftops

"What about the dead girl?" one of the soldiers asked

"Such a pity, such a waste," Caul said, clucking his tongue "I should have liked to dine on her soul It’s got no taste on its own, the peculiar soul," he said, addressing us "Its natural consistency is a bit gelatinous and pasty, really, but whipped together with a soupçon of remoulade and spread upon white hed, very loudly, for a long time

As they led us away, one by one, over the wide collapsible bridge, I felt a fa, slow but quickening--the hollowgast, unfrozen now, co slowly back to life

Ten soldiers unpoint, past the carnival tents and sideshows and gaping carnival-goers, down the rats’ warren of alleys with their stalls and vendors and raga room, past the piles of cast-off clothes we’d left behind, and down into the underground The soldiers prodded us along, barking at us to keep quiet (though no one had said a word in minutes), to keep our heads down and stay in line or be pistol-whipped

Caul was no longer with us--he had stayed behind with the larger contingent of soldiers to " the loop for hiders and stragglers The last ti on a pair of modern boots and an army jacket and told us he was absolutely sick of our faces but would see us "on the other side," whatever that eover, and forward in tinized The tracks and ties were all hts in the tunnels were different, not red incandescents but flickering fluorescent tubes that glowed a sickly green Then we came out of the tunnel and onto the platforer in the nineteenth century, nor even the twentieth The crowd of sheltering refugees was gone now; the station nearly deserted The circular staircase we’d co LED screen hung above the platform: TIME TO NEXT TRAIN: 2 MINUTES On the as a poster for a randfather died

We’d left 1940 behind I was back in the present