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"Renée, you have all of the traits that are characteristic of a Monitor"

"But I can’t be I mean, I’m just me Renée I don’t have any special sixth sense"

"You found your parents, dead, in the redwood forest"

"That was luck I saw their car on the side of the road It was coincidental"

"When you first came to this house, you played croquet with Dustin and found a dead bird on the edge of the lawn"

"The ball rolled to it It wasn’t me I’m just bad at croquet" My voice trailed off as I remembered my first Horticulture class, when I found the dead fawn Or how I’d found the dead mouse in the library Or how I always see at a dead spider or insect

"You’ve always been drawn to death It’s as if you can sense it There were hints early on Your mother told me about how, as a child, you would wander around the yard, always returning with so one of ht in a trap behind the refrigerator It s for days, but it didn’t seem to bother you You picked it up with your bare hands and presented it to us just before dinner Your father wanted to throw it out, but you insisted on giving it a proper burial Sepultura, as we call it You did the same with all of your pets"

"Sepultura?" I repeated The second cause of death in Cassandra’s file

"Inter the Undead to rest, at least in these parts That’s another reason for many of the rules at Gottfried--to protect the Monitors while they do their work The no lights after curfew rule, for exaned for this specific purpose"

I no longer cared about thebehind the school rules "But I didn’t know If I were a Monitor, shouldn’t I have known, instinctively?"

"Underclass Monitors, such as yourself, take one training class per year, through which the faculty is able to assess their skill sets For you, that class is Horticulture"

"Horticulture?" I repeated, going over all of our class exercises The burials, the soil, the graveyard, the raphy

"And like yourself, they are not told of the existence of the Undead, but are left to discover it on their own The process of discovery is incredibly iuishes a truly excellent Monitor fro as the existence of the Undead is not sohly and utterly This is why I resisted telling you about it, as much as I wanted to"

"So you think that I’m some sort ofkiller?"

"Not a killer, a Monitor"