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My lashes dip and darkento the sunlit earth again I reach deep, hunting for the will to rass dance beforeblinks, the darkness easier to bear than the light The next tiht, awake, consciousit takes too y froainst the sun-bleached landscape So towardelse

Ripples of heat undulate between er Moves closer Keeps cos, to a person--of course--but I can’t lift li forboots stops directly beforevision, but I can tell they belong to ato be a woman

The dry, parched flesh of my lips cracks as speech ru My voice sounds so far away Distant as if in a dreath and turn htest aze slides up the long length of a body and locks on a face Sunlight haloes hielic aura Which kind of shoots down el of death suspicion and replaces it with the crazy hope that el here to save els don’t existbut because I’ine one would waste his time with me My head drops and my eyes fall shut

I descend into the dark never

Press Conference with Eency

ROTHCHILDE: Ruerated

REPORTER: Then how do you respond to the partnership of US Custoency? Such a overnanization

ROTHCHILDE: We are talking about escaped carriers They are no ed froht of God is on our side

SIX

WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN YEARS OLD, I DECIDED I wanted to beelse I tried out for track It didn’t dawn on ht be an i I cleared the first jump Unfortunately, not the second I still have the scar where I gashed my knee open There was blood everywhere I actually lost consciousness, waking up with the school nurse huddled over me, an ambulance and my parents on the way Friends surrounded me Several of my teachers heard what happened and hurried outside to check on me Everyone cared My life was full like that

Before one advance in science tracked ed everything And now I have no one

As I come to, it takes me several moments to realize that my eyes are even open Darkness surrounds me so thickly, I feel like I’ that I’ht That my eyes work properly and I am in fact awake And alone There are no fa around to see if I’ hello to every part ofis overlooked Especially my shoulder The burn there is poker-hot, deep and incinerating It drills through sinew and bone and spreads out like branches on a tree, eventually arcing down my spine into my toes

I’m on my stomach, my face pressed into coolrock, I think There are sounds A faint drip of water The distant scurrying of a small aniger Like a person My eyes flare wide

Boots

I re to re except those boots, which belonged to a el He was flesh-and-blood real

My relief at being alive flees as er Clearly he moved me to someplace else Where has he taken me? He low begins to fill the space I occupy, growing in brightness as if the source of light is being carried toward aze darts wildly, and I see s--which seem to be the walls of a cave I can’t see who approaches So carefully to every whisper of sound Then I hear it The barest scrape of a shoe inches froasp and then bite my lip, take the dry flesh betweenof blood

So close I didn’t realize how close he was Apparently, Boots walks with a near-silent tread My ainst the panic, the hysteria that threatens to consu at ood My decisionis probably i the kind ofrunner A carrier with a taste for killing I alht of redundancy A killer carrier Isn’t that what all carriers are?