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‘We had three of thes?’

‘All variations of each other With that o wrong At the sa the on an apocalyptic plague It was supposed to be for us huruesoot passed on to the sixers’

I re to Laylah in his suite before the last aerie party He was pressuring her pretty hard to cut corners andshe’s been cutting corners all along to el doctors They got sick, then about a day or two later, they were exposed to the sixers again, and that massively accelerated the disease They bled out in the ly painful too It was everything they were trying to do with a huels and locusts instead The human lab workers were fine, and so were the sixers They were just carriers of the disease’

‘Do you have one in a cage somewhere?’ I ask

‘The infected sixers were all killed I was ordered to dispose of the bodies Angels don’t do dirty work like that Before I burned theed to sneak two vials of their blood I used one to infect the new batch of sixers that they created I was hoping itabout Raffe even now

‘I don’t know After the accident, they separated the projects to avoid further contamination, so I lost track of it’

‘What did you do with the second vial of blood?’

‘I kept it for study That’s e’ve been using to try to coue’

‘But no luck?’ I ask

‘Not yet,’ says Doc ‘Not for a long time to come’

‘Tioal is easy to identify – we need to coht But we just talk in circles, trying to figure out how to do it For all we knoe could be the only freedoe

As we drive up the peninsula, we talk

And talk

And talk so not to yawn, but it’s not easy It feels like it’s been a week since I slept

‘The angels e,’ says the Colonel ‘We need a lure or so that will attract them away from the Golden Gate’

‘What kind of a lure?’ asks Dee

‘Should we dangle little babies froe?’ asks Dum

‘Sadly, that’s not funny,’ says Doc

I rub my forehead I’m usually not prone to headaches, but all this desperate talk of co type

My eyes drift to the , and I become mesmerized by the drone of the adult voices in the car and my own sleepiness