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For her the spell was about forgetfulness The harsh life she now lived was less harsh than the reality she had left behind in Perdido Beach That was the true wilderness But there she had awakened forgotten and brutal instincts

Here it was only nature trying to starve her, break her bones, cut and poison her Nature was relentless but it was free of malice Nature did not hate her

It was not nature that had driven her to sacrifice her brother’s life

Astrid closed her eyes and then the book and tried to cal thing: it seeer as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity

She had hurled her sick, strange little brother to the huge, appalling creatures that threatened her and threatened every human in the FAYZ

Her brother had disappeared

So had the creatures

The sacrifice had worked

Then God said, "Take your son, your only son, Isaac,

whoion of Moriah

Sacrifice hi on one

of theher faith, had intervened to stop the killing

For the excellent reason that there was no loving God

That it had taken her so long to realize this was an embarrassment to her She was Astrid the Genius, after all The name she had carried for years And yet Sa indifference to all ious, had been so much closer to the truth

What kind of a fool looked at the world as it was--and this terrible world of the FAYZ especially--and believed in God? A God actually paying attention, let alone caring about his creations?

She had murdered Little Pete

Murdered She didn’t want to dress it up with any nice word She wanted it harsh She wanted the word to be sandpaper dragged across her raw conscience She wanted to use that aord to obliterate whatever was left of Astrid the Genius

It was a good thing to have decided there was no God, because if there were then she would be damned to eternal hell

Astrid’s hands shook She laid the book flat on her lap Fro of pot She rationalized the drug on the grounds that it was the only way she could fall asleep If this were the nor pill And that wouldn’t be wrong, would it?

Well, she needed to sleep Hunting and fishing were earlyactivities and she needed to sleep