page46 (1/2)

"Not just every day Only when it's for the child's own good"

"OK, it's for his good But why His brother is dangerous, his brother was rejected for this program because he's one of the s we've laid hands on Why is he so important to Ender? Why, after all this time?"

"Honestly, sir, I don't know And the ned so that it can't tell us It may not know itself, actually This is uncharted territory"

"You ?"

"You ht put it that way"

"Well, that does ht I was the only one"

Valentine celebrated Ender's eighth birthday alone, in the wooded back yard of their new horound bare of pine needles and leaves, and there scratched his na Then she s and needles and lit a small fire It made smoke that interith the branches and needles of the pine overhead All the way into space, she said silently All the way to the Battle School

No letters had ever come, and as far as they knew their own letters had never reached him When he first was taken, Father and Mother sat at the table and keyed in long letters to hih, it was once a week, and when no answers came, once a month Now it had been two years since he went, and there were no letters, none at all, and no reht bitterly, because we have forgotten him

But Valentine had not forgotten him She did not let her parents know, and above all never hinted to Peter how often she thought about Ender, how often she wrote him letters that she kneould not answer And when Mother and Father had announced to the the city to move to North Carolina, of all places, Valentine knew that they never expected to see Ender again They were leaving the only place where he knew to find the these trees, under this changeable and heavy sky? He had lived deep in corridors all his life, and if he was still in the Battle School, there was less of nature there What would he make of this?

Valentine knehy they hadtrees and small animals, so that nature, in as raw a forht have a softening influence on their strange and frightening son And, in a way, it had Peter took to it right away Long walks out in the open, cutting through woods and out into the open country--going so space with his desk in the pack on his back, with only a small pocket knife in his pocket

But Valentine knew She had seen a squirrel half-skinned, spiked by its little hands and feet with twigs pushed into the dirt She pictured Peter trapping it, staking it, then carefully parting and peeling back the skin without breaking into the abdo had it taken the squirrel to die? And all the while Peter had sat nearby, leaning against the tree where perhaps the squirrel had nested, playing with his desk while the squirrel's life seeped away

At first she was horrified, and nearly threw up at dinner, watching how Peter ate so vigorously, talked so cheerfully But later she thought about it and realized that perhaps, for Peter, it was a kind of ic, like her little fires; a sacrifice that soods that hunted for his soul Better to torture squirrels than other children Peter has always been a hus-bandreedily when it was ripe; better he should take it in these small, sharp doses than with dull cruelty to children in the school

"A model student," said his teachers "I e had a hundred others in the school just like him Studies all the time, turns in all his work on time He loves to learn"

But Valentine kneas a fraud Peter loved to learn, all right, but the teachers hadn't taught hih his desk at ho and thinking and, above all, talking to Valentine Yet at school he acted as though he were excited about the puerile lesson of the day Oh, , I never knew that frogs looked like this inside, he'd say, and then at hoh the philotic collation of DNA Peter was a ht it

Still, it was good Peter never fought any ith everybody It was a new Peter