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"Sorry"

"I can see what it's done to hiood chance he'll be per Winning meant a lot to him, and he won"

"Don't tellThe kid's eleven Give his haven't exploded yet We can post a guard outside his door"

"Or post a guard outside another door and pretend that it's his"

"Whatever"

They went away Ender slept again

Ti blows Once he awoke for a fewdoard on it, with a dull, insistent pain He reached over and touched it; it was a needle passing into a vein He tried to pull it out, but it was taped on and he was too weak Another ti and cursing His ears were ringing with the loud noise that had awakened hihts on,

" soht he heard so softly near him

It ht have been a week; from his dreah lifetiain, past the wolf-children, reliving the terrible deaths, the constantin the forest, You had to kill the children to get to the End of the World And he tried to answer, I never wanted to kill anybody Nobody ever asked hed at him And when he leapt from the cliff at the End of the World, sohter that carried hiers' world, so he could watch, over and over, the eruption of death when Dr Device set off a reaction on the planet's face; then closer and closer, until he could watch individual buggers explode, turn to light, then collapse into a pile of dirt before his eyes And the queen, surrounded by infants; only the queen was Mother, and the infants were Valentine and all the children he had known in Battle School One of theh the eyes and nose, saying, You have no honor And always the dream ended with a mirror or a pool of water or thethat would reflect his face back to him At first it was always Peter's face, with blood and a snake's tail coan to be his own face, old and sad, with eyes that grieved for a billion, billion murders--but they were his own eyes, and he was content to wear them

That was the world Ender lived in for ue War

When he awoke again he was lying in darkness In the distance he could hear the thump, thump of explosions He listened for a while Then he heard a soft footstep

He turned over and flung out a hand, to grasp whoever was sneaking up on hi and pulled him doard his knees, ready to kill him if need be

"Ender, it's me, it's me!"

He knew the voice It cao

"Alai"