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Published by petersidoer, 2019-10-19 22:12:33

An Accident of Stars

An Accident of Stars

AN ACCIDENT OF STARS

BOOK I OF THE MANIFOLD WORLDS

FOZ MEADOWS

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CONTENTS

Dedication
Maps
The Universe Next Door

1. Look & Leap
2. Down, Through, Over
3. Learn the World
4. Severed
5. Walking Wounded
6. Catching Up
7. Hurt, Not Broken

The Braided Path
8. The Cuivexa & the Shavaktiin
9. Hide & Seek
10. The Road (Not) Taken
11. Firefight
12. The Envas Road
13. Blood Will Out
14. Stories Within Stories

The Counsel of Queens
15. Neither the Right Thing Nor Its Opposite
16. Ashasa’s Knives
17. Heart of Blood & Stone
18. How Sharp the Risen Sun
19. Queen’s Gambit
20. Rites of Passage

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21. Dreams of Power
Home Again

22. Reality Break
23. End Game
24. Only Fire Brings Release
Glossary
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Legals

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For Alis and Kit,
in thanks for the strength

their stories bring;
and for Smott of Swords,
the original worldwalker.

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PART ONE

THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR

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ONE
LOOK & LEAP

Sarcasm is armour, Saffron thought, and imagined she was
donning a suit of it, plate by gleaming, snark-laden plate. “Nice
undies,” leered Jared Blake, lifting her skirt with a ruler. No, not
a ruler – it was a metal file, one of the heavy ones they were
meant to be using on their metalworking projects. He grinned at
her, unrepentant, and poked the file upwards. The cold iron
rasped against her thigh. “Are you shaved?”

“Fuck off, Jared,” Saffron shot back. “I’d rather have sex with
an octopus.”

He oozed at her, a ridiculous noise meant to ridicule. Giving
her hem a final upwards flick, he retracted the file and pulled a
face for the benefit of his laughing friends, then loudly yelled to
the teacher, “Sir! Mr Yarris! Saffron said fuck, sir!”

Mr Yarris turned with the lumbering, angry slowness of a
provoked bear. He was a big man, block-solid and bald – a

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stereotypical metalwork teacher, except for the fact that he
mostly taught art, and was only filling in for Mrs Kirkland. He
pointed a fat, calloused finger at Jared, then jerked his thumb at
the doorway. “Out.”

Jared mimed comic disbelief as his friends kept laughing. “But
sir! I didn’t do anything, sir! It was Saffron!”

Mr Yarris didn’t take the bait. “Out,” he said again, folding his
arms.

Jared dramatically flung down the file. “This is bullshit!” he
said. “I didn’t–”

“OUT!” roared Mr Yarris, loud enough that even Jared
flinched, but the effect was spoiled when, seconds later, the bell
rang for lunch. As Jared leapt from his stool, Saffron pointedly
kicked her bag into his path. His sneakers tangled in the straps,
and down he went with a crash.

“Oops,” said Saffron – loud and flat, so the whole class knew
that she’d done it on purpose. “My mistake.” And before Mr
Yarris could parse what had happened, she reached down,
yanked the bag back from Jared and stormed out of class.

She was furious, shaking all over as she sped away from the
metalwork rooms. How dare he. How dare he! And yet he did
dare, publicly and often, to whichever girl was nearest. Nobody
stopped it; nobody even came close. He’d been suspended last
year for groping a Year Seven girl in the canteen lines, but once
he returned, he was just as bad as ever, snapping bras, making
sick comments and bullying Maddie Shen so badly – he stole her
bag, opened her sanitary pads and stuck them over her books
and folders, all while calling her names – that Saffron had later

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found her having a panic attack in the bathroom. He was awful,
and got up to even worse at parties, but as appalling as Jared’s
behaviour was, Lawson High apparently considered unrelenting
sexual harassment to be insufficient grounds for expulsion.
“Boys will be boys,” the deputy head had said, the one time
Saffron had screwed up the nerve to approach him about it. “Or
should I expel them all, just to be on the safe side?” And then
he’d laughed, like the fact that the problem was so widespread
was funny. Saffron came to a halt. She was outside the music
rooms, and the air was filled with the yells and shrieks and
laughter and profanity of lunchtime. She leaned her head on the
rough red bricks and fought back tears. I can’t keep doing this
anymore. I can’t.

But she had to. What other choice was there?

As Gwen saw it, the first rule of interacting with teenagers was
simple: show no fear. Given its general applicability, it was also
her personal motto, and one that had served her well in the
decades since she’d first stumbled into the multiverse and out of
what she’d grown up thinking was normal. Human adolescents,
she reminded herself, were not more terrifying than magical
politics and walking between worlds. You can do this. You have
to. She took a deep breath, and stepped into Lawson High.

In Kena, where magic was ubiquitous, you could open a
portal damn near anywhere. On Earth, however, things were
somewhat trickier. The way Trishka explained it – which was, in

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fairness to Gwen’s comprehension, vaguely – some places were
simply less accessible than others, resisting the touch of the
jahudemet, the portal magic, like a knot that won’t pull loose.
But even once you found a receptive location, you could only
use it so many times in succession: the more you ripped a
particular patch of reality’s fabric in any world, the higher the
risk it would start to unravel, and Gwen had no desire to cause
an international incident. With her previous portal point thus
ruled out, Trishka had gone in search of a suitable substitute, and
come up with a patch of bush alongside the local high school. If
they’d had more time, Gwen would have protested – the last
thing she wanted to risk was an accidental audience – but they
didn’t, and she hadn’t, and now she was here, striding across the
playground at what was evidently lunchtime and trying not to
look as conspicuous as she felt.

She had a cover story, of course: if anyone asked, she was
looking the campus over before applying for a job in the
understaffed English faculty. The fact that Gwen had, once upon
a time, actually qualified as a teacher meant she could probably
bluff her way through an adult conversation should the need
arise; the greater risk, as ever, was the curiosity of children. As a
flock of shrieking tweens dashed haphazardly past, Gwen
suppressed a smile and fought the urge to light up a cigarette,
which was bound to attract the wrong sort of attention. Just get
across campus, find the place, and wait, she told herself.

And then she saw the girl.
She was white, about sixteen. Long-boned and lanky, though
her hunched shoulders said she was self-conscious about it.

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(Gwen, who was tall and had grown up hating it, could
sympathise.) Her eyes were green, made prominent by the near-
black circles beneath them, while her blonde hair – a natural
shade, Gwen judged – hung messily to her shoulders. She was
standing by a wall with a bag at her feet, her expression so
nakedly lost, it was clear she didn’t know she had an audience.
Gwen twisted a little to see it, but if not for what happened next,
she might still have kept walking.

A rangy white boy came storming up from around the
corner, yelling at the girl. He was all raw angles and sharp bones,
like he was trying to grow into his body faster than it would let
him, and the hooked smile on his face had no friendliness in it.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he shouted, pushing her.
“You stupid bitch–”

“Get off me!” the girl snarled, shoving him away – or trying
to, at least; the boy hung onto her arm with hard, thin fingers,
and before she could stop herself, Gwen closed the distance
between them. Smiling furiously, she grabbed the boy’s wrist,
pinching just so to make him give up his grip on the girl, and
twisted his arm up behind his back. He yelped, first in shock and
then in pain, swearing as he struggled.

“What the fuck, lady?”
Gwen tightened her grip. “Say uncle,” she said, and looked
straight at the girl, who was staring at her with a mixture of
hope and hunger, as if the world had just completely rearranged
itself.
Flailing, the boy tried to pull free. Gwen responded by
tugging his arm up higher, harder. “Say uncle, boy.”

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“Uncle! Uncle! Fuck!” Gwen counted to three, then shoved
him roughly away. He staggered, turned and stared at her,
incredulous in his anger. “The fuck is wrong with you?”

And before she could answer, he darted away like a rat from
a trap, leaving Gwen alone with the unknown girl, who licked
her lips and said softly, “Thanks.”

“Does he bother you often?”
The girl snorted. “He bothers everything in a skirt. Are you
new here, miss? I haven’t seen you before.”
“I’m maybe applying for a job,” Gwen said. “Though I doubt
I’ll get it.”
“I hope you do.” The girl’s jaw ticked. “No one else ever stops
him.”
Anger washed through Gwen. She’d already stayed too long,
made too much of an impression, but she couldn’t bring herself
to leave just yet. “Well, they should,” she said, and winced at the
inadequacy of the words. “What’s your name, girl?”
“Saffron,” she said, clearly surprised by the question. “Saffron
Coulter.”
“Well, Saffron Coulter, let me give you some unsolicited
advice,” said Gwen, because having already come this far, she
might as well go that little bit further – then faltered at the
realisation that there wasn’t much she could say. She didn’t
know what else was going on in Saffron’s life, and the boy’s
harassment of her wasn’t going to stop just because Gwen had
literally twisted his arm. What could she possibly say that might
make a difference?
“Yeah?” said Saffron, expectantly. “What?”

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Gwen sighed. “Life is hard. Some days we get our asses
kicked, but apathy breeds more evils than defeat. So, you know.
Keep fighting.”

It was, Gwen thought, a shitty speech – Pix would probably
laugh until she cried – but the girl, Saffron, lit up as though she’d
never heard anything better.

“Thank you,” she said again - quieter than before, but also
stronger. For the first time, she stood at her full height. “I’ll try.”

“Good,” said Gwen, and with a parting clap to Saffron’s
shoulder, she strode away in search of a magic door.

Apathy breeds more evils than defeat. Keep fighting.
Saffron couldn’t get the words, or the encounter, out of her

head. Which made no sense; it wasn’t as if she’d never had to
deal with Jared grabbing her before – not like she’d even needed
the help to get rid of him, however satisfying its delivery had
been. And it wasn’t like she didn’t know the world was a
messed-up place, either – you only had to look at the news to
see that much. But she’d never had an adult acknowledge the
fact to her face, let alone so bluntly, and especially not when it
came to the predations of Jared Blake. Whoever the teacher was,
she’d done more to make Saffron feel capable, safe and validated
in the space of one conversation than either her parents or her
teachers had since the start of term, and all at once, she didn’t
know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.

When the bell rang for the end of lunch, she felt like she’d

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been jolted out of a stupor; she hadn’t touched her food.
Suddenly, the prospect of going straight to class was intolerable.
Shouldering her bag, Saffron cut across campus and headed
straight for the second floor entrance to the library, which was
built on a slope against the old English block. Once inside, she
hid behind the new arrivals shelf until she was sure that none of
the librarians were watching, then moved quietly over to the
emergency door. It was meant to be alarmed, but as she’d
learned after accidentally falling against it a few months back, it
wasn’t. For obvious reasons, it wasn’t locked either – not during
the day, anyway – and Saffron slipped through with unobtrusive
ease.

On the other side was a small, square landing stuck between
two flights of stairs: one going down to the ground level exit, and
one that led up to the roof. Saffron took the latter option,
leaping up two steps at a time. The roof door was unlocked by
virtue of being broken: the lock and handle had both been
hacked clean out of the wood, and now it only stayed shut
because the cleaning staff kept a heavy chock wedged under the
frame. Saffron opened the door, used the wedge to pin it up
against the wall so it didn’t bang in the breeze, and headed out
into the sunlight.

The accessible section of roof was hemispherical, bordered by
a waist high brick wall just high enough to hide her from casual
scrutiny. To one side was a fat, square vent, and on the other,
protected by a broad awning, was a locked metal cupboard at
whose mysterious contents Saffron could only guess. Beside it
were two plastic chairs, set facing each other under the

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overhang, and as had become her custom, she sat down in one
and propped her feet on the other, head tipped back against the
sun warmed metal.

The first time she’d skipped class to come to the roof, she’d
been equal parts angry and terrified – angry, because the deputy
head had just given her the boys will be boys speech, and she
could no more have sat through Maths after that than flown to
the moon, and terrified, because up until that moment, she’d
never cut class in her life. She’d been shaking, so certain that
someone was going to shout out or stop her that when she made
it up without incident, she spent a full five minutes staring at the
open door, convinced that someone was following. But nobody
came, and when she showed up to her next lesson, it was like
she’d never been gone: friends or faculty, if anyone had missed
her, they didn’t mention it. It was like a revelation, as though
she’d spent years preemptively flinching from someone who, it
turned out, either couldn’t or wouldn’t hit her.

Since then, she’d grown incrementally bolder, coming up
more frequently and for longer. She had a half dozen excuses
worked out to explain her absence from class in the event that
anyone ever asked where she’d been, but so far, she hadn’t had
to use any of them. Now, she shut her eyes and exhaled deeply,
savouring the luxury of privacy and silence as, over and over
again, she replayed what had happened.

Apathy breeds more evils than defeat. Keep fighting.
Saffron stayed on the roof for two full periods, only going to
her last class of the day for the sake of appearances. As she
walked, she found herself surreptitiously glancing around in

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hopes of spying her rescuer again. She wasn’t exactly
inconspicuous: where Lawson High’s teaching staff was almost
uniformly white, the unknown woman was not. Her brown skin
was warm and weathered, and when she spoke her rich, smoke-
gravel voice was coloured by a faint English accent, marking her
as doubly incongruous to Saffron’s suburban Australian
sensibilities. She’d been tall, too, almost six feet, with kinky,
iron-grey hair cut to jaw-length, and when she’d held Jared still,
the muscles in her arms had stood out like cords. Such a woman,
were she still on campus, should have attracted attention. But
though Saffron looked, she didn’t see her, and though she
listened to her classmates talk, she didn’t overhear anything that
pointed to her presence.

The portal point turned out to be a nature strip. Technically, it
was part of the school grounds, but happily for Gwen, it was
right at the outskirts, and – better still – deserted. True, there
were some classrooms nearby, but most of their windows were
on the other side of the building, leaving the strip in a
convenient blind spot.

Now all she had to do was wait.
Gwen hated waiting.
Irritable with unspent energy, she sat down on a tree stump
and tried to remind herself why it was she’d left Kena in the first
place. With Tevet dead and the rebellion with her, Gwen and her
allies had lost their best shot at removing Leoden from power.

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They’d needed to lie low, regroup, and after a solid year away
from Earth, Gwen had taken the opportunity to accomplish both
tasks while proving to her parents, who’d retired to Australia
years ago, that she was, in fact, still alive. Such reunions were
always bittersweet, complex; none of her relatives or remaining
friends had any idea how she lived her life, which made the act
of lying to them more chore than holiday. And yet she was glad
to have visited, if only because it left her that much happier to
return to her (dangerous, wonderful) reality. She’d kept in
contact with Trishka through the dreamscape, however patchily
– and now, at last, she was going back to help fix the mess she’d
made. Those were the facts, but just at that moment, they didn’t
stop her from feeling as if she’d slunk off with her tail between
her legs.

Guilt, after all, was the rightful province of people who’d had
a hand in ruining whole countries, whether they’d meant it or
not. Rationality didn’t enter into it. Her lips quirked in private
irony: her son, were he privy to her thoughts, would doubtless
see things differently. But then Louis had chosen a life stranger
even than Gwen’s, and though she loved him dearly, she didn’t
always understand him. Which was doubtless true of most
parents, for all that she’d raised him in somewhat exceptional
circumstances, even by the standards of the Many – or had she?
Certainly Louis himself had seen nothing unusual in it, and if he
harboured any resentment on that point, he’d never brought it
up. Not for the first time, Gwen wondered if children, even
when grown, weren’t inherently more complex than the
multiverse, and decided, now as always, that some questions

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were better left unanswered.
Like water flowing downstream, her thoughts turned from

Louis towards the white girl – Saffron – and that parting look of
gratitude on her face. Helping her in the moment had been easy,
but as with so much else, Gwen hadn’t really changed anything.
That awful boy would likely still continue to bother her, and the
school’s apparent indifference to the problem would persist.

I was still right to help.
It was a small comfort, but against the looming weight of
Leoden’s coup and Kena’s complexities, Gwen would take what
victories she could find.

Sighing, Saffron put her head on her desk and stared sideways at
the clock. Her last class of the day was Personal Development,
Health and Physical Education, also known as PDHPE, also
known as a complete and utter waste of time, partly because
she’d be dropping it next year, but mostly because the kind of
sex education deemed suitable for state school students was
vastly less accurate, detailed or relevant than anything she could
find on one of a half-dozen sex positive YouTube channels run
by people who, unlike Mr Marinakis, could say penis without
twitching.

I need to find her, Saffron thought. I need to say – well, not
thank you, because she’d already said that, but… something. She
wanted to explain herself, or ask the woman’s advice, or maybe
just spend five minutes in the company of an adult who might

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actually take her seriously. It was irrational and pointless and she
couldn’t stop thinking about it, and when the last bell finally
rang, she ended up walking towards the bus lines in a virtual
fugue state.

“Saff! Hey, wait up!”
Saffron stopped and turned, smiling as her little sister, Ruby,
came running over. “Didn’t you hear me?” Ruby asked, glaring.
“I had to call you, like, five times!”
“Well, I’m hearing you now. What’s up?”
They started walking together, Ruby launching straight into a
lengthy description of her day. But as much as Saffron usually
enjoyed her sister’s acid observations about high school life, she
couldn’t quite focus; she was only half-listening, still scanning
the school for the mystery teacher.
“…so I told her, look, this isn’t a Monty Python sketch, there
aren’t any strange women lurking in the nature strip, and she
said–”
“What?” said Saffron, suddenly jerking back to the moment.
She stopped, a hand on Ruby’s arm. “What about strange
women?”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “God, you really don’t listen, do you? I
literally just said, Cora was convinced there was some random
lady hanging out in the nature strip behind the chem labs all
afternoon, and I just… Hey! Where are you going?”
“Forgot something!” Saffron said, already moving off.
Remembering that she’d left her phone charging in her bedroom,
she turned and added, “Tell mum and dad I’ll be home later,
OK?”

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“Tell them yourself!” Ruby called, but Saffron didn’t answer.
Heart pounding, she made her way across campus, trying and
failing to explain to herself why on Earth this felt so important –
or why, more to the point, she felt so damn certain that the
woman Cora claimed to have seen was her mystery teacher.
What the hell are you hoping to accomplish here? she asked
herself. School’s over, dumbass – even if she was there earlier,
she’ll be long gone by now. And yet she kept walking, ignoring
the awkward tug in her chest that said she should just go back to
the bus lines. She passed the science block, turned the corner,
and stopped.
There, standing in the middle of the nature strip, was the
mystery teacher. She was side-on to Saffron, but unaware of her
presence, head cocked as though listening for something. Saffron
licked her lips and stepped closer, too concerned with trying to
think of what to say to question why the woman was there at
all.
And then it happened.
Scarcely three metres from where the teacher stood, a crack
appeared in the world: a gaping, pink-tinged tear in reality’s
flank, scything through the naked air like some sort of impossible
portal. It almost hurt to look at, and as Saffron gulped and
thought it’s real, I’m seeing this and it’s really real, her whole
body went weak with shock, the way it had done last year when
a clumsy driver had knocked her off her bike. Her blood was
alive with panic, fear, excitement – what should she do? What
should they do? And only then did she see that the teacher was
smiling, striding towards the gap as though its presence was the

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most natural thing on Earth. In the split second before the
teacher crossed the portal’s threshold, Saffron made a decision.
All she could think of was that she’d wanted to talk to her, and
now she was escaping, moving through a hole in the world that
had no business existing anywhere, let alone in a nature strip
behind the chem labs. And so, in her shock, she did the only
thing she could think of. Saffron ran forwards and followed her
through the gap.

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TWO
DOWN, THROUGH, OVER

Black light blinded her. A frightened cry died in Saffron’s throat,
and then she was stumbling, falling into a small, square room.
The walls were made of pale stone, the only light coming from
cracks in a wooden door. The transition was so sudden as to be
unreal, but when she turned, the rip – the portal, whatever it
was – had vanished. All she saw was another stone wall and the
mystery teacher, staring at her in shock.

“Oh, no. No, no, no–”
“I followed you,” said Saffron, stunned. “I wanted to talk, and
then I just–”
“You just? You senseless, impulsive…” She broke off, visibly
willing herself to calm, and into the silence, Saffron asked,
“Where are we?”
“Somewhere you shouldn’t be,” came the snapped response.
“Down the rabbit hole. Through the wardrobe. Over the bloody

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rainbow.”
“You’re not a teacher,” Saffron said. The realisation left her

fighting inappropriate laughter. “Who the hell are you,
anyway?”

The woman sighed. “My name’s Gwen Vere.”
“Guinevere? Like the queen?”
“Like my father fancied himself a comedian. Gwen-space-
Vere. First name and last.” She said it with the tired cadence of
someone used to explaining their name to strangers. “Just call
me Gwen.”
“All right. Are we, um…?” She nodded her head at the door.
“Are we going outside?”
“Eventually, yes. Not yet.”
“OK,” said Saffron, strangely relieved to hear it. Swallowing,
she put down her bag and wondered what to say. “So, ah. You
come here often?”
Gwen raised an eyebrow, lips quirking in reluctant humour.
Saffron mentally replayed the question, recognised its
resemblance to a bad pick-up line, and blushed to the roots of
her hair. “I didn’t mean it like that!”
“I’m flattered, really.”
“That’s not what…” She broke off, feeling strangely
lightheaded, and looked at the room again. The floor was made
from the same stone as the walls, the uneven surface covered in
dirt, dust, straw. There were some empty sacks in a corner, a
broken crate in another. It was all so achingly mundane, it made
no sense at all that she’d come here by magic. Maybe she’d been
drugged instead, knocked out and put in a van and driven away,

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and the hole in the world was just some hallucinatory way of
dealing with a traumatic situation. “Go on,” Gwen said,
suddenly. “Get it out of your system. Tell me what you’re trying
to convince yourself actually happened, and see if you can still
put faith in it once you’ve said it out loud.”

“I’m not trying–”
“Of course you aren’t.” Her mouth was hard, but her eyes
were soft. “Oh, child. You don’t know what you’ve done.”
“It’s just a room,” said Saffron, mouth dry. A shining rip in
the world. “We could be anywhere. We could’ve… I could be
hallucinating the rest.”
“Could you?”
Saffron didn’t answer. She scuffed her shoe on the ordinary
dirt of the ordinary floor, feeling the exact same mix of fear and
exhilaration as when she’d first cut class to hide on the library
roof, as though her understanding of rules and limits had quietly
rearranged itself.
A tramp of footsteps, coming from outside. Gwen froze, and
Saffron inexplicably froze with her.
Someone banged on the door.
It wasn’t knocking; more like a solid thump. The handle gave
an abortive turn. The door rattled in its frame, unyielding, and
whoever was trying to get in – a man, by the sound of it – called
out in an unfamiliar language. Faintly, Saffron heard two more
people respond, another man and a woman. The door shook
again, harder than before, as though someone were kicking it. A
woman’s laughter followed, more words were exchanged, and
then they retreated, the unintelligible conversation growing faint

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