“And that’s how I got here,” I said quietly to the silver man without a face.
He nodded his head at me and I think his voice smiled.
“This is all very well. Your compliance is noted.”
He stood and walked out of the room without another word. I stood after this and walked about the darkness – sad, afraid, and very, very alone. I knew there was no hope for my escape. Matters into my own hands would have to be taken. I just didn’t see how. I needed hope. I needed that false hope I hated so much. I needed something.
I couldn’t help but think of all of Ollie’s descriptions of his own special Deviants, and I couldn’t help but to shiver. The room in which I sat – the darkness that I dwelled in – it was all exactly how I had pictured it with Ollie.
Tears would have entered my eyes before – any time before. But I had hardened somehow. It was as if that sleep that the woman had induced brought within me a change. I was glad for it. I could no longer cry, nor would I ever need to.
Behind me, I heard a noise. I flipped around and saw a masculine figure emerge from the wall.
“Ollie?” I whispered tentatively.
Fear.
“Ollie, please –”
“It’s me,” he whispered warmly.
I flew across the room in relief, only to hesitate a few feet from him.
“Why is it dark?” I whispered to him.
He chuckled.
“On,” he said.
The lights suddenly turned on, and we both squinted for a moment. I turned my head up to the source of them in awe, and I realized that they were bulbs. Light bulbs.
“Light bulbs!” I whispered in awe, glancing down at him with a great smile.
I had always thought they would be louder – a hum, perhaps. There was no sound – just the silence of our breath within the hall. The building had a noise to it, of course, but there was no noise from the bulbs. I was oddly disappointed by it. It was not at all how I had expected.
I looked at him suspiciously when he did not take his eyes from me, a tired smile on his face, but eventually I smiled too.
His eyes didn’t just seem kinder; there was a definite perception of appreciation within them. His longing was unmasked, and I saw what he felt. No argument. Just warmth. I began to feel that he was suddenly glad he had brought me back (to wherever we were.) It was the greatest, most satisfying, most wonderfully filling feeling I had ever had.
The room took on a different light then, pardoning the pun, and I felt sweet relief enter my bones. It felt secure, suddenly too, and it made me feel better.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I admitted, laughing with nerves that didn’t make sense to me.
He shared these nerves with his next laughter, and silence hung comfortably in the air.
“So…” I finally said. “You are home.”
I motioned all around me, feeling strangely out of place.
He eyed me deeply, taking a short step closer to me.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess I am.”
He looked so relaxed. The tired lines in his face seemed to have gone, and he looked younger. Clean.
Handsome.
“You look nice,” I said, motioning politely up and down him with my hand. “Very…clean.”
His smile widened.
“You too,” he said, imitating the same gesture I’d just used.
More awkward laughter.
“Are you…happy?” I asked him.
His smile grew into a thing with teeth. I had never seen it as such, and it took my breath away. It was the effect Chess had once.
“Yeah…” he said, nodding. “Yeah, I am.”
His smile became strained now.
“You?”
I thought about it, and my mind turned serious.
Thinking and calculating were my strong points, they said. Planning and quickness and fierce, cold, passionate enthusiasm had always been my strong points. So I stayed true to it.
“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly. “Too soon to say.”
“It won’t be that bad,” he assured, looking around with a yawn.
I smiled.
“A yawn out of Dark, the Great and Terrible?”
He laughed again and glanced back at me just once before making a round around the room. He seemed distracted for the first time in my memory. His focus had always been on me – it had always focused around me.
I felt the tenseness inside of me unravel.
“What next, partner?” I asked him after a while.
He stood tall and looked at me.
“What?”
“Why am I here?”
“I don’t know yet. I think they want to help you. Not sure.”
“With what?” I asked.
“Hm?” he asked, yawning again.
He looked like a little boy, and it made me feel warm.
“Help me with what?” I said gently.
“We think you have the cure for Necrosis.”
Another yawn.
“Have you gone home yet?” I asked softly, gently.
“The others have. I’m just going now.”
Fear must have flitted through my eyes.
“I’m going to be in here to see you. Don’t worry.”
He motioned me over to a large table that had some sort of blanket on it. It was too low to eat off of, and I knew that this had been a table’s purpose as it was what my grandfather had said. You often sat around one and ate at it; that’s what he said anyway. Ollie sat on it though and my short knowledge was not accurate.
“This is a bed – you sleep on it.”
“Why?” I asked, laughing at just exactly how wrong my intelligence had been.
“It’s like a mat. Try it.”
We sat together and before we knew it we’d lied back, both of us, I on my side, he on his. It struck me once as being mildly inappropriate, but fatigue suddenly bettered me, and I didn’t mind getting the chance to fall asleep next to him.
The next time he spoke, I’d obviously been asleep, and I didn’t know for how long.
“Okay, though, look,” he was saying.
I sat up with difficulty and didn’t remember Ollie getting up. He looked at me seriously and had his hands on a thin black box. I blinked hard to rid myself of chills of fatigue, and I wanted nothing more than to fall back into the “bed.”
“This is a TV.”
“A what?” I asked with a yawn.
“A…a…”
He yawned loudly too. It was contagious.
“A TV – or television, I guess.”
I was interested, despite my fatigue.
“What does it do?”
“It’s like a box where…you can watch things happen. None of its real – well, some of it is, but I can imagine you won’t watch any of that.” He laughed at himself. “You press the biggest button and it turns on.”
He did so and there was a loud, high piercing scream in my ears. It didn’t hurt, but it gave me chills. I had never heard a ring like it, and the fact of the matter was that it pleased me.
There was movement on the screen and talking, suddenly. It was loud, and Ollie pushed another button. It became quieter. I got off the bed to examine it. They were pictures, not real people. It was like the art on my wall of the Gallery, only these people moved and spoke and looked like representations of life. They were colors I’d never even dreamed of before. I got on my knees in front of it and touched the flat part of it cautiously. It was soft, but the characters didn’t move. They continued on as if I hadn’t bothered them, and I was confused but delighted at their ignorance of me. I touched them again, harder. They continued on to talk and laugh in their own world inside their own box.
I glanced up at him. Ollie was very pleased at my reaction. I looked back, almost as if his pleasure were my permission to continue, and I stared. There was a little man, who was a color I had never seen before, and there was another man that I knew to be pink, as Ollie had explained.
r /> “What are these things?” I asked in pure amazement. They were moving on the screen, talking and living by themselves.
“You’ll understand soon, I hope.”
“But what are they?”
“This is…oh, Spongebob.” He sighed dreamily, as if remembering. “They made these all the way back before the Silent Forties. They’re classics. Stopped making them after that. I’m surprised it’s even on after…”
“What?” I asked, listening, suddenly. “What’s the Silent –?”
“It was the time when everything started. It’ll make sense to you eventually. Actually, they probably are just looping old things for you to watch. Maybe they don’t want to expose you to anything bad just yet.”
The pictures moved with such ease, as if I could reach out to touch them. I did so, but the screen was cool, like a wall made of a flexible glass.
“How does it –?”
“Another story for another night,” was his abrupt reply.
I closed my eyes to reprimand myself.
“You’re right, I’m sorry.”
I moved to face him and realized for the first time how tall he was.
“I’m so sorry,” I said up to him guiltily. “You should go.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, you need to rest – I’m sorry.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’ve been away from home for months.” I smiled as he smiled. “Go get a drink and get a room and then go to sleep.”
He laughed appreciatively. I laughed a little too.
“Here. No, I’m serious. Why don’t you go – no, I’ll be fine.”
I looked about the room nervously but then back at him with feigned courage. He bought it.
“I’ll be fine. Go home.”
He leaned back, impressed again.
“I can –”
“Its fine, Ollie. I’m fine – really.”
He was convinced and didn’t argue.
“I’m fine. Go home. I’m safe. Look.” I motioned around. “No dark, no light, no monsters, no people. I’m fine.”
I smiled at him and pushed him away a little.
“I…well…thanks, I guess. I’ll…I guess I’ll see you some time soon.”
He waved a little.
The sensation was strange. I’d never had to bid him farewell like this. I turned from him to hide my fear at this and said,
“Safety and peace, Ollie.”
I heard him turn back.
“Good night…Ellie.”
This was too much. I let out a whimper and flew across the room to him, wrapping my arms around his chest.
“You said my name,” I whispered. “Say it again.”
He did so and I squealed happily.
“I like that,” I said, squeezing him harder.
“I’ll be able to say it more,” he said to me. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Tears overwhelmed me, but they were good tears. He really was taking care of me, and I felt so safe.
“You know, Ollie,” I began, leaning back just enough to look at him, “I think I might owe you one.”
“The pleasure is mine,” was his reply.
We held on for a long time before letting go, and he was the first one to look back before leaving. When he did leave though, I was afraid for everything unfamiliar, and I began to sigh with the immensity of it. He left to get his booze and his hundred, beautiful women and his fancy room. I was left in quiet with nothing.
I couldn’t imagine it any differently, but I knew that not just my back but my entire being was going to change with the new world, and I was just going to have to live with that.
Epilogue: Death in the Snow
I was invincible. I was untouchable. I didn’t feel pain. I didn’t even feel fear or love or sadness. I couldn’t. In fact, there was only one thing inside of me that ate away at me, controlled my every action. It was a fear. And I feared only one thing.
Death.
I feared it so much that I did not allow myself to live. I feared death because I feared life in the way others had it, I feared what was different. And that was why I was not prepared for it.
Death.
And yet, death did not exist. Not in my life. Not in my perfectly stable world. I didn’t even believe in death. I dared it to come to me for a change, dared it for the challenge of it, but I think that was because I didn’t understand it.
Death wasn’t something I could take back. It wasn’t a cruel joke or a punch to the face. It wasn’t a last job or a lasting guilt trip. Death was permanent. And, like I said, I couldn’t have known that because I wasn’t even alive.
Death.
I was one of the people that brought about death. I had always scorned at it, laughed at it, mocked those who cared about it.
Death wouldn’t happen to me as long as I did not live.
I was so sure that life was that simple. I was positive that nothing would ever mean more to me than pure survival, as that had always been the only thing that I had ever held dear. It kept grief and pain long at bay. I didn’t care about living or death because I didn’t live and I wouldn’t die, of that I had made sure.
But that did not make me invincible from death. It made me simply unaware of it.
That I was above ever meeting anyone in my life who I would care about…that I was above grieving simply because of my blind rage that I had nothing to grieve was ludicrous. It made me cruel with apathy. It drove me on, nevertheless, shamelessly made me into the cold-hearted bastard that could barely be defined as a man…
She understood. She understood death and life and how to live. She was aware of her mortality. She was aware that one day, someday, she would be forced to see her life before her eyes as she wilted away. And she knew that she wanted it to be something worth seeing. She knew what it meant to fight for something worthwhile, to live and struggle courageously for sacred ideals. She knew what it meant to fight people like me. And she knew what it meant to die for it.
Because she had loved life, because she had lived so deeply, Elizabeth Fisher, my only friend, was not afraid to die. People like her didn’t have the capacity to fear anything. They were too busy living. They were strong – and quite invincible, more than I’d ever been.
So I had never worried, never even once considered that she might die, that I would have to grieve for her…cry for her…shed tears that she was gone…pray that she would come back.
I stared at this grief with a numbing sense. I had always taught myself that it was dull. It was redundant, painful, useless…Just because one grieved did not mean that the one you wanted would return. It was unnecessary. It was avoidable. I had taught myself techniques to get around things like that, blocking me from everything, blocking me from living, keeping me from dying. Feeling wasn’t in my cards, after all. There were so many other things that were, but feeling was not one of them.
But in that moment, at that place, with that feeling…I knew that I was wrong about everything.
I reevaluated my life and I realized it was brief, that it was only when I was with her that I’d truly begun to live. And I saw that the veil I’d kept over my own eyes when death came around was conspicuously absent.
The guilt was gone. The shield that I had clutched to was gone. Everything that I had ever thought had changed. In the year and a half that she had been in my life, she had ripped that comfort apart.
It hurt, I realized. Sorrow hurt on the inside – like someone had taken a knife, snuck into a deep imaginary castle within my heart, and stabbed the king over and over and over again. It came in jabs that took my breath away. And, for the first time, I experienced pain that was not from my body.
My body was human. But it was not me. And I felt what I truly was. And I realized that there were two halves to me, one that was strong and able that was my body and one that was weak and malnourished that was my soul. And I realized that my weaker side had never felt real pain before.
It was like an old factory being turned on for the first time in fifty years…the cogs wound well enough to function, but they weren’t used to the duress. I came to find that the duress ate away at me. It shook my hands, working its way up my extremities to my very heart, to my chest, to my very skin. I was covered in chills of the acutest kind. I couldn’t even begin to fathom what was happening to me – what had happened to her.
I hadn’t believed it possible. She was invincible, more than I was. She was fiery, passionate, beautiful…Everything about her sparkled with life. And, suddenly, she looked acutely different to me. It was like I was seeing her for the first time, and her body was still.
I hadn’t believed it. When I heard it, I actually laughed with disbelief. I had waited for that phone call…for someone to tell me that she was okay. When they told me, I knew it wasn’t real. She was so bursting with life. She couldn’t have died.
I ripped myself out of me and I became aware of a figure that lay before me. I dropped my knees to the freezing earth. My knees shook to support my own weight, and I shifted to be more comfortable beside her. My eyes went all over her in a way they never had before. I did not recognize who it was.
The chest of the woman on the ground did not move, as it did not breathe. It didn’t even shiver with the snow that began to pound against her. But I supposed only living things could establish that they were cold. That they needed warmth. That they needed something, someone, somewhere to be warmer.
I wished I had made her warmer. I had taken so much from her…I had made her colder. I stripped her of her very happiness. I had met all of her kindnesses with contempt, even with loathing.
Why I had done it, I suddenly didn’t know. It was as if the logic that I held so close to me had never existed. Why did I need to bring her down? There was no real reason for it. She had done nothing but save my life time and again in more ways than she could realize…and I was mean. I wasn’t strong or cool or tough – I was pathetic. And weak. I had always known that, and it had made me cruel to her – for trying to convince me otherwise. And what was worse…she still called me friend. She had always called me friend.
It was farcical to say she was anything less than man, as she was more of a man than I would ever be. I couldn’t even imagine what I had been thinking when I told her she had no right to call herself human. That she wasn’t genuine was a crazy, stupid thing to say. It didn’t matter what she was, what she wanted to call herself, what Probe did. She was the most alive person I had ever met. She was better than me in every way, in a way that made me want to be better – if for nothing else but to impress her.
I reached out a hand to touch her face, but I couldn’t quite do it. It felt wrong to be touching her when she didn’t recoil. It felt so strange to hold my hand near her, to want to touch her with my bare skin and not feel her body tense with fear. At the thought, my eyes struggled to reach her face, where I waited for her eyes to crunch together with the shame she felt for herself, shame she felt because I had made her ashamed.
I almost expected her death to be a cruel joke she played, one she wanted solely to see what she meant to me. I waited for her to pop up with her lopsided, cavalier smile. She had the teeth of a lion – straight and meticulously clean. Before those teeth were her chapped lips, her used lips, her lips that I had looked to with so much reliance, so much need. I had never realized that I had relied on her so much to speak, to instruct me, to speak with me, but it became immediately apparent to me that I had. When they did not move, I found them to be disturbing.
She was like a beautiful doll of the woman I admired, but she was not the woman. How could she be? That woman was alive. This woman was dead.
I waited and waited for something – anything. I waited for those rules of indifference to sweep me up from the slippery slope and take flight away with me into the cold, into the night. I waited for them to tell me that I waited for no man, no woman, especially no Deviant.
And yet I waited for her eyes to open more, waited for her to show me her silvery irises, dashed and speckled with nearly every shade of blue imaginable. They were beautiful dancing eyes. They performed for everyone with just a glance, and they shook me every time I saw them. I wanted to see her face light up as it always did for me. She smiled with those eyes. No one else had ever dared look at me like she had. She was the only one to ever talk back, ever retaliate, ever laugh at me.
It frustrated me before…and it had made me an animal. My need to make her less than I was, to make her proud of me, to keep her from laughing at me, to prove to her that I could be as good as she was, had consumed me like a fire.
She didn’t move. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t move. I moved to her eyes again, my hand still outstretched, moving over her body all over but not touching. I had always wanted to feel what she felt like…feel her flesh under my hands, feel the warmth of her skin, but I couldn’t.
It would have been disrespectful, even though I knew every corner of her skin, front and back. I had only seen it a few times due to mistakes of my own and hers, but it didn’t keep me from knowing what I’d already seen. I had never looked at her intentionally, never meant to observe and learn, but I had. It was as if I had memorized where her freckles were, where her scars had been. She was completely natural, not altered, not fake, not smooth or hairless or soft. She was real. And the stranger thing was – I didn’t even care. There was no lust, not like there usually was. There was respect. And guilt for having seen what was not mine. Had it been any other beautiful woman, I would have laughed inside for what I had witnessed…but…she wasn’t like every other woman. I just wished I had realized that sooner.
I wasn’t smart about the way I spoke to her. I was unsure how to treat her differently, kinder, sweeter than others…I just knew that I had to somehow. I needed to make her know how important she was to me, but I had never known just how to do it, especially when my jealousy of her ability to live when I could not overcame me. I just wasn’t good at being nice, being normal, acting normal. And she was. She was always good at making me feel things.
She was always disappointed in me somehow too. She never voiced it…but it was in her tone sometimes. She was frustrated, like I wasn’t trying hard enough to be her friend. In reality, being with her was the hardest thing that I had ever done in my entire life and I worked on the words that came from my mouth like I had never worked at anything before. She made me frightened and nervous and shaky. I didn’t know why. But that nervousness made me stupid, made me say stupid things. It left me with the need to say something smart – just once.
I couldn’t ever think of anything. I had tried, I had really tried, but, in the end, it was never good enough. And that was when I got mean, when I got angry. I would say cruel things to her, but my inability to speak around her wasn’t her fault, it was mine. I was the idiot, not her. I was the pawn, the little imbecile that was never good enough for anyone.
Why I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I had to do. I tried everything to be better so that she would be proud of me. I had worked tirelessly to improve myself so that some higher power would turn her opinion of me in my favor, warm her to me.
I had thought it would be easy. That was probably why it didn’t work. Because it wasn’t easy. It was so difficult that I lost sleep over it, obsessed over it. And I wouldn’t change. I didn’t know why. It made me feel intense self-loathing that I was different, that I couldn’t help her when I desperately wanted to, that I couldn’t speak just when I looked into her eyes sometimes.
I turned back to her body. It was small, but it had grown much larger and taller than it had been six months ago when she first arrived. Her face had changed, matured, aged, and experienced like it was meant to, and she was growing into it well. Her hair was long…much longer than when I had last seen it.
The wind was cruel. It made her hair move. It made me wonder if it was actually she who shuddered or if the wind was truly playing tricks on me. I
tucked her hair behind her ear, careful not to touch her skin. But as I did it, I pulled her head into my lap. My head leaned over her face and stared deeply at it, as if I was admiring a beautiful painting. She was so beautiful – she was just so absolutely, stunningly beautiful…I became confused. I had never seen anything more beautiful. I began to wonder how I had never seen it, why I had never seen it. It was just another thing on the list of my shortcomings.
I finally moved the tips of my knuckles to the flesh on her face – with a cry of anguish. It was my turn to wince away…It had always been my turn. My palm made full contact with her cheek, but her skin was hard and cold.
I cried out again, looking to the sky. It was a cry of lamentation, so familiar to me and yet so foreign from my own lips. It escaped my mouth loudly and as I heard it I began to struggle to see. I held her body close to me. But it wasn’t my friend. It was my friend’s body.
I let out another cry of torment. The pain came fast. My hands shook and my body became cold with the thing I held onto so dearly, so lovingly, it would have been as if she were my very own…I cried into her chest as I held her, buried myself in her stiffness. I felt tears fall past the very tips of my eyes, my cheeks, my neck. The water rushed out of me in gasps of pain, suffocating me with its determination to escape from my body. I waited dearly, desperately for her to come to me with her arms, bring my head from her chest where I waited for her heart to beat, where I listened like I had never listened for anything.
There was only silence. I laid there for long, long minutes, waiting and knowing, sobbing and praying. I closed my eyes with wanting her back, opened my heart so that I would be able to see her as she had been. But, when she didn’t move, I stopped.
I pulled her to me again and rested my head on her chest that would never move again. I wished, I waited for her to wake up.
“Ellie…” I whispered to her softly. I barely moved my lips for the pain of it. “Ellie…”
I knew that she would respond. She loved it when I spoke her name. She deserved to hear her name over and over again if she wanted it. She deserved everything I could give and more, because I couldn’t give her nearly half of what she deserved. I hated that.
“Ellie…please, wake up…”
I held her hand to my face, and I brought it to my lips over and over again. It was soft with the occasional scar, and I felt new guilt. She had a way of making me angry. She had a way about her that forced me to believe she deserved punishment, even though I should never have laid a hand on her. In reality, I didn’t, but I’d come close – far too close. They had manipulated me into thinking she deserved this…that I even considered it made me a fool. My offenses were unforgivable. Her death was God’s way of punishing me for what I had done to her. I had known I would lose something. But this…this was far too much, too painful, more than I could have ever guessed.
“Ellie…wake up now, Ellie…Come on. You have to wake up now…”
My lip curled into itself as I knew that she wouldn’t. I knew what had happened. I had always known what had happened, what would happen. I could have been there for her. I could have helped her. I wanted to help her. I had once asked why I had even bothered…before I had turned into the cruel beast that she had come to know…
But I could have saved her. I could have stopped it. I could have stopped it all. I could have kept her away from those horrible things, those people…and I had let her go. She hadn’t been strong enough because I wasn’t there to help her. I had never needed to be.
It had always been her place to be the strong one. She gathered loyalty like a disease, and it was the most infectious one on the face of the planet. That loyalty drew all kinds of people to her…everyone and everything flocked to her side in a moment’s notice simply to say that they could. She was so strong that way. But even the greatest ship needed a bottom to float upon…I could have been that bottom, that supportive base. It was my right; it was my privilege; it was my job. It was my job. I had failed her so miserably…I had failed her in every possible way…And she called me friend.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered softly. I closed my eyes for shame. “I’m so, so sorry…” I felt swollen. “I made a mistake…”
I took a deep breath without breathing.
“You’ll never…”
I couldn’t say it. I didn’t want to hear that she would never forgive me. She wouldn’t have the opportunity to.
I let go of her with another grunt of effort and stood up as I placed her on the ground before me. Before I turned away, I leaned over and kissed her forehead. She was so cold…
I turned my back on the hole, turned my back on her beautiful face that was no longer living. The man passed me as I walked away, and I wept more and more with the rhythms of his spade. I finally turned and watched, forcing myself to, suffering through it as I knew she would have for me. I had to see it. I had to see him do it. I wanted to.
The man lifted her up carefully and placed her into the hole he made. I began to blind myself with the tears as I saw him shove more and more dirt onto her. I waited for her to yell at him from that hole. I waited for her to get up as more and more of her body was obscured. Tears poured down my face as I stared, far after the man had gone and her grave was done. I waited there so that she would wake up, so that when she did, I would most certainly be there.
But Ellie didn’t wake up. She was dead.
***
I took pride from the fact that it took six men to carry me away, but only just. Where I was going was up to them, not to Ollie, even if it had been his orders…I had always wondered what it would be like to be truly betrayed. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. It brought only darkness. And silence…and fear.
Something horrible was waiting for me, I knew it. I had a strange feeling that I had only glimpsed the surface of Ollie’s dangerous world. And I had a feeling that it was never going to get better. And, most of all, I had a feeling that, for the first time in my entire life, I was completely and utterly alone.
I was not going to die. They could have done that already…but, already, in that dark room full of strange, silent people…I sort of wished that I was.
###
Thank you for sticking with the book, and for supporting me as a budding author. Writing novels is a journey every time, and I am very excited you could be a part of it. If you have any thoughts about it at all, I invite you to take a moment of your time to leave me a review! All constructive reviews are welcome!
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Audrey Higgins
About the Author:
Audrey Higgins is currently a student at the University of Rhode Island in the hopes of attaining a Bachelor’s in Writing and Rhetoric. She has been an avid reader and writer of books since she was very young, but has always fostered a specific love for science fiction and fantasy. Because of this, she is drawn in particular to video games and movies of the same genre.
Beyond that, Audrey enjoys languages, and is studying three: Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. She has also recently begun to study Latin. She is currently seeking minors in Russian and Chinese.
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