Hit The Ground Running Quotes

If life is slumping down into the algorithms of depression, succumbing to instigating moods of worthlessness, we must endeavor to get out of the rabbit hole of mistrust, shape challenging decisions, pick the fitting fight-or-flight mode, and hit the ground running. ("A glimpse of the future")

Realization hit his face like a bomb. His hand trembled on my cheek, and he looked down to the ground, no longer able to hold my gaze.

When people are just drifting along the tides of life and can’t see the shores of reality anymore, they may experience someday the irresistible desire for a liberating burst, emerging deeply from the inner self and disentangling them from their manufactured pattern. That day might be a day of all possibilities and make them ready to hit the ground running. ("A change of vision" )

to be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running

Never being on the shortlist of people’s attention may arouse a sensation of desolation but may, all together, be an expectant challenge to excel and exceed oneself, as it can inflame the will to extract unsuspected power from the inner self, never to give up and to hit the ground and run…ever since life may offer an astounding window of opportunity to assert oneself in a land of contention. ("Not on the shortlist" )

How do you feel? (Maggie) Like I got hit by a bus that decided to back up a few times and make sure it finished the job. I think it must have ground its tires on my ribs during the last run. You know, just in case I might actually want to breathe again in my lifetime. (Wren)

You’re a blackmailer—” “I broker information.” “A con artist—” “I create opportunity.” “A bawd and a murderer—” “I don’t run whores, and I kill for a cause.” “And what cause is that?” “Same as yours, merch. Profit.” “How do you get your information, Mister Brekker?” “You might say I’m a lockpick.” “You must be a very gifted one.” “I am indeed.” Kaz leaned back slightly. “You see, every man is a safe, a vault of secrets and longings. Now, there are those who take the brute’s way, but I prefer a gentler approach—the right pressure applied at the right moment, in the right place. It’s a delicate thing. “Do you always speak in metaphors, Mister Brekker?” Kaz smiled. “It’s not a metaphor.” He was out of his chair before his chains hit the ground.

I didn't have any more time. Directly below the window was a thickly leafed bush of some sort. I couldn't see it clearly and only hoped it wasn't a rosebush or something equally sharp. A second floor drop wouldn't kill me, though. Probably wouldn't even hurt—much. I climbed over the ledge, briefly meeting Dimitri's gaze as the other Strigoi moved in on him. The words came to me again: Don't hesitate. Dimitri's important lesson. But it hadn't been his first one. His first had been about what to do if I was outnumbered and out of options: Run. Time for me to run. I leapt out the window. I think the profanities that came out of my mouth when I hit the ground would have been understandable in any language. It hurt.

Women, being the calculating gender, know all too well to hit the gym months prior to a break up – she’s not getting in shape for you, she’s getting ready to hit the ground running with the next guy she’ll be fucking.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

I called my wife up on the cell phone and said baby you aint gonna believe this, i go, we just hit a deer with the airplane. and there was a silence on the other end of the line followed by.. OH MY GOD.! were you on the ground? I said nope, santa was makin one last run..

Children Are Like Kites You spend years trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you are both breathless. They crash ... they hit the roof ... you patch, comfort and assure them that someday they will fly. Finally, they are airborne. They need more string, and you keep letting it out. They tug, and with each twist of the twine, there is sadness that goes with joy. The kite becomes more distant, and you know it won't be long before that beautiful creature will snap the lifeline that binds you together and will soar as meant to soar ... free and alone. Only then do you know that you have done your job.

You have to look at Jews like Bina Gelbfish, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the district of Sitka. Methodological, organised, persistent, resourceful, prepared... A mere re-drawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

May the Saints receive me. She pressed the tip beneath her breast, between her ribs, an arrow to her heart. Then a hand gripped her wrist painfully, forcing her to drop the blade. “Not just yet, Inej.” The rasp of stone on stone. Her eyes flew open. Kaz. He bundled her into his arms and leapt down from the crates, landing roughly, his bad leg buckling. She moaned as they hit the ground. “Did we win?” “I’m here, aren’t I?” He must be running. Her body jounced painfully against his chest with every lurching step. He couldn’t carry her and use his cane. “I don’t want to die.” “I’ll do my best to make other arrangements for you.” She closed her eyes. “Keep talking, Wraith. Don’t slip away from me.” “But it’s what I do best.” He clutched her tighter. “Just make it to the schooner. Open your damn eyes, Inej.” She

For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and the picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read!

The three of us do not go out very often as the three of us. I think Daniel is perfect for Jed, which is the highest compliment I can give. But my friendship isn't with him, and Jed understands that. When we hit the road, we hit it together alone. We get to the bridge, out undestined destination. Even though there's no sign, no arrow, Jed turns at the last minute and parks us in a verge right before the bridge leaves the ground. The trunk pops open, and Jed runs round back to retrieve a bag of oranges and a sweatshirt that fits me better. Shall we make like lizards and leap? he asks. I never felt the urge to jump off a bridge, but there are times I have wanted to jump out of my life, out of my skin. Would you stroll me down the promenade instead? I ask back. Most certainly, my splendid. There is no word for our kind of friendship. Two people tho don't see each other a lot, but can make each other effortlessly happy.

Hit the ground running; consolidate control; ask questions of everyone wherever you go; manage by wandering around; determine the basic problems of each organization and hit them head-on; when attacked, counterattack; stick to your guns; spend your political capital to reach your goals; and then when your work is stymied or done, find a way out.

Welcome to my head. Let's hit the ground running.

You don’t have to like it, you just have to do it” – There are situations in life where you will simply need to grit your teeth and hit the ground running.

A nurse’s aid threw the contents of a patient’s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, of of which, preparatory to flight released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while birds flew away, making sounds.

When he heard light, rushing footfalls, he turned his head. Someone was racing along the second-floor balcony. Then laughter drifted down from above. Glorious feminine laughter. He leaned out the archway and glanced at the grand staircase. Bella appeared on the landing above, breathless, smiling, a black satin robe gathered in her hands. As she slowed at the head of the stairs, she looked over her shoulder, her thick dark hair swinging like a mane. The pounding that came next was heavy and distant, growing louder until it was like boulders hitting the ground. Obviously, it was what she was waiting for. She let out a laugh, yanked her robe up even higher, and started down the stairs, bare feet skirting the steps as if she were floating. At the bottom, she hit the mosaic floor of the foyer and wheeled around just as Zsadist appeared in second-story hallway. The Brother spotted her and went straight for the balcony, pegging his hands into the rail, swinging his legs up and pushing himself straight off into thin air. He flew outward, body in a perfect swan dive--except he wasn't over water, he was two floors up over hard stone. John's cry for help came out as a mute, sustained rush of air-- Which was cut off as Zsadist dematerialized at the height of the dive. He took form twenty feet in front of Bella, who watched the show with glowing happiness. Meanwhile, John's heart pounded from shock...then pumped fast for a different reason. Bella smiled up at her mate, her breath still hard, her hands still gripping the robe, her eyes heavy with invitation. And Zsadist came forward to answer her call, seeming to get even bigger as he stalked over to her. The Brother's bonding scent filled the foyer, just as his low, lionlike growl did. The male was all animal at the moment....a very sexual animal. "You like to be chased, nalla, " Z said in a voice so deep it distorted. Bella's smile got even wider as she backed up into a corner. "Maybe." "So run some more, why don't you." The words were dark and even John caught the erotic threat in them. Bella took off, darting around her mate, going for the billiards room. Z tracked her like prey, pivoting around, his eyes leveled on the female's streaming hair and graceful body. As his lips peeled off his fangs, the white canines elongated, protruding from his mouth. And they weren't the only response he had to his shellan. At his hips, pressing into the front of his leathers, was an erection the size of a tree trunk. Z shot John a quick glance and then went back to his hunt, disappearing into the room, the pumping growl getting louder. From out of the open doors, there was a delighted squeal, a scramble, a female's gasp, and then....nothing. He'd caught her. ......When Zsadist came out a moment later, he had Bella in his arms, her dark hair trailing down his shoulder as she lounged in the strength that held her. Her eyes locked on Z's face while he looked where he was going, her hand stroking his chest, her lips curved in a private smile. There was a bite mark on her neck, one that had very definitely not been there before, and Bella's satisfaction as she stared at the hunger in her hellren's face was utterly compelling. John knew instinctively that Zsadist was going to finish two things upstairs: the mating and the feeding. The Brother was going to be at her throat and in between her legs. Probably at the same time. God, John wanted that kind of connection.

When you’re being chased by zombies, hills are either your best friends or your burial ground. The slope slows them down, which is great, unless you hit the peak and find out that you’re surrounded, with nowhere left to run to.

The most common mistake runners make is overstriding: taking slow, big steps, reaching far forward with the lead foot and landing on the heel. This means more time on the ground, which means the vulnerable heel hits the ground with more force on landing, creating more impact on the joints. Training at a stride rate of 85 to 90 is the quickest way to correct this problem. Short, light, quick steps will minimize impact force and keep you running longer, safer. It also will make you a more efficient runner.

I don’t believe it can be taught as if it were a recipe. There aren’t ingredients and techniques that will guarantee success. Parameters exist that, if followed, will ensure a business can continue, but you cannot clearly define our business success and then bottle it as you would a perfume. It’s not that simple: to be successful, you have to be out there, you have to hit the ground running; and, if you have a good team round you and more than your fair share of luck, you might make something happen. But you certainly can’t guarantee it just by following someone else’s formula. Business is a fluid, changing substance.

Why do you hate this game so much?" Andrew sighed as if Neil was being purposefully obtuse. "I don't care enough about Exy to hate it. It's just slightly less boring than living is, so I put up with it for now." "I don't understand." "That's not my problem." "Isn't it fun?" Neil asked. "Someone else asked me that same thing two years ago. Should I tell you what I told him? I said no. Something as pointless as this game is can never be fun." "Pointless," Neil echoed. "But you have real talent." "Flattery is uninteresting and gets you nowhere." "I'm just stating facts. You're selling yourself short. You could be something if only you'd try." Andrew's smile was small and cold. "You be something. Kevin says you'll be a champion. Four years and you'll go pro. Five years and you'll be Court. He promised Coach. He promised the school board. He argued until they signed off on you. [...] Then Kevin finally got the okay to sign you and you hit the ground running," Andrew said. "Curious that a man with so much potential, who has so much fun, who could be something wouldn't want any of it. Why is that?" [...] "You're lying," Neil said at last, because he needed that to be the truth. "Kevin hates me." "Or you hate him," Andrew said. "I can't decide. Your loose ends aren't adding up." "I'm not a math problem." "But I'll still solve you.

Hit the ground running.

hit the ground running

...it was important to hit the ground running and not fall into the lifestyle traps of newly found free time.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But, one day, she looked at a page and the word "mouse" had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word, and a picture of a gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw "horse," she heard him pawing the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word "running" hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between he individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came to adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

The ground went out from under her. She sucked in a breath, flailing for balance. Arms came around her waist from behind, jerking her back, keeping her feet in the air. She fought, feeling his chest at her back, but he was too strong. "Damn it," he said, his voice strained. "Do you want to go in the water?" That forced her still. Red and white lights still hung in the distance, warring with the stars. Now that she wasn't running the sound of waves hitting the rocks was unmistakable. And right in front of her. "The water?" she said numbly. He put her feet on the ground, but he didn't let her go. "Yeah. Water. Did you miss the part where I said we're parked on a peninsula?

Someday you shall meet someone Who's gonna look at you in awe- Flying high, wings all spread, And wonder how it'd be like To clip those wings, Tie those feet down, And cage you forever... When you hit the ground, Remember to run

10 facts about abusive relationships (what i wish i'd known) 1. it's not always loud. it's not always obvious. the poison doesn't always hit you like a gunshot. sometimes, it seeps in quietly, slowly. sometimes, you don't even know it was ever there until months after. 2. love is not draining. love is not tiring. this is not how it is supposed to be. 3. apologies are like band-aids, when what you really need is stitches– they don't actually fix anything long-term. soon enough, you'll be bleeding again, but they will never give you what you really need. 4. this is not your fault. you did not turn them into this. this is how they are, how they've always been. you can't blame yourself. 5. there will be less good days than bad days but the good days will be so amazing that it will feel like everything is better than it actually is. your mind is playing tricks on itself and your heart is trying to convince itself that it made the right choice. 6. they do not love you. they can not love you. this is not love. 7. you're not wrong for wanting to run, so do it. listen to what your gut is telling you. 8. you will let them come back again and again before you realize that they only change long enough for you to let them in one more time. 9. it's okay to be selfish and leave. there is never any crime in putting yourself first. when they tell you otherwise, don't believe them. don't let them tear you down. they want to knock you off your feet so that they can keep you on the ground. 10. after, you will look back on this regretting all the chances given, all the time wasted. you will think about what you know now, and what you would do differently if given the chance. part of you will say that you would never have even given them the time of the day, but another part of you, the larger one, will say that even after everything, you wouldn't have changed a thing. and as much as it will bother you, eventually, you will realize that that is the part that is right. because as much as it hurts, as much as you wish you'd never felt that pain, it has taught you something. it has helped you grow. they brought you something that you would have never gotten from somebody else. at the end of the day, you will accept that even now, you wouldn't go about it differently at all.

I'm going to say this one time and one time only, so you had better listen up. The world is going to hell in a hand basket. We got Jacque running off into ponds like a crazy woman; Fane thinking he's Aqua Man, diving in after her and getting his ass captured by the wicked witch; we have freak lightening shows; thunder that shakes the ground; and wind strong enough to knock you over. And you know what's really scary? It's going to get worse before it gets better. The fan is broken from all the shit that has hit it. Yes, I have a potty mouth. I get to have one when the world as we know it is crumbling around us.

Bill Hutchinson went over to his wife and forced the slip of paper out of her hand. It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal company office. Bill Hutchinson held it up, and there was a stir in the crowd. "All right, folks," Mr. Summers said. "Let's finish quickly." Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. "Come on," she said. "Hurry up." Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath, "I can't run at all. You'll have to go ahead and I'll catch up with you." The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles. Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. "It isn't fair," she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, "Come on, come on, everyone." Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him. "It isn't fair, it isn't right," Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

I’m so short I tread water in the kiddie pool. I need a ladder to get to the bottom bunk. I hit my head on the ground when I sneeze. I need a running start to reach the toilet. And no, I’m not related to Tom Cruise.

toward the small pond that he had seen before. The walls of fire ended there. An instant later the remains of the cottage exploded. He ducked and rolled again from the concussive force, almost pitching into the right side of the wall of fire. He rose and redoubled his efforts, thinking that he would reach the water. Water was a great antidote to fire. But as he neared the edge of the pond, something struck him. No scum. No algae on the surface although the ground around was full of it. What could kill green scum? And why was he being forced to run right toward the one thing that could possibly save him? Robie tossed his gun over the top of the wall of flames, pulled off his jacket, covered his head and hands with it, and threw himself through the wall of flames on the left side.

She knew all about the cops and their trigger fingers and their predilection for dealing with those who would attack their brethren. Her father had drummed such stories into her from a young age; more so into Whiz, who bore the burden of being a black boy about to grow into a black teen. "If the police even look at you funny," Dad had said, "you hit the ground and put your hands over your head. Don't talk back. Don't try to run. Don't try to explain. They're just looking for an excuse to shoot you. Don't give it to them.

I think there is a reason they call it falling in love. It’s the moment, at the top of the roller coaster, when your heart hangs in your throat. It’s the time between when you jump from the cliff and when you hit the ocean. It’s the realization that there’s no ground beneath your feet when you miss a step on the ladder, when the branch of the tree breaks, when you roll over and run out of mattress. Here’s what they do not tell you about falling in love: there’s not always a soft landing beneath you. It’s called falling, because it’s bound to break you.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who was not afraid. The girl ran as people run who do not fear falling. Her small, strong, nimble feet sped over the rocks and stumps. On the soles of her feet, she felt the soft moss, the sun-warmed sand, the prickly pine needles, the dewy grass. She trusted that her legs would carry her wherever she wished to go. The girl laughed as those laugh who have not yet known humiliation. Her laughter started deep in her belly. It filled her chest, gurgled in her throat, and bubbled on her tongue. Finally, it wriggled out of her mouth, shot through the air, and burst into apple blossoms on the trees. Her laughter warmed and brightened all that surrounded her. Often it ended in hiccuping, but that did not matter because the hiccuping only made her laugh all the more. The girl trusted as those trust for whom the earth has never given way, whom no one has ever betrayed. She hung upside down and trusted that she would not fall. Or if she fell, someone would catch her before she hit the ground. Once upon a time, there was a girl who learned fear. Fairy tales do not begin this way. Other, darker stories do.

Rooster here has missed Ned a few times himself, horse and all,' said the captain. 'I reckon his is on his way now to missing him again.' Rooster was holding a bottle with a little whiskey in it. He said, 'You keep on thinking that.' He drained off the whiskey in about three swallows and tapped the cork back in and tossed the bottle up in the air. He pulled his revolver and fired at it twice and missed. The bottle fell and rolled and Rooster shot at it two or three more times and broke it on the ground. He got out his sack of cartridges and reloaded his pistol. He said, 'The Chinaman is running them cheap shells in on me again.' LaBoeuf said, 'I thought maybe the sun was in your eyes. That is to say, your eye.' Rooster swung the cylinder back in his revolver and said, 'Eyes, is it? I'll show you eyes!' He jerked the sack of corn dodgers free from his saddle baggage. He got one of the dodgers out and flung it in the air and fired at it and missed. Then he flung another one up and he hit it. The corn dodger exploded. He was pleased with himself and he got a fresh bottle of whiskey from his baggage and treated himself to a drink. LaBoeuf pulled one of his revolvers and got two dodgers out of the sack and tossed them both up. He fired very rapidly but he only hit one. Captain Finch tried it with two and missed both of them. Then he tried with one and made a successful shot. Rooster shot at two and hit one. They drank whiskey and used up about sixty corn dodgers like that. None of them ever hit two at one throw with a revolver but Captain Finch finally did it with his Winchester repeating rifle, with somebody else throwing. It was entertaining for a while but there was nothing educational about it. I grew more and more impatient with them. I said, 'Come on, I have had my bait of this. I am ready to go. Shooting cornbread out here on this prairie is not taking us anywhere.' By then Rooster was using his rifle and the captain was throwing for him. 'Chunk high and not so far out this time,' said he.

The creature in the doorway. At first he was a shadow, blocking the light, then he was a man in a rabbit suit, and even then it didn’t occur to Charlie to be afraid. She knew this rabbit. Sammy hadn’t even noticed him yet. He continued to play with his toy truck, running it back and forth hypnotically across the floor. Charlie stared up at the thing in the doorway, and a coldness began to gather in the pit of her stomach. This was not the rabbit she knew. Its eyes shifted back and forth subtly between the twins, taking its time: making its choice. When the eyes settled on Charlie, the cold feeling spread all through her, then he looked away again, at Sammy, who still hadn’t turned around. Then a sudden movement, and the costumes on their hangers all leaped together, covering her so she couldn’t see. She heard the toy truck hit the ground and spin in place for a moment, then everything was still. She was alone, a vital part of her

you could be something if only you’d try.” “you be something. kevin says you’ll be a champion. four years and you’ll go pro. five years and you’ll be court. he promised coach. he promised the school board. he argued until they signed off on you.” “he— what?” “then kevin finally got the okay to sign you and you hit the ground running. curious that a man with so much potential, who has so much fun, who could ‘be something’ wouldn’t want any of it. why is that?” “you’re lying. kevin hates me.” “or you hate him. i can’t decide. your loose ends aren’t adding up.” “i’m not a math problem.” “but i’ll still solve you.” - neil & andrew

You have to look to Jews like Bina Gelbfish, Landsman thinks, to explain the wide range and persistence of the race. Jews who carry their homes in an old cowhide bag, on the back of a camel, in the bubble of air at the center of their brains. Jews who land on their feet, hit the ground running, ride out the vicissitudes, and make the best of what falls to hand, from Egypt to Babylon, from Minsk Gubernya to the District of Sitka. Methodical, organized, persistent, resourceful, prepared. Berko is right: Bina would flourish in any precinct house in the world. A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.

With bare feet in the dirt, fulmia, ten times with conviction, will shake the earth to its roots, if you have the strength, Jaga’s book had told me, and the Dragon had believed it enough not to let me try it anywhere near the tower. I had felt doubtful, anyway, about conviction: I hadn’t believed I had any business shaking the earth to its roots. But now I fell to the ground and dug away the snow and the fallen leaves and rot and moss until I came to the hard-frozen dirt. I pried up a large stone and began to smash at the earth, again and again, breaking up the dirt and breathing on it to make it softer, pounding in the snow that melted around my hands, pounding in the hot tears that dripped from my eyes as I worked. Kasia was above me with her head flung up, her mouth open in its soundless cry like a statue in a church. “Fulmia,” I said, my fingers deep in the dirt, crushing the solid clods between my fingers. “Fulmia, fulmia,” I chanted over and over, bleeding from broken nails, and I felt the earth hear me, uneasily. Even the earth was tainted here, poisoned, but I spat on the dirt and screamed, “Fulmia,” and imagined my magic running into the ground like water, finding cracks and weaknesses, spreading out beneath my hands, beneath my cold wet knees: and the earth shuddered and turned over. A low trembling began where my hands drove into the ground, and it followed me as I started prying at the roots of the tree. The frozen dirt began to break up into small chunks all around them, the tremors going on and on like waves. The branches above me were waving wildly as if in alarm, the whispering of the leaves becoming a muted roaring. I straightened up on my knees. “Let her out!” I screamed at the tree: I beat on its trunk with my muddy fists. “Let her out, or I’ll bring you down! Fulmia!” I cried out in rage, and threw myself back down at the ground, and where my fists hit, the ground rose and swelled like a river rising with the rain. Magic was pouring out of me, a torrent: every warning the Dragon had ever given me forgotten and ignored. I would have spent every drop of myself and died there, just to bring that horrible tree down: I couldn’t imagine a world where I lived, where I left this behind me, Kasia’s life and heart feeding this corrupt monstrous thing. I would rather have died, crushed in my own earthquake, and brought it down with me. I tore at the ground ready to break open a pit to swallow us all.

One by one the dragons came to ground, and the wolves slid down from them. Anders transformed as soon as his paws hit the earth, and once human, silently pulled off Rayna’s harness so she could do the same. Nearby, Lisabet was seeing to Ellukka. Both the harnesses were charred in places, and he wasn’t sure Rayna’s would hold if they used it again. One by one the dragons transformed, until the eleven children stood in a circle. Some leaned over to rest their hands on their knees, exhausted, others hugged themselves, staring at their companions in the moonlight. The tableau was broken when Kess suddenly streaked across the circle, leaping down from Lisabet’s arms to run straight for Anders, scaling his body and perching on his shoulders. He was so exhaustedly happy to see her, he didn’t even mind the places where she sank her claws in. As if the cat’s movement had woken her up, Viktoria spoke in a whisper. “What have we done?” “The same thing as us,” Ellukka replied. “You can’t go home. Neither can we.” “We had to,” Lisabet said, sounding just as tired as the others. “If we hadn’t brought the Sun Scepter, the wolves would have weakened the dragons until they killed them. If we hadn’t kept it from the dragons, they’d have used it against the wolves until they could attack instead. We’re the only reason they’re not at war right now.” “All we did was destroy half of Holbard instead,” said Theo, looking sick.

One way to get a life and keep it is to put energy into being an S&M (success and money) queen. I first heard this term in Karen Salmansohn’s fabulous book The 30-Day Plan to Whip Your Career Into Submission. Here’s how to do it: be a star at work. I don’t care if you flip burgers at McDonald’s or run a Fortune 500 company. Do everything with totality and excellence. Show up on time, all the time. Do what you say you will do. Contribute ideas. Take care of the people around you. Solve problems. Be an agent for change. Invest in being the best in your industry or the best in the world! If you’ve been thinking about changing professions, that’s even more reason to be a star at your current job. Operating with excellence now will get you back up to speed mentally and energetically so you can hit the ground running in your new position. It will also create good karma. When and if you finally do leave, your current employers will be happy to support you with a great reference and often leave an open door for additional work in the future. If you’re an entrepreneur, look at ways to enhance your business. Is there a new product or service you’ve wanted to offer? How can you create raving fans by making your customer service sparkle? How can you reach more people with your product or service? Can you impact thousands or even millions more? Let’s not forget the M in S&M. Getting a life and keeping it includes having strong financial health as well. This area is crucial because many women delay taking charge of their financial lives as they believe (or have been culturally conditioned to believe) that a man will come along and take care of it for them. This is a setup for disaster. You are an intelligent and capable woman. If you want to fully unleash your irresistibility, invest in your financial health now and don’t stop once you get involved in a relationship. If money management is a challenge for you, I highly recommend my favorite financial coach: David Bach. He is the bestselling author of many books, including The Automatic Millionaire, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Smart Couples Finish Rich. His advice is clear-cut and straightforward, and, most important, it works.

He had spent his life running, secrets spitting at his back. With the coach clocking him, Kevin took flight, his feet hitting the ground and pulling back with tremendous speed. Demons--visions of the eager hands of pretty boys with firm bodies--chased him, chipping away at the space separating them, their claws a whisper away from his flesh. He ran until he felt his lungs would give out; like a madman he ran.

Jordan kicked aside off the ground. His hip came into contact with her side, gently knocking her off her balance. “Hey,” she cried out, regaining her step. Jordan grinned at her over his shoulder as he continued across the room. “Whoops.” Alyx launched off a table at him. He jerked forward as she kicked off his back and flipped over his head. “Whoops,” she yelled back as she hit the ground and kept running. She could hear him laughing.

He flapped and hopped until he was up in the air and, frantically looking around, eyed the dining room table again and headed its way. This time he stuck his feet out in front of him and held them open like hands trying to grab solid ground. But it didn’t help. He hit the table, slid on his rear all the way across, and crashed on the floor again. Again I dissolved in laughter and again Wesley stared stonily at the wall. I stopped laughing abruptly when I realized that Wesley was embarrassed. Learning to fly is physically and emotionally very difficult, and human owl mothers should not laugh at their babies. From then on I tried my hardest to keep a straight face. Most pet owners know that animals can read emotions such as anger, approval, affection, and acceptance. But it had never occurred to me that perhaps an animal could feel ridiculed. From that point forward, no one in Wendy’s house was allowed to laugh at Wesley, at least not in front of him, while he was learning to fly. Sometimes we had to run into the bathroom, shut the door, and burst out laughing.

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem’s troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

Ithink there is a reason they call it falling in love. It’s the moment, at the top of the roller coaster, when your heart hangs in your throat. It’s the time between when you jump from the cliff and when you hit the ocean. It’s the realization that there’s no ground beneath your feet when you miss a step on the ladder, when the branch of the tree breaks, when you roll over and run out of mattress. Here’s what they do not tell you about falling in love: there’s not always a soft landing beneath you. It’s called falling, because it’s bound to break you.

Someone stop them!” I yell. No one does. I think about Porter surrounded by people that horrible day on the beach years ago, when no one would help him save his dad from the shark. If strangers won’t help when someone is dying, they’re definitely not going to stop two kids from running out of a museum. Pulse swishing in my temples, I race around the information booth, pumping my arms, and watch them split up again. Polo is heading for the easy way out: the main exit, where there’s (1) only a set of doors to go through, and (2) Hector, the laziest employee on staff. But Backpack is headed for the ticketing booth and the connecting turnstiles. Freddy should be there, but no one’s entering the museum, so he’s instead chatting it up with Hector. The turnstiles are unmanned. Like a pro hustler who’s never paid a subway fare, Backpack hurdles over the turnstiles in one leap. Impressive. Or it would have been, had his backpack not slipped off his shoulder and the strap not caught on one of the turnstile arms. While he struggles to free it, I take the easier route and make for the wheelchair access gate. I unhitch the latch. He frees the strap. I slip through the gate, and just as he’s turning to run, I lurch forward and— I jump on his back. We hit the ground together. The air whooshes out of my lungs and my knee slams into tile. He cries out. I don’t. I freaking got him.

His booted feet pounded out an insane, frantic rhythm underneath him as he raced into the cavern across from Baba Yaga’s den at a dead sprint. Pieces of dragon dung flew off him and hit the ground behind him in miniature chunks. He didn’t dare look behind him to see if the dragon had risen from the ground yet, but the deafening hiss that assaulted his ears meant she’d woken up. Icy claws of fear squeezed his heart with every breath as he ran, relying on the night vision goggles, the glimpse he’d gotten of the map, and his own instincts to figure out where to go. Jack raced around one corner too sharply and slipped on a piece of dung, crashing hard on his right side. He gasped as it knocked the wind out of him and gritted his teeth, his mind screaming at him to get up and run, run, run. He pushed onto his knees, nursing what felt like bruised ribs and a sprained wrist, and then paled as an unmistakable sensation traveled up the arm he’d used to push himself up. Impact tremors. Boom. Boom. Boom, boom, boom. Baba Yaga was coming. Baba Yaga was hunting him. Jack forced himself up onto his feet again, stumbling backwards and fumbling for the tracker. He got it switched on to see an ominous blob approaching from the right. He’d gotten a good lead on her—maybe a few hundred yards—but he had no way of knowing if he’d eventually run into a dead end. He couldn’t hide down here forever. He needed to get topside to join the others so they could take her down. Jack blocked out the rising crescendo of Baba Yaga’s hissing and pictured the map again. A mile up to the right had a man-made exit that spilled back up to the forest. The only problem was that it was a long passage. If Baba Yaga followed, there was a good chance she could catch up and roast him like a marshmallow. He could try to lose her in the twists and turns of the cave system, but there was a good chance he’d get lost, and Baba Yaga’s superior senses meant it would only be a matter of time before she found him. It came back to the most basic survival tactics: run or hide. Jack switched off the tracker and stuck it in his pocket, his voice ragged and shaking, but solid. “You aren’t about to die in this forest, Jackson. Move your ass.” He barreled forward into the passageway to the right in the wake of Baba Yaga’s ominous, bubbling warning, barely suppressing a groan as a spike of pain lanced through his chest from his bruised ribs. The adrenaline would only hold for so long. He could make it about halfway there before it ran out. Cold sweat plastered the mask to his face and ran down into his eyes. The tunnel stretched onward forever before him. No sunlight in sight. Had he been wrong? Jack ripped off the hood and cold air slapped his face, making his eyes water. He held his hands out to make sure he wouldn’t bounce off one of the cavern walls and squinted up ahead as he turned the corner into the straightaway. There, faintly, he could see the pale glow of the exit. Gasping for air, he collapsed against one wall and tried to catch his breath before the final marathon. He had to have put some amount of distance between himself and the dragon by now. “Who knows?” Jack panted. “Maybe she got annoyed and turned around.” An earth-shattering roar rocked the very walls of the cavern. Jack paled. Boom, boom, boom, boom! Boom, boom, boom, boomboomboomboom— Mother of God. The dragon had broken into a run. Jack shoved himself away from the wall, lowered his head, and ran as fast as his legs would carry him.

Bryce held her stare. Clearly, they didn’t want her dead, if they’d sent someone to retrieve her, not hunt her down. But if she returned to that cell, how long would they keep her there? Even hours could make a difference for Hunt and Ruhn— “I’m always up for a day of discovery,” Bryce said. Then she erupted with light. Nesta cursed, but Bryce didn’t wait to see if the light had blinded her before bolting down the passage. Without any weapons, a running head start was her best chance of making it. A force like a stone wall hit her from behind. The world tilted, her breath rushing from her as she collided with the stone ground, bones barking in pain. Shadows had wrapped around her, pinning her, and she thrashed, kicking and swatting at them.

Reading a newspaper account of one young woman's fatal accident on a midsummer morning a few years ago got me thinking about how I would have liked to have departed before my time if that had been my destiny. If I'd had to die young, hers is the death I would have chosen. She was twenty-two, the story disclosed, bright, talented, beautiful, her future spread before her like a brilliant, textured tapestry. She'd just graduated from a prestigious eastern university, had accepted a communications position with a New York television network, and would depart the following day on a four-week holiday in Europe before embarking on her promising career and the rest of her exciting life. On that golden summer day, the young woman had just finished her morning run. She had sprinted the last half mile, then stopped abruptly to catch her breath. She was bent at the waist, hands on her knees, eyes on the ground, her mind a world away, perhaps in Barcelona or Tuscany or Rome, exulting in the enchanting sights she would soon see, the splendid life she would have. It was then that the train hit her. Unaware, unthinking, oblivious to everything but the beguiling visions in her head, she had ended her run on the railroad tracks that wound through the center of her small Oregon town, one moment in the fullest expectancy of her glorious youth, adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her body, sugarplum visions dancing in her head, the next moment gone, the transition instantaneous, irrevocable, complete.

Well,” he said. “The gap between the player you are today and the player you want to be—” “I want to be the greatest tennis player in the world,” I said. “That gap is not big. We are talking about that vital half-percent improvement. And that’s not found in changing your strategy. It’s in shortening the nanosecond of time between getting to the ball and slicing it across the court. It is going to be found in the minute change you make to the angle of your serve. The details are fine, and they are going to get finer. It is going to be nearly imperceptible, the ways we need to change your game. No one will be able to see it from the outside, but Stepanova is going to feel it. Every time she loses to you for the next ten years.” I could feel my pulse in my ears; my face felt hot. “Okay,” I said. “How do we do that?” “Are you cross-training?” he asked. “I run and do drills.” Lars laughed. “That’s not enough. Stepanova is right about one thing––you need to lose at least a couple pounds. We need you doing sprints, lunges, weight training. You can jump higher to hit overheads. You rarely do—it’s a weakness in your game, in my opinion. I want to see what happens when you blast off the court into the air. Take out some of Stepanova’s lobs before they hit the ground. We start there and see where we get.” “No,” I said, shaking my head. “If we are doing this, I need to know right now that you believe I can bury her. That I can be number one.” “If I am your coach and you do not become the number-one-ranked player for the year,” he said, “I will be disgusted.

Bookish folk aren’t what they used to be. Introverted, reserved, studious. There was a time when bookish folk would steer clear of trendy bars, dinner occasions and gatherings. Any social or public encounters would be avoided at all costs because these activities were very un-bookish. Bookish people preferred to stay in, or to sit alone in a quiet pub, reading a good book, or getting some writing done. Writers, in fact, perhaps epitomised these bookish traits most strongly. At least, they used to. These days, bookish people, such as writers, are commonly found on stage, headlining festivals, or being interviewed on TV. Author events and performances have proliferated, becoming established parts of a writer’s role. It’s not that authors have suddenly become more extroverted – it’s more a case that their job description has changed. Of course, not all writers are bookish. Not in the traditional sense of the word anyway. Some are well suited for public life, particularly those from certain academic backgrounds where public speaking is encouraged and confidence in social situations is shaped and formed. These writers may even be termed ‘gregarious’, and are thus happy being offered up for speaking engagements, stage discussions and signings. Good for them. But the others – the timid, shy and mousy authors – they’re being thrust into the limelight too. That’s my lot. The social wipeouts. Unprepared and ill-equipped to face our reader audience. What’s most concerning is that no one is offering us any guidance or tips. We’re expected to hit the ground running, confident and ready, loaded with banter, quips and answers. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

On that golden summer day, the young woman had just finished her morning run. She had sprinted the last half mile, then stopped abruptly to catch her breath. She was bent at the waist, hands on her knees, eyes on the ground, her mind a world away, perhaps in Barcelona or Tuscany or Rome, exulting in the enchanting sights she would soon see, the splendid life she would have. It was then that the train hit her. Unaware, unthinking, oblivious to everything but the beguiling visions in her head, she had ended her run on the railroad tracks that wound through the center of her small Oregon town, one moment in the fullest expectancy of her glorious youth, adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her body, sugarplum visions dancing in her head, the next moment gone, the transition instantaneous, irrevocable, complete. If I'd had to die young, hers is the death I would have chosen.

I would like to see you cheat,” Elizabeth said impulsively, smiling at him. His hands stilled, his eyes intent on her face. “I beg your pardon?” “What I meant,” she hastily explained as he continued to idly shuffle the cards, watching her, “is that night in the card room at Charise’s there was mention of someone being able to deal a card from the bottom of the deck, and I’ve always wondered if you could, if it could…” She trailed off, belatedly realizing she was insulting him and that his narrowed, speculative gaze proved that she’d made it sound as if she believed him to be dishonest at cards. “I beg your pardon,” she said quietly. “That was truly awful of me.” Ian accepted her apology with a curt nod, and when Alex hastily interjected, “Why don’t we use the chips for a shilling each,” he wordlessly and immediately dealt the cards. Too embarrassed even to look at him, Elizabeth bit her lip and picked up her hand. In it there were four kings. Her gaze flew to Ian, but he was lounging back in his chair, studying his own cards. She won three shillings and was pleased as could be. He passed the deck to her, but Elizabeth shook her head. “I don’t like to deal. I always drop the cards, which Celton says is very irritating. Would you mind dealing for me?” “Not at all,” Ian said dispassionately, and Elizabeth realized with a sinking heart that he was still annoyed with her. “Who is Celton?” Jordan inquired. “Celton is a groom with whom I play cards,” Elizabeth explained unhappily, picking up her hand. In it there were four aces. She knew it then, and laughter and relief trembled on her lips as she lifted her face and stared at her betrothed. There was not a sign, not so much as a hint anywhere on his perfectly composed features that anything unusual had been happening. Lounging indolently in his chair, he quirked an indifferent brow and said, “Do you want to discard and draw more cards, Elizabeth?” “Yes,” she replied, swallowing her mirth, “I would like one more ace to go with the ones I have.” “There are only four,” he explained mildly, and with such convincing blandness that Elizabeth whooped with laughter and dropped her cards. “You are a complete charlatan!” she gasped when she could finally speak, but her face was aglow with admiration. “Thank you, darling,” he replied tenderly. “I’m happy to know your opinion of me is already improving.” The laughter froze in Elizabeth’s chest, replaced by warmth that quaked through her from head to foot. Gentlemen did not speak such tender endearments in front of other people, if at all. “I’m a Scot,” he’d whispered huskily to her long ago. “We do.” The Townsendes had launched into swift, laughing conversation after a moment of stunned silence following his words, and it was just as well, because Elizabeth could not tear her gaze from Ian, could not seem to move. And in that endless moment when their gazes held, Elizabeth had an almost overwhelming desire to fling herself into his arms. He saw it, too, and the answering expression in his eyes made her feel she was melting. “It occurs to me, Ian,” Jordan joked a moment later, gently breaking their spell, “that we are wasting our time with honest pursuits.” Ian’s gaze shifted reluctantly from Elizabeth’s face, and then he smiled inquisitively at Jordan. “What did you have in mind?” he asked, shoving the deck toward Jordan while Elizabeth put back her unjustly won chips. “With your skill at dealing whatever hand you want, we could gull half of London. If any of our victims had the temerity to object, Alex could run them through with her rapier, and Elizabeth could shoot him before he hit the ground.” Ian chuckled. “Not a bad idea. What would your role be?” “Breaking us out of Newgate!” Elizabeth laughed. “Exactly.

I tell you, I know what it is.” “What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?” It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I-know-more-about-it-than-you heresies-of-the-early-Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he’s not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it’s not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this crazy game you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws at his shoulder. “The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.” They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory-colored buds. “Let me go first,” Rabbit says. “ ’Til you calm down.” His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn’t care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather’s color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he’s fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. “That’s it!” he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, “That’s it.

Jesus… is this about him? Hastings?” “No, this is about you.” She points at me. “You and your innocent act… and your money, and your things. The words you say—the jokes, the laughs, the smiles you give her that she eats right up, and ugh, your face.” “My face?” “Your stupid fucking face,” she says, running her hands through her hair as she groans, those words startling me. Kennedy doesn’t curse. “Your face is everywhere. I’m sick of it!” “You’re sick of my face.” “Yes!” “There’s not much I can do about that.” “You can get out of my head,” she says. “Stop being there all the time!” I laugh at that, because it’s so damn absurd, but that’s the wrong thing to do. Her eyes narrow as she stares me down, looking like she wants to hit me right now. “I hate you,” she says, her voice shaking. “I’ve never hated someone as much as I hate you, Jonathan.” Those words, they wake me right up. I’m no longer laughing. There’s nothing funny about it. I got under her skin, and with the two of us already on shaky ground, I know that’s dangerous. She turns to leave, like she’s going to walk away, but I grab her arm to stop her. “Come on, don’t be like that…” “Don’t touch me,” she says, ripping from my grasp. I let go as I stand up, stepping toward her. “Just… wait a minute… talk to me.” “There’s nothing left to say.” “I’ll be goddamned.” I grab her arm again before she can walk out. “You can’t tell me you hate me and then leave. That’s bullshit. You bust up in here while I’m asleep to yell at me…” “You deserve it!” “Maybe so, but still…” “Still nothing,” she says, turning to me again, getting right in my face. “I hate you. That’s it. There’s nothing else to say. I hate everything about you. Your voice, your face… I hate it. Why aren’t you going away?” “Because I can’t,” I tell her, “and I’m pretty sure you don’t really want me to.” She scoffs. “You’re upset,” I say, “but you’re lying to yourself if you think you want me gone.” “I do.” “You don’t.” “Leave.” “No.” “Go away.” “I’m not.” As soon as that last word leaves my lips, she’s on me, slamming into me, her lips pressing against mine. She’s kissing me, and I’m so fucking stunned that it takes me a moment to react, a moment to consider kissing her back. She moans and wraps her arms around my neck, clinging to me damn near aggressively as she kicks the door closed.

Itching, itching. Skin on fire. Nausea and splitting headache. The more sumptuous the dope, the deeper the anguish—mental and physical—when it wore off. I was back to the chunk spewing out of Martin’s forehead only on a more intimate level, inside it almost, every pulse and spurt, and—even worse, a deeper freezing point entirely—the painting, gone. Bloodstained coat, the feet of the running-away kid. Blackout. Disaster. For humans—trapped in biology—there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage. Time destroyed us all soon enough. But to destroy, or lose, a deathless thing—to break bonds stronger than the temporal—was a metaphysical uncoupling all its own, a startling new flavor of despair. My dad at the baccarat table, in the air-conditioned midnight. There’s always more to things, a hidden level. Luck in its darker moods and manifestations. Consulting the stars, waiting to make the big bets when Mercury was in retrograde, reaching for a knowledge just beyond the known. Black his lucky color, nine his lucky number. Hit me again pal. There’s a pattern and we’re a part of it. Yet if you scratched very deep at that idea of pattern (which apparently he had never taken the trouble to do), you hit an emptiness so dark that it destroyed, categorically, anything you’d ever looked at or thought of as light.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word. But one day, she looked at a page and the word “mouse” had instantaneous meaning. She looked at the word and the picture of the gray mouse scampered through her mind. She looked further and when she saw “horse”, she heard him pawing at the ground and saw the sun glint on his glossy coat. The word “running” hit her suddenly and she breathed hard as though running herself. The barrier between the individual sound of each letter and the whole meaning of the word was removed sound of each letter and the printed word meant a thing at one quick glance. She read a few pages rapidly and almost became ill with excitement. She wanted to shout it out. She could read! She could read! From that time on, the world was hers for the reading, She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was a poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel the closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived.

Everything was silent except for his heavy breathing. Steele tugged the helmet off and heard frantic voices coming closer. He hit the riser release, stripped the 1911 from his chest, and held the pistol at the ready. Outside the voices were getting closer. “He is in here!” someone yelled in Arabic. “Kill him, kill him!” The door flew open, revealing a man with an AK-47 who stood there scanning the interior. Steele waited for him to step inside, then dropped him with a shot to the skull. He scrambled to his feet. There was no time to grab his rifle from his pack—the only thing he could do was press the attack. Moving to the door, he saw three more men running toward him, their chests heaving and fingers on the triggers. The closest man saw him step out. He wasn’t expecting one man to attack and his eyes widened in surprise. “Not today, boys.” Steele fired the first round too fast and it hit his target in the hip. The round spun him like a top, but Steele frowned, knowing he had rushed the shot. He settled automatically into a shooter’s stance and reengaged the first target before shifting fire to the other two. Thwap, thwap, thwap. The suppressed 9mm bounced from chest to chest, sending a hollow point mushrooming into each. All three men were down before the first casing tumbled to the ground. Steele stepped out and finished them off with a single shot to the head.

Come with me,' Cardan says again, drawing me away from the blood-soaked star chart and the others taking their lessons. 'I am a prince of Faerie. You have to do what I want.' He leads me to the dappled shade of an oak tree, then lifts me up so I am seated on a low branch. He keeps his hands on my waist and moves closer, so that he's standing between my thighs. 'Isn't this better?' he says, gazing up at me. I am not sure what he means, but I nod. 'You're so beautiful.' He begins to trace patterns on my arms, then runs his hands down my sides. 'So very beautiful.' His voice is soft, and I make the mistake of looking into his black eyes, at his wicked, curving mouth. 'But your beauty will fade,' he continues, just as softly, speaking like a lover. His hands linger, making my stomach tighten and warmth pool in my belly. 'This smooth skin will wrinkle and spot. It will become as thin as cobwebs. These breasts will droop. Your hair will grow dull and thin. Your teeth will yellow. And all you have and all you are will rot away to nothing. You will be nothing. You are nothing.' 'I'm nothing,' I echo, feeling helpless in the face of his words. 'You come from nothing, and it is to nothing you will return,' he whispers against my neck. A sudden panic overtakes me. I need to get away from him. I push off the edge of the branch, but I don't hit the ground. I just fall and fall and fall through the air, dropping like Alice down the rabbit hole.

humans have dozens of additional adaptations in our muscles and bones for endurance running whose traces first appear in fossils of H. erectus. Most of these features allow us to use our legs like giant springs to jump efficiently from one leg to another in a manner totally different from walking, which uses the legs like pendulums. As figure 7 shows, when your foot hits the ground during a run, your hips, knees, and ankles flex during the first half of stance, causing your center of mass to drop, thus stretching many of the muscles and tendons in your legs.43 When these tissues stretch, they store up elastic energy, which they release while recoiling during the second half of stance, helping you jump into the air. In fact, a running human’s legs store and release energy so efficiently that running is only about 30 to 50 percent more costly than walking in the endurance-speed range. What’s more, these springs are so effective that they make the cost of human endurance running (but not sprinting) independent of speed: it costs the same number of calories to run five miles at a pace of either 7 or 10 minutes per mile, a phenomenon many people find counterintuitive.44 Since running uses the legs like springs, some of our most important adaptations for running are literally springs. One key spring is the dome-shaped arch of the foot, which develops from the way ligaments and muscles bind together the foot’s bones as children start to walk and run. As discussed

He ducked his head and started walking. “Go away.” “I don’t know why I was worried,” Hunter said from behind him. “Considering you only seem to know how to run and hide.” Gabriel swung around and hit him. Or he tried to. Hunter had some serious military training, and he deflected the blow easily. But Gabriel was no stranger to fighting dirty. He caught Hunter with a solid punch to the stomach. Hunter got him in the jaw. And then they were fighting in earnest. Christ, it felt fantastic to drive his fist into something. Especially when Hunter fought back with enough force to really make it worth it. Enough force that Gabriel started to wonder if this would turn into a test of endurance. Enough force that Gabriel started to wonder if he could win. His back slammed into the concrete wall of the mall. Breath rushed out of his lungs. He braced against the wall to throw Hunter off, getting enough leverage to shove the other boy to the ground. He followed him down to pin him there. “Whoa, hold up,” Hunter said, breathless. He made his hands into a T. “If I tear my clothes, my grandmother will shit a brick.” Gabriel stared down at him, unsure whether to let him go. Then he caught the glint of light on steel under Hunter’s jacket. “You are one crazy bastard. You really did come armed.” “Sure.” “You had a gun and you still fought me like that?” Hunter grinned. “Wait you were fighting for real? ” Yeah, he had been but suddenly it didn’t seem so important. Gabriel let him go. Hunter rolled to his feet and dusted bits of grass from his hair. “You want a ride home?

He’s a murdering chud,” Zil was yelling. “What do you want to do? Lynch him?” Astrid demanded. That stopped the flow for a second as kids tried to figure out what “lynch” meant. But Zil quickly recovered. “I saw him do it. He used his powers to kill Harry.” “I was trying to stop you from smashing my head in!” Hunter shouted. “You’re a lying mutant freak!” “They think they can do anything they want,” another voice shouted. Astrid said, as calmly as she could while still pitching her voice to be heard, “We are not going down that path, people, dividing up between freaks and normals.” “They already did it!” Zil cried. “It’s the freaks acting all special and like their farts don’t stink.” That earned a laugh. “And now they’re starting to kill us,” Zil cried. Angry cheers. Edilio squared his shoulders and stepped into the crowd. He went first to Hank, the kid with the shotgun. He tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Give me that thing.” “No way,” Hank said. But he didn’t seem too certain. “You want to have that thing fire by accident and blow someone’s face off?” Edilio held his hand out. “Give it to me, man.” Zil rounded on Edilio. “You going to make Hunter give up his weapon? Huh? He’s got powers, man, and that’s okay, but the normals can’t have any weapon? How are we supposed to defend ourselves from the freaks?” “Man, give it a rest, huh?” Edilio said. He was doing his best to sound more weary than angry or scared. Things were already bad enough. “Zil, you want to be responsible if that gauge goes off and kills Astrid? You want to maybe give that some thought?” Zil blinked. But he said, “Dude, I’m not scared of Sam.” “Sam won’t be your problem, I will be,” Edilio snapped, losing patience. “Anything happens to her, I’ll take you down before Sam ever gets the chance.” Zil snorted derisively. “Ah, good little boy, Edilio, kissing up to the chuds. I got news for you, dilly dilly, you’re a lowly normal, just like me and the rest of us." “I’m going to let that go,” Edilio said evenly, striving to regain his cool, trying to sound calm and in control, even though he could hardly take his eyes off the twin barrels of the shotgun. “But now I’m taking that shotgun.” “No way!” Hank cried, and the next thing was an explosion so loud, Edilio thought a bomb had gone off. The muzzle flash blinded him, like camera flash going off in his face. Someone yelled in pain. Edilio staggered back, squeezed his eyes shut, trying to adjust. When he opened them again the shotgun was on the ground and the boy who’d accidentally fired it was holding his bruised hand, obviously shocked. Zil bent to grab the gun. Edilio took two steps forward and kicked Zil in the face. As Zil fell back Edilio made a grab for the shotgun. He never saw the blow that turned his knees to water and filled his head with stars. He fell like a sack of bricks, but even as he fell he lurched forward to cover the shotgun. Astrid screamed and launched herself down the stairs to protect Edilio. Antoine, the one who had hit Edilio, was raising his bat to hit Edilio again, but on the back swing he caught Astrid in the face. Antoine cursed, suddenly fearful. Zil yelled, “No, no, no!” There was a sudden rush of running feet. Down the walkway, into the street, echoing down the block.

Hurry up!” everyone in the room seemed to shriek at the same time. It didn’t matter to us that all over Pittsburgh, in every house and in every bar, thousands of others were undoubtedly carrying out their own rituals, performing their own superstitions. Hats were turned backward and inside out, incantations spoken and sung, talismans rubbed and chewed and prayed to. People who had the bad fortune of arriving at their gathering shortly before the Orioles’ first run were treated like kryptonite and banished willingly to the silence of media-less dining rooms and bathrooms, forced to follow the game through the reactions of their friends and family. And every one of those people believed what we believed: that ours was the only one that mattered, the only one that worked. Ruthie fumbled through the pages. Johnson fouled one off. “Got it!” Ruthie called. She stood and held Dock Ellis’s picture high over her head, Shangelesa’s scribbled hearts like hundreds of clear bubbles through which her father could watch the fate of his teammates. “He’s no batter, he’s no batter!” Ruthie sang. Johnson grounded the next pitch to shortstop Jackie Hernandez, who threw to Bob Robertson at first, and the threat was over. We yelled until we were hoarse. We were raucous and ridiculous and unashamed, and I have no better childhood memory than the rest of that afternoon. Blass came back out for the ninth, heroically shrugging off his wobbly eighth and, with Ruthie still standing behind us, holding the program shakily aloft for the entirety of the inning, he induced a weak grounder from Boog Powell, an infield pop-up from Frank Robinson, and a Series-ending grounder to short from Rettenmund. For the second inning in a row, Hernandez threw to Robertson for the final out, and all of us (or those who were able) jumped from our seats just as Blass leaped into Robertson’s arms, straddling his teammate’s chest like a frightened acrobat. Any other year, Blass would have been named the Most Valuable Player, and his performance remains one of the most dominant by a pitcher in Series history: eighteen innings, two earned runs, thirteen strikeouts, just four walks, and two complete game victories. But this Series belonged to Clemente. To put what he did in perspective, no Oriole player had more than seven hits. Clemente had twelve, including two doubles, a triple and two homeruns. He was relentless and graceful and indomitable. He had, in fact, made everyone else look like minor leaguers. The rush

Bobby ran up on the deck and skidded to a stop in front of them. “It’s time for the Kowalski Fourth of July Football Game of Doom!” Cat laughed and pushed herself out of her seat. “We’ll talk about this some other time, Emma. Go have fun.” “I’m not sure I want to play football. Especially if there’s doom involved,” she said, but Bobby grabbed her hand and dragged her off the deck. They were divvied up into teams roughly by size, each with an assortment of men, women and children. Emma was on Sean’s team, which was good. She’d just hide behind him, because the only thing she knew about football was that it involved a lot of hitting. It only took a few plays to see that the Kowalskis played by their own rules and the few they had were fluid. Mostly they served to ensure the smaller kids didn’t get plowed over, victims of the adults’ competitive streak. Five minutes into the game, Emma somehow ended up with the ball. She squealed and looked around for somebody—anybody—to hand it off to, but there was nobody. Well, there was Danny, but he was doubled over in laughter. “Run, Emma,” Lisa yelled. She ran in the direction her friend was frantically waving her hand, but she only went a few feet before two very strong arms wrapped around her waist and then she was falling. Luckily, she landed on a body instead of the ground. “I love football,” Mitch said, grinning up at her. Emma grimaced and managed to get one of her knees on solid ground so she could push herself to her feet. He was quicker and freed himself to stand and help her up. “They should give you the ball more often,” he said, his blue eyes sparkling and the grin so like Sean’s—but not quite as naughty—in full force. “Hands off my girl,” Sean told him, pulling on Emma’s elbow. “You should do a better job of blocking for her. “Let’s go,” Brian shouted. The very next play, Mitch intercepted Mike’s pass to Evan and turned to run toward the other end zone. He was halfway there when Sean took him down hard. They hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud that made Emma wince, and came up pushing and shoving. When Sean drew back his arm to throw the first punch, Mary blew her whistle from the sidelines. “Boys! Enough!” Instead of heading straight for the huddle, Sean walked to Emma and pulled her into his arms for a hard, almost punishing caveman kiss that made her skin sizzle and her knees go wobbly. Then he glared at his brother for a few long seconds and went back to his team, leaving Emma standing there breathless and discombobulated.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

Holy gallnipper, how long till we hit the magic trail? It’s gloomier than my own funeral I here.” Camille adjusted the bag’s rope and looked at Ira. “Don’t even joke about that.” Since the moment they’d entered the forest, she’d felt like something was listening. Like they’d woken some sleeping creature, and now it followed them with silent cunning. The deafening chants had not returned to pierce her eardrums, but danger still felt close. A few paces ahead of her, Oscar peeled away another cobweb, the octagonal spinning so massive Camille didn’t even want to imagine the size of the spider that had created it. “Mate, you got a stomach made of iron,” Ira said. A flash of orange and black swept in front of Camille’s eyes and she felt an odd tug on her dress. She looked down and froze. A spider with a body the size of her first flexed its hairy legs on her skirt. It started to scuttle up. Her scream echoed through the forest as she swiped the spider off. It hit the marshy ground and scampered under a log. Oscar grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him. “Did it bite you?” She shook her head, arms and legs stiff with fear. “I’ve never seen one so bloody big,” Ira said, running past the log as though the spider would leap out at him. Oscar started walking again, his hand on the small of her back. She exhaled with more than one kind of relief. He was at least still concerned for her. As they started to pick up their pace, another black critter swung down from a nearby tree. Camille say it flying toward them, but her warning shout was too slow. The spider landed on Oscar’s shoulder, fat and furry and swift as its legs darted up his neck. Oscar shouted an obscenity as he whacked the giant from his skin. Camille heard it thud against the leafy forest floor. Unfazed, the spider quickly sprang to its finger-length legs and darted toward her boot. Her shrieks echoed again as it leaped onto her hem. With his foot, Ira knocked the spider back to the ground, and before it could bounce back up, Oscar smashed it with a stick. The squashed giant oozed yellow-and-green blood onto the marshy ground. Camille gagged and tasted her breakfast oats in the back of her mouth. “What in all wrath are those monsters?” Ira panted as he twisted around, looking for more. Camille looked up to the trees to try and spot any others that might be descending from glossy webbing. Terror paralyzed her as her eyes landed on a colony of glistening webs in the treetops. An endless number of black dots massed above their heads, dangling from tree limbs. Oscar and Ira followed her horrified stare. “Run,” Oscar whispered. Camille sprinted forward, her skin and scalp tingling with imaginary spider legs. The bag of provisions slammed against her back, tugging at her neck, but she didn’t care. They didn’t slow down until the gigantic spiderwebs grew sparse and the squawk of birds took over.

Similarly, the computers used to run the software on the ground for the mission were borrowed from a previous mission. These machines were so out of date that Bowman had to shop on eBay to find replacement parts to get the machines working. As systems have gone obsolete, JPL no longer uses the software, but Bowman told me that the people on her team continue to use software built by JPL in the 1990s, because they are familiar with it. She said, “Instead of upgrading to the next thing we decided that it was working just fine for us and we would stay on the platform.” They have developed so much over such a long period of time with the old software that they don’t want to switch to a newer system. They must adapt to using these outdated systems for the latest scientific work. Working within these constraints may seem limiting. However, building tools with specific constraints—from outdated technologies and low bitrate radio antennas—can enlighten us. For example, as scientists started to explore what they could learn from the wait times while communicating with deep space probes, they discovered that the time lag was extraordinarily useful information. Wait times, they realized, constitute an essential component for locating a probe in space, calculating its trajectory, and accurately locating a target like Pluto in space. There is no GPS for spacecraft (they aren’t on the globe, after all), so scientists had to find a way to locate the spacecraft in the vast expanse. Before 1960, the location of planets and objects in deep space was established through astronomical observation, placing an object like Pluto against a background of stars to determine its position.15 In 1961, an experiment at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California used radar to more accurately define an “astronomical unit” and help measure distances in space much more accurately.16 NASA used this new data as part of creating the trajectories for missions in the following years. Using the data from radio signals across a wide range of missions over the decades, the Deep Space Network maintained an ongoing database that helped further refine the definition of an astronomical unit—a kind of longitudinal study of space distances that now allows missions like New Horizons to create accurate flight trajectories. The Deep Space Network continued to find inventive ways of using the time lag of radio waves to locate objects in space, ultimately finding that certain ways of waiting for a downlink signal from the spacecraft were less accurate than others. It turned to using the antennas from multiple locations, such as Goldstone in California and the antennas in Canberra, Australia, or Madrid, Spain, to time how long the signal took to hit these different locations on Earth. The time it takes to receive these signals from the spacecraft works as a way to locate the probes as they are journeying to their destination. Latency—or the different time lag of receiving radio signals on different locations of Earth—is the key way that deep space objects are located as they journey through space. This discovery was made possible during the wait times for communicating with these craft alongside the decades of data gathered from each space mission. Without the constraint of waiting, the notion of using time as a locating feature wouldn’t have been possible.

Lark wrapped an arm around me and started to speak until Bailey’s startled voice interrupted us. A huge football player had her pinned against the wall and she was yelling for him to back off. Instead, he crowded her more while playing with her blonde hair. “Hey!” I yelled as Lark and I rushed over. Six four and wide shouldered, the guy was wasted and angry at the interruption. “Fuck off, bitches,” he muttered. Bailey clawed at his neck, but he had her pinned in a weird way, so she couldn’t get any leverage. While I was ready to jump on him in a weak attempt to save my friend, someone shoved the football player off Bailey. I hadn’t even seen the guy appear, but he stood between Bailey and the pissed jerk. “Fuck off, man,” the asshole said. “She’s mine.” “Nick,” Bailey mumbled, looking ready to cry. “He humped my leg. Crush his skull, will ya?” Nick frowned at Bailey who was leaning on him now. The football player was an inch or two bigger than Nick and outweighed him by probably fifty pounds. Feeling the fight would be short, the asshole reached for Bailey’s arm and Nick nailed the guy in the face. To my shock, the giant asshole collapsed on the ground. “My hero,” Bailey said, looking ready to puke. She caressed Nick’s biceps and asked, “Do you work out?” Running his hands through his dark wavy hair, Nick laughed. “You’re so wasted.” “And you’re like the Energizer Bunny,” she cooed. “My bro said you took a punch, yet kept on ticking.” Nick started to speak then heard the asshole’s friends riled up. I was too drunk to know if everything happened really quickly or if my brain just took awhile to catch up. The guys rushed Nick who dodged most of them and hit another. The room emptied out except for Nick, the guys, and us. I grabbed a beer bottle and threw it at one of the guys shoving Nick. When the bottle hit him in the back, the bastard glared at me. “You want to fight, bitch?” “Leave her alone,” Nick said, kicking one guy into the jerk looking to hit me. As impressive as Nick was against six guys, he was just one guy against six. A losing bet, he took a shot to the face then the gut. Lark grabbed a folding chair and went WWE on one guy. I was tossing beers in the roundabout direction of the other guys. Yet, Bailey was the one who ended the fight by pulling out a gun. “Back the fuck off or I’ll burn this motherfucking house to the ground!” she screamed then fired at a lamp. Everyone stopped and stared at her. When she noticed me wide-eyed, Bailey frowned. “Too much?” Grinning, I followed Lark to the door. Nick followed us while the assholes seemed ready to piss themselves. Well, except for an idiot who looked ready to go for Bailey’s gun. "Dude,” Nick muttered, “that’s Bailey Fucking Johansson. Unless you want to end up in a shallow grave, back the fuck off.” “What he said!” Bailey yelled, waving her gun around before I hurried her out of the door. The cold air sobered up Bailey enough for her to return the gun to her purse. She was still drunk enough to laugh hysterically as we reached the SUV. “Did you see me kill that lamp?” “You did good,” I said, groggy as my adrenaline shifted to nausea and the alcohol threatened to come back up on me. Nick walked us to the SUV. “Next time, you might want to wave the gun around before you get drunk and dance.” “Don’t tell me what to do,” Bailey growled, crawling into the backseat. Then, realizing he saved her, she crawled back to face him. “You were so brave. I should totally get you off as a thank you." “Maybe another time,” he said, laughing as she batted her eyes at him. “Are you guys safe to drive?” Lark nodded. “I’m sober enough to remember everything tomorrow. Trust me that there’ll be mocking.

Too late she realized the boys weren’t motioning to her at all. They were looking past her, shouting at someone behind her. She had just started to turn around when a boy slammed into her with the force of a bull. “Accidempoli!” Cass hit the cobbled ground hard, her back landing in a dirty puddle, the palm of her left glove ripping on the rough stone street. Miraculously, she had not hit her head. Cass felt warm breath against her chin. She had clenched her eyes shut, but opened them now to find herself pinned underneath a boy a couple of years older than she was. She could feel his body radiating heat into hers. The boy wore a thin smock spattered with paint. Dots of blood red and bright yellow swam before Cass’s eyes. She struggled to focus. He had dark brown hair that curled under at the ends and eyes as blue as the Adriatic. His smile tilted a little to the right. It was the smile of someone who loved getting into trouble. “Molte scuse!” He hopped back onto his feet. “I didn’t see you at all, bella signorina.” He bowed, then reached out a hand and yanked Cass off the ground unceremoniously. She felt a little dizzy as she stood. “Though I can’t say it wasn’t a pleasure running into you.” Letting go of her hand, he brushed a droplet of dirty water from the side of her face. He leaned in close to murmur in her ear. “You should be more careful, you know.” Cass opened her mouth but no words came out. Again, she felt her stays crushing down on her chest. “Careful?” she managed to croak. “You’re the one who knocked me over.” “I couldn’t resist,” he said, and he actually had the nerve to wink at her. “It’s not often I get the chance to put my hands on such a beautiful woman.” Cass stared at him, speechless. Without another word, he turned away and followed the group of laughing artists into a crowded campo, his muscular form disappearing among merchants’ sacks of cabbages and potatoes. The scene blurred a little, like a painting, and for a second Cass wondered if maybe she had hit her head and had imagined the whole exchange.

As I walk across the lobby, I hear a scream coming from below, coming from the Pit. It’s not a good-natured Dauntless shout, or the shriek of someone who is scared but delighted, or anything but the particular tone, the particular pitch of terror. Small rocks scatter behind us as I run down to the bottom of the Pit, my breathing fast and heavy, but even. Three tall, dark-clothed people stand near the railing below. They are crowded around a fourth, smaller target, and even though I can’t see much about them, I know a fight when I see one. Or, I would call it a fight, if it wasn’t three against one. One of the attackers wheels around, sees me, and sprints in the other direction. When I get closer I see one of the remaining attackers holding the target up, over the chasm, and I shout, “Hey!” I see her hair, blond, and I can hardly see anything else. I collide with one of the attackers--Drew, I can tell by the color of his hair, orange-red--and slam him into the chasm barrier. I hit him once, twice, three times in the face, and he collapses to the ground, and then I’m kicking him and I can’t think, can’t think at all. “Four.” Her voice is quiet, ragged, and it’s the only thing that could possibly reach me in this place. She’s hanging from the railing, dangling over the chasm like a piece of bait from a fishing hook. The other one, the last attacker, is gone. I run toward her, grabbing her under her shoulders, and pull her over the edge of the railing. I hold her against me. She pressed her face to my shoulder, twisting her fingers into my shirt. Drew is on the ground, collapsed. I hear him groan as I carry her away--not to the infirmary, where the others who went after her would think to look for her, but to my apartment, in its lonely, removed corridor. I shove my way through the apartment door and lay her down on my bed. I run my fingers over her nose and cheekbones to check for breaks, then I feel for her pulse, and lean in close to listen to her breathing. Everything seems normal, steady. Even the bump on the back of her head, though swollen and scraped, doesn’t seem serious. She isn’t badly injured, but she could have been. My hands shake when I pull away from her. She isn’t badly injured, but Drew might be. I don’t even know how many times I hit him before she finally said my name and woke me up. The rest of my body starts to shake, too, and I make sure there’s a pillow supporting her head, then leave the apartment to go back to the railing next to the Pit.

Hamilton hit the ground running: the very next day, he arranged a fifty-thousand-dollar loan for the federal government from the Bank of New York. The day after that, a Sunday, he worked all day at the Treasury’s new office on Broadway, just south of Trinity Church. He dashed off a plea to the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, asking for another fifty thousand dollars.

Bob and Lyn approached. “A pair of emus, just up the road,” Bob shouted. Steve jumped into the Ute, and we were off to get a look. We spotted the two flightless birds, an adult and a subadult, but they bolted as soon as we arrived. “Too bad,” I said, watching the emus kicking up dust. “That would have been good.” “Get Henry,” Steve yelled. Then he leaped from the truck and hit the ground running. It’s impossible to catch an emu. They can reach speeds of up to forty miles an hour. Steve sprinted off and ran like the wind after the younger bird. It was huge, nearly full grown, and running like mad. I sat in the truck and watched in shock. Henry looked as stunned as I was. There was nothing he could do but put camera to shoulder and tear off after them. “This is going to be a good laugh to watch,” I said to John. To my amazement, the three made a big circle and began to head back in the truck’s direction. “Is it just me,” I said to John, “or is he gaining on it?” With the young emu taking huge, ground-gulping strides, the dust puffing up from each footstep, and Steve in his Timberlands kicking up the dirt right behind, they came toward us. Steve lunged forward and grabbed the bird in a bear hug. He picked the emu clean up off the ground, its big, gangly legs kicking wildly. Steve grinned from ear to ear. Henry caught his breath and tried to stop the camera from shaking. “Emus are spectacular,” Steve said exuberantly. “It’s the dad who raises the kids. All the mother does is deposit her eggs in a nest scraped into the ground. Then it’s the father’s responsibility to raise them up.” After his commentary, Steve let the emu go. As it trotted off, Henry turned to Steve and said, “I’m not sure if I got all that.” Steve immediately bolted off like a jackrabbit and ran after the emu, and I’ll be darned if he didn’t catch it again. Once more Steve turned to Henry and told him all about emus. Then he kissed the bird, gave it a hug, and released it a second time. If emus tell stories around the campfire, that one had a humdinger to tell for years to come.

Zev’s heart thumped wildly, and he somehow managed to increase his speed, running faster than he’d ever previously managed. Jonah was a big kid, almost as big as Zev. And he was strong. But shifters were stronger than humans, even when wearing their human skins. And with three of them surrounding Jonah, he didn’t stand a chance. Hell, even very few shifters would manage to come out victorious against those odds. The sounds of fists hitting bodies intermingled with shouting ratcheted Zev’s anxiety even higher. Just as he was about to turn the corner, the noise stopped. That unexpected silence increased the fear that racked Zev’s body to such high proportions that he thought he might vomit. “Get away from….” Zev’s warning stuck in his throat as he finally managed to get around the edge of the building to survey the scene in front of him. Brian was lying on the ground, cradling his arm. A shifter who was two years older than Zev was flat on his back with his eyes closed. The third shifter who’d threatened Jonah was holding his nose, trying to block the blood that poured out from between his fingers. And in the center of the damage stood Jonah, his fists clenched, face sweaty, blond hair disheveled, and expression fierce.

The man who won’t marry you because you chose this adventure doesn’t deserve you,” Milo said. “A man who truly loves you will understand why you ran away. He’ll know who you really are.” His smile was gone. “And if you can’t love him as much as he loves you, he’ll understand that, too.” “Milo…” I reached out to touch his arm, but just then Tiphys came running up to take back the steering oar. Argus was hot on his tail, calling him and all his ancestors so many foul names that I didn’t know whether to duck out of sight or start memorizing the most impressive ones. “Is this how you treat my beautiful ship?” Argus yelled, bright red in the face. “Trusting her to an inexperienced boy is bad enough, but at this time?” He gestured to the west, where the sun was already beginning to dip below the sea.” Count yourself lucky that I don’t give you a fine view of Aea from the bottom of her harbor!” “Gods above, calm yourself,” Tiphys muttered. “It was only for a moment. No harm was done.” “Why don’t I take you to the roof of the Sun Temple, once we’re ashore, and push you off? You can keep repeating, ‘No harm done, no harm done,’ up to the instant you hit the ground! Of all the miserable, ignorant--!” Argus choked on his own fury. I don’t know how long he would have gone on if a call from the prow hadn’t distracted him.

driveway, her hip scraping as she tumbled, her skin torn and bleeding. She knew she should have worn trousers. The world rocked to a stop, balanced itself out and she opened her eyes. The Infected were standing looking at her, and Dusk strode through them, his eyes narrowed and his lips curled in hatred. And then Valkyrie was up and running. She was sore, she felt blood on her legs and arms, but she ignored the pain. She looked back, saw the mass of Infected surge after her. She passed the club gates and took the first road to her left, losing a shoe in the process and cursing herself for not wearing boots. It was narrow, and dark, with fields on one side and a row of back gardens on the other. She came to a junction. Up one way she could see headlights, so she turned down the other, leading the Infected away from any bystanders. She darted in off the road, running behind the Pizza Palace and the video store, realising her mistake when she heard the voices around the next corner. The pub had a back door that smokers used. She veered off to her right, ran for the garden wall and leaped over it. She stayed low, and wondered for a moment if she’d managed to lose the Infected so easily. Dusk dropped on to her from above and she cried out. He sent her reeling. “I’m not following the rules any more,” he said. She looked at him, saw him shaking. He took a syringe from his coat and let it drop. “No more rules. No more serum. This time, there’ll be nothing to stop me tearing you limb from limb.” He grunted as the pain hit. “I’m sorry I cut you,” Valkyrie tried, backing away. “Too late. You can run if you want. Adrenaline makes the blood taste sweeter.” He smiled and she saw the fangs start to protrude through his gums. He brought his hands to his shirt, and then, like Superman, he ripped the shirt open. Unlike Superman, however, he took his flesh with it, revealing the chalk-white skin of the creature underneath. Valkyrie darted towards him and his eyes widened in surprise. She dived, snatched the syringe from the ground and plunged it into his leg. Dusk roared, kicked her on to her back, his transformation interrupted. He tried to rip off the rest of his humanity, but his human skin tore at the neck. This wasn’t the smooth shucking she’d seen the previous night. This was messy and painful. Valkyrie scrambled up. The Infected had heard Dusk’s anguished cries, and they were closing in. he Edgley family reunion was taking up the main function hall, at the front of the building, leaving the rear of the golf club in darkness. That was probably a good thing, Tanith reflected, as she watched Skulduggery fly backwards through the air. The Torment-spider turned to her and she dodged a slash from one of his talons. She turned and ran, but he was much faster. Tanith jumped for the side of the building and ran upwards, a ploy that had got her out of a lot of trouble in the past, but then, she had never faced a giant spider before. His talons clacked as he followed her up, chattering as he came.

I had thought I would hit the ground running when I arrived at the university, and that every secret of the universe would simply fall into my lap, and that I could catch new scientific discoveries as easily as a child catches fireflies in a jar, and would untie mathematical knots with a single tug. As it turns out, college is a lot of work.

When you hit rock bottom, you feel it. You break down, walls crumbling until you’re free-falling. The feelings that you tried to run from suddenly rush up around you in an unstoppable force, the gravity of your thoughts now nothing but a punishing plunge. When you slam into the bottom, that landing jolts you all the way to your very soul. You hit hard, and it cracks the very foundation of the world. The ground fragments beneath you, lines stretching far and wide. And then you’re left, a pile of rubble. But I realize something as I lie here, surrounded by the destruction of my plummet. These cracks that have spread out from my caustic landing, they’re not evidence of my ruination. They’re paths. Each jagged line leads from me and then diverts away, showing me all the different ways I could go from here.

Stop doubting my amazing stripping skills, dude,” Roxy teased as she continued to struggle with her buttons. I was about to force my eyes away from her when she cursed and yanked on her shirt hard enough to rip every button off of it. Beneath it she was wearing a gold push up bra which accentuated her perfect tits and made her look like something out of a Dragon’s wet dream. She tossed her head back with laughter, taking a playful bow for her friends but her foot slipped and she tumbled off of the table instead. I took a few running steps towards her before I could stop myself but the guy had leapt up to catch her before she could hit the ground. “Tory?” he asked as she slumped against him, seeming to have fallen unconscious. “Oh, shit! Help me.” The girl Roxy had called Sofia scrambled to help him with her and they struggled to move her towards one of the cushioned chairs close to where they’d been sitting. I shook my head to clear it of the image of her in that gold bra and spun on my heel, striding towards the exit and quite possibly a cold shower. Just as I made it to the door, a loud scream halted me. I turned back to see Roxy’s friends backing away from her in a panic as a thick sheet of ice spread across the ground away from her, tinting everything in its path a frosty blue. “Wake up, Tory!” Sofia yelled desperately. “Maybe you should run for a teacher,” the boy said. “I’ll try to get through to her.” Sofia turned to run for the exit and her eyes widened in panic as she found me striding towards her instead. “What’s wrong with her?” I asked, my tone clipped. “She err...” Sofia hesitated, clearly not wanting to trust me with her friend’s condition while battling against the inclination to do whatever I told her. “She passed out and now she’s using magic in her sleep and we can’t get close to help her.” Roxy whimpered behind her and I stepped around Sofia to inspect the damage for myself. I’d dealt with this kind of thing with the other Heirs once or twice when our powers had first been Awakened. We were just so powerful that if we got too drunk, sometimes we’d lose control over our magic in our sleep and Roxy had seemed wasted to me. “It’s fine, we’ll look after her,” the boy said firmly but I ignored him as I walked closer to Roxy where she was slumped in the chair. Ice crunched loudly beneath my boots while the temperature around me plummeted and I hadn’t even gotten close to her yet. I drew on my fire magic, pushing it against the ice and melting some of it but Roxy’s power fought back as she whimpered again. “Roxy,” I growled as I made it to stand before her. The ice was still spreading and thickening. She was trembling in the chair and I noticed a few tears sailing down her cheeks. “Not again,” she breathed, her fists balling as she curled in on herself. “Roxy, wake up!” I snapped, moving forward to grab her arm and shake her. She didn’t wake but the ice around me thickened even more and her friends cried out as they were forced to back up again. My breath rose before me and I dropped the six pack beside her chair, crouching down before her so that I could shake her more firmly. She started coughing and water burst from her mouth like she’d been drowning. I pulled her forward, slapping her back to help her get it all up and the tremors rocking her body reverberated through mine as she pressed against my chest. More cold water flooded from her, drenching her as she cried out in panic and I pulled her against me more firmly. (Darius POV)

He glanced at me as I started running at his side and I cast furtive looks at him beneath my lashes from time to time as I continued along our route. Students walked the paths, ensuring we were never actually alone for more than a moment or two but we weren’t really with anyone else either. So far, the stars didn’t seem to mind. We kept running all the way through The Wailing Wood to Aer Tower and beyond until we reached the crossroads where the path we usually took headed back towards The Orb and a narrow track led up to the fields which ran along the cliffs above Aer Cove. I hesitated at the crossroads, glancing at Darius for a moment as the damn butterflies made a return to my stomach before taking the narrow path up onto the cliff top. The path was empty with no one up on the cliff as far as I could see. If we ran up there, we really would be alone. I glanced back over my shoulder as Darius paused, wondering if he’d dare to follow me. How far was he willing to push the stars on this? He only hesitated a moment before jogging after me as I ran for the cliff top and a smile tugged at my lips as I put on a spurt of speed. If he wanted to run with me then he’d have to keep up. My feet pounded up the track and I panted as my muscles burned in protest at the incline. The sky grew dark overhead as we ran on and I glanced up to see thick storm clouds sweeping overhead despite the fact that there had been nothing but pale blue to see only minutes ago. Fuck you, stars. I gritted my teeth and kept going, ignoring a thin track which led back to the centre of campus and ploughing on. Thunder rumbled overhead, but I pretended I couldn’t hear it and kept running. The clifftop loomed ahead of me and I fixed my gaze on it as the sound of Darius’s feet hitting the trail chased me on. Rain spilled from the clouds, peppering my cheeks and I didn’t even bother to shield myself from it. I kept running until I made it to the very top of the cliff then stopped. I turned to face Darius as he came to a halt too. “Do you think this is a good idea?” he asked slowly, looking up at the sky as the shower grew heavier and the rain washed over us. He wasn’t shielding himself from it either and his tank was plastered to his skin as the rain pounded down. “Why should we have to listen to the stars?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the rain. “Because they govern everything,” Darius said sadly like there was nothing to be done for it. “They don’t govern me,” I growled. Darius frowned slightly as I took a step closer and thunder crashed so violently that the ground trembled. I waited to see what he was going to do and his jaw set as he moved towards me too. The rain slammed down over us so hard that I could hardly see through it. My hair was plastered to my back and a shiver ran through me, but I banished it with a flare of fire magic beneath my skin. Darius stopped inches from me and I looked up at him as water gathered in my lashes and slid over my cheeks. He reached out to cup my jaw in his large hand and the thunder crashed again, lightning forking through the clouds above us as the stars fought to make us part. “Are you sure about this?” he asked me. “Fuck fate,” I snarled because it was time I owned what was going on between us. “No one gets to pick my future for me. I choose what I want and I want you.” The smile he gave me was bright and fierce and full of an emotion I was afraid to put a name to, but the way he was looking at me lit me up from the inside out. “Fuck fate,” Darius agreed darkly. (Tory)

The longest I ever stayed up on meth was something like fourteen days. I started seeing these little creatures in my house. They looked so real to me that to this very day I could swear I actually saw them. They were these little men who looked like Stretch Armstrong dolls, but green. They were being manufactured under my house. They came up out of the ground and ran around my living room, and I would run around my house, chasing them, and shooting my gun at them. Sometimes I hit one, and it died. Then, all of a sudden, the wall opened up, and the creatures grabbed him and dragged him back inside, so I couldn't show anybody. That's why nobody else could see them but me.

Being upright has another disadvantage: when running, we lost the use of our spines as stride-extending springs. Watch a slow-motion video of a greyhound or a cheetah galloping. When it lands on its back legs, its hind paws land below the shoulders as its long, flexible spine curves like a powerful bow, storing elastic energy. Then as the animal’s hind limbs push off, the spine rapidly unbends, releasing elastic energy to help catapult it into the air and increase its stride length.11 Our short, little upright spines do nothing to help us run faster, but instead struggle to keep our inherently tippy upper bodies stable while also dampening the shock wave that travels from the foot up to the head every time we hit the ground.12

Happy Birthday, Dom,” she whispers softly, running her fingers over my chest before drifting off. Somewhere between the drift of sleep and consciousness, I claim the only gift I want, palming her thigh and drawing it up to bring her snugger to me. Pressing and keeping my lips to her forehead, I inhale her scent and let myself fall into the idea of us and linger there—knowing that eventually, I’ll be jerked away by the hard, unforgivable reality waiting for me when I hit the ground.

Some political campaigns hit the ground running. Others simply hit the ground.

It is always changing and accepting this will help us to adapt better. In the future, our technology will help us to communicate even better than we do now, travel faster and advance us in ways that we never knew could exist. If we anticipate this now, we can hit the ground running when this takes place and have an action plan ready to go.

Stumbling to my feet, I glanced at my mom who still sat at the table. She looked at me then Larry then lowered her gaze and returned to her coupons. The logical choice for me was to run from the house. I was so much smaller than these three battling men and the smart thing was to run. Yet, Larry and his bullshit family were why Raven left. They were always telling me what to do and making me feel like shit. Now, he’d hit me and I wasn’t running. Grabbing a chair from the table, I swung it at Glenn and hit him at the back of the neck. As he went flying forward, the bastard tripped over Dylan and toppled hard to the ground. Before I could celebrate, Larry ripped the chair out of my hand then came at me. I backed away and grabbed one of the millions of bear figurines. Throwing it at him, I nailed Larry in the chest with the first one. The second one caught him over the eye, leaving a gash. As Larry chased me around the room, I grabbed more bears and flung them over my shoulders at him. While most missed, a few made contact and he finally hollered in frustration. Having recovered from the blow, Glenn tried to block me in. However, Dylan shoved the older man outside then locked the door. Unfortunately for Glenn, Larry’s stupid fluffy dog hated him and proceeded to attack his leg. “Dylan, this is your last chance,” Larry said, his face red and blood dripping down his face. “Give me that girl or you’re done.” “Fuck you. I was done the minute you put your fucking hand on her.” Watching the two men glare at one another, I exchanged the bears in my hands for heavier ones. “I’m leaving,” I said more to Mom than Larry. “If anyone messes with me, I’m cracking their heads open with Picnic Bear.

you’ll know you’re hitting a groove when grocery shopping becomes less stressful and more focused (you actually have a list and no real reason to veer from it).

The mile counter on the treadmill hit six miles and I surrendered. I turned off the machine and slumped into a hot, sweaty pile on the floor. “What’s wrong, Lace?” “I hate you, that’s what’s fucking wrong, you stupid douchebag!” He just started chuckling and continued to run for the next hour. I didn’t move from my spread eagle position on the ground. I didn’t care that people had to step over me to get to the rows of treadmills and other gym equipment. They could go fuck themselves if they had a problem with it

There was a horrible, blood-freezing scream somewhere very close. I suddenly recognised it as my own, but I couldn’t stop it. And I looked at the men, the brave and beautiful men beside me, running into the guns, and God help me for thinking it, and God forgive me for saying it, but it was glorious, it was glorious, if glory is a magnificent and raptured exaltation. It was what love would be like, if love was a sin. It was what music would be, if music could kill you. And I climbed a prison wall with every running step. And then, in a world suddenly soundless as the deepest sea, my legs stopped still, and hot, gritty, filthy, exploding earth clogged my eyes and my mouth. Something had hit my legs. Something hard and hot and viciously sharp had hit my legs. I fell forward as if I’d been running in the dark and I’d smashed into a fallen tree trunk. A mortar round. The metal fragments. The shock-deafened silence. The burning skin. The blinding earth. The choking struggle for breath. There was a smell that filled my head. It was the smell of my own death—it smells of blood, and seawater, and damp earth, and the ash of burned wood when you smell your own death before you die—and then I hit the ground so hard that I plunged through it into a deep, undreaming darkness. And the fall was forever. And there was no light, no light.

A guy once asked me to go with him to Indonesia to help people after the latest tsunami hit. I said yes. I had no idea what I was doing. We arrived in Banda Aceh two weeks after the destruction. (Indonesia alone lost a mind-bending two hundred thousand lives.) We weren’t welcomed by everyone. Most people love the help, sure. But I felt unwelcome when a group of Muslim separatists threatened to kill us. (I have a sixth sense about this kind of thing.) They were opposed to Western interference in Aceh and didn’t want us saying anything about Jesus. I just wanted to help some people. I also wanted a hotel. I wanted a safer place. I didn’t want to die. I had no idea what I was getting into. We took supplies to what was, before the tsunami, a fishing village. It was now a group of people living on the ground, some in tents. I just followed what the rest of our little group was doing. They had more experience. We distributed the food, housewares, cooking oil, that sort of thing, and stayed on the ground with them. That’s how our little disaster-response group operated, even though I wanted a hotel. They stayed among the victims and lived with them. After the militant group threatened to slit our throats, I felt kind of vulnerable out there, lying on the ground. As a dad with two little kids, I didn’t sign up for the martyr thing. I took the threat seriously and wanted to leave. The local imam resisted our presence, too, and this bugged me. “Well, if you hate us, maybe we should leave. It’s a thousand degrees, we’ve got no AC or running water or electricity, and your co-religionists are threatening us. So, yeah. Maybe let’s call it off.” But it wasn’t up to me, and I didn’t have a flight back. As we helped distribute supplies to nearby villages, people repeatedly asked the same question: “Why are you here?” They simply couldn’t understand why we would be there with them. They told us they thought we were enemies. One of the members of our group spent time working in a truck with locals, driving slowly through the devastation, in the sticky humidity, picking up the bodies of their neighbors. They piled them in the back of a truck. It was horrific work. They wore masks, of course, but there’s no covering the smell of death. The locals paused and asked him too: “Why? Why are you here?” He told them it was because he worshiped Jesus, and he was convinced that Jesus would be right there, in the back of the truck with them. He loves them. “But you are our enemy.” “Jesus told us to love our enemies.” The imam eventually warmed up to us, and before we left, he even invited our little group to his home for dinner! We sat in his home, one of the few in the area still standing. He explained through an interpreter that he didn’t trust us at first, because we were Christians. But while other “aid” groups would drive by, throw a box out of a car, and get their pictures taken with the people of his village, our group was different. We slept on the ground. He knew we’d been threatened, he knew we weren’t comfortable, and he knew we didn’t have to be there. But there we were, his supposed enemies, and we would not be offended. We would not be alienated. We were on the ground with his people. His wives peered in from the kitchen, in tears. He passed around a trophy with the photo of a twelve-year-old boy, one of his children. He told us the boy had been lost in the tsunami, and could we please continue to search for him? Was there anything we could do? We were crying too.

night, there was a real bad thunderstorm. But what woke me up wasn’t the thunder and lightning. It was Winn-Dixie, whining and butting his head against my bedroom door. “Winn-Dixie,” I said. “What are you doing?” He didn’t pay any attention to me. He just kept beating his head against the door and whining and whimpering; and when I got out of bed and went over and put my hand on his head, he was shaking and trembling so hard that it scared me. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around him, but he didn’t turn and look at me or smile or sneeze or wag his tail, or do any normal kind of Winn-Dixie thing; he just kept beating his head against the door and crying and shaking. “You want the door open?” I said. “Huh? Is that what you want?” I stood up and opened the door and Winn-Dixie flew through it like something big and ugly and mean was chasing him. “Winn-Dixie,” I hissed, “come back here.” I didn’t want him going and waking the preacher up. But it was too late. Winn-Dixie was already at the other end of the trailer, in the preacher’s room. I could tell because there was a sproi-i-ing sound that must have come from Winn-Dixie jumping up on the bed, and then there was a sound from the preacher like he was real surprised. But none of it lasted long, because Winn-Dixie came tearing back out of the preacher’s room, panting and running like crazy. I tried to grab him, but he was going too fast. “Opal?” said the preacher. He was standing at the door to his bedroom, and his hair was all kind of wild on top of his head, and he was looking around like he wasn’t sure where he was. “Opal, what’s going on?” “I don’t know,” I told him. But just then there was a huge crack of thunder, one so loud that it shook the whole trailer, and Winn-Dixie came shooting back out of my room and went running right past me and I screamed, “Daddy, watch out!” But the preacher was still confused. He just stood there, and Winn-Dixie came barreling right toward him like he was a bowling ball and the preacher was the only pin left standing, and wham, they both fell to the ground. “Uh-oh,” I said. “Opal?” said the preacher. He was lying on his stomach, and Winn-Dixie was sitting on top of him, panting and whining. “Yes sir,” I said. “Opal,” the preacher said again. “Yes sir,” I said louder. “Do you know what a pathological fear is?” “No sir,” I told him. The preacher raised a hand. He rubbed his nose. “Well,” he said, after a minute, “it’s a fear that goes way beyond normal fears. It’s a fear you can’t be talked out of or reasoned out of.” Just then there was another crack of thunder and Winn-Dixie rose straight up in the air like somebody had poked him with something hot. When he hit the floor, he started running. He ran back to my bedroom, and I didn’t even try to catch him; I just got out of his way. The preacher lay there on the ground, rubbing his nose. Finally, he sat up. He said, “Opal, I believe Winn-Dixie has a pathological fear of thunderstorms.” And just when he finished his sentence, here came Winn-Dixie again, running to save his life. I got the preacher up off the floor and out of the way just in time. There didn’t seem to be a thing we could do for Winn-Dixie to make him feel better, so we just sat there and watched him run back and forth, all terrorized and panting. And every time there was another crack of thunder, Winn-Dixie acted all over again like it was surely the end of the world. “The storm won’t last long,” the preacher told me. “And when it’s over, the real Winn-Dixie will come back.

I turned and flipped the latch on the door, then pulled hard on the handle, stumbling over the threshold into the fresh air. I would have fallen in the dirt for the second time that day except that someone standing outside caught me. Terrified that my escape was being thwarted, I struck out at whoever it was, feeling a sharp pain when my fist connected with the person’s jaw. “Empress, you hit hard!” a male voice exclaimed, then he captured my arms and trapped them behind my back. By the strange expletive he had used, I knew him to be Cokyrian--my luck was golden. “What’s going on here?” The butcher staggered into the doorway, squinting in the sunlight. “Your girl’s a thief,” he muttered at sight of the man who held me, sparing a glower for me as though warning me to be quiet. I ground my teeth and looked away, intending to do just that. Now that I had stopped struggling, the Cokyrian soldier released me, and I considered whether or not to run. Then I saw who had been restraining me--Saadi, the man with whom Narian and my uncle had dealt after my failed prank. There would be no point in running if he remembered who I was. “My girl?” Saadi repeated, his pale blue eyes calculating. “She is no Cokyrian. Besides, I would expect you to show any comrade of mine more respect than that.” “My apologies,” the butcher forced himself to say, and rage filled me at his newly respectful attitude. “She broke into my store and I assumed from her clothing…I also assume you’ll see her punished for her crime.” “You were about to punish her yourself, weren’t you?” Saadi scrutinized me, noting the red marks around my wrists and perhaps the beginnings of the bruises I would have across my mouth. “In Cokyri, you would be killed for what you did to her--what you tried to do.” “It’s good we’re not in Cokyri then,” the butcher sneered. Saadi’s jaw clenched, and he seemed to be fighting a deep urge to pummel the merchant who stood before him. “I should take you to join the men at the gallows.” “I would welcome it.” “I can see why,” Saadi coldly retorted, with a subtle look up and down at the heavyset man. “But I’m afraid the lack of your business might dampen the economy in the province, and that is something my sister would frown upon. She’ll be disappointed, though--she does so enjoy seeing men like you hang.” “And I enjoy seeing women in skirts as God intended.” Another strained moment passed, then Saadi laughed. “Perhaps if your God had paid less attention to clothing and more to abilities, you and your kind wouldn’t be in this position right now.” The butcher shifted uncomfortably, and Saadi quickly dispensed with him. “If you want me to arrest her for thievery, I’ll also arrest you for assault. So I would advise that you go back to your meat and your customers, may they be few.” The man did not need to be told twice. He slammed the door in our faces, and I could hear the lock click into place. It was then that I noticed the canvas bag at Saadi’s feet. He must have seen flight in my eyes, for he started running at almost the same moment I did.

When the first day of the festival had concluded, I retired early, my feet aching and my body exhausted. Narian had left us after our tour of the grounds, and I had not seen him since, although I hoped he would come to me now. He did, but even as he dropped through my window, he seemed distracted, far away inside his own head. I tried to engage him in conversation, but found it to be mostly one-sided, for I could not hold his interest. Though there was no smooth way to launch into the necessary topic, I did so anyway, doubtful that he was even listening. “Are you upset that your family was with us today?” I asked. “You invited them?” Judging by the tone of his voice, I had landed upon the correct issue. “Yes. It made sense to do so.” “I suppose,” he replied, but I knew the answer did not reflect his actual thoughts. “They’re old friends of my family, Narian. And I thought perhaps you would…enjoy seeing them again.” “Alera, they don’t want my company.” “Your mother does.” His eyes at last met mine. “I spoke to her about you. She would give up her husband to regain her son.” “I doubt that’s true,” he said with a short laugh. “It is,” I insisted, reaching out to run a hand through his hair. I might have changed her words a little, but I understood her intent. “She told me so herself. Believe it.” Narian stared at me, a flicker of hope on his face that quickly faded into his stoic façade. “Even if what you say is true,” he said at last, “in order to have a relationship with her, with my siblings, I need to have one with Koranis.” “You’re right,” I admitted, for my dinner at the Baron’s home had proven that to be the case. He sat on the bed beside me and drew one knee close to his chest. “Koranis doesn’t want to be anywhere near me, and to be honest, I have no interest in a relationship with him. I have no respect for him.” Narian read the sympathy in my eyes. “It’s all right, Alera. I don’t need a family.” “Maybe you don’t need one,” I said with a shrug, playing with the fabric of the quilt that lay between us. “But you deserve one.” I thought for a moment I had hit a nerve, but instead he made a joke out of it. “Just think--if I’d had Koranis as my father, I might have turned into him by now. I’d be brutish and pretentious, but at least my boastful garb would distract you from those flaws. Oh, and this hair you love? It would be gone.” I laughed at the ounce of truth in his statement, then fell silent, for some reason feeling sadder about his situation than he was.

carried the Makarov outside to watch the fireworks. Thirty yards beyond the spot where Brendan Magill lay dead was a rock wall running on a north-south axis. Gabriel took cover behind it after a 7.62x39mm round shredded the air a few inches from his right ear. Keller hit the ground next to him as rounds exploded against the stones of the wall, sending sparks and fragments flying. The source of the fire was silenced, so Gabriel had only a vague idea of the direction from which it was coming. He poked his head above the wall to search for a muzzle flash, but another burst of rounds drove him downward. Keller was now crawling northward along the base of the wall. Gabriel followed after him, but stopped when Keller suddenly opened up with the dead man’s AK-47. A distant scream indicated that Keller’s rounds had found their mark, but in an instant they were taking fire from several directions. Gabriel flattened himself on the ground at Keller’s side, the Glock in one hand, the dead man’s phone in the other. After a few seconds he realized it was pulsing with an incoming text. The text was apparently from Eamon Quinn. It read KILL THE GIRL . . . 79 CROSSMAGLEN, SOUTH ARMAGH A MID THE HEAP OF BROKEN and dismembered farm implements in Jimmy Fagan’s shed, Katerina had found a scythe, rusted and caked in mud, a museum piece, perhaps the last scythe in the whole of Ireland, north or south. She held it tightly in her hands and listened to the sound of men pounding up the track at a sprint. Two men, she thought, perhaps three. She positioned herself against the shed’s sliding door. Madeline was at the opposite end of the space, hooded, hands bound, her back to the bales of hay. She was the first and only thing the men would see upon entry. The latch gave way, the door slid open, a gun intruded. Katerina recognized its silhouette: an AK-47 with a suppressor attached to the barrel. She knew it well. It was the first weapon she had ever fired at the camp. The great AK-47! Liberator of the oppressed! The gun was pointed upward at a forty-five-degree angle. Katerina had no choice but to wait until the barrel sank toward Madeline. Then she raised the scythe and swung it with every ounce of strength she had left in her body. Two hundred yards away, crouched behind a stone wall at the western edge of Jimmy Fagan’s property, Gabriel showed the text message to Christopher Keller. Keller immediately poked his head above the wall and saw muzzle flashes in the doorway of the shed. Four flashes, four shots, more than enough to obliterate two lives. A burst of AK-47 fire drove him downward again. Eyes wild, he grabbed Gabriel savagely by the front of his coat and shouted, “Stay here!” Keller hauled himself over the wall and vanished from sight. Gabriel lay there for a few seconds as the rounds rained down on his position. Then suddenly he was on his feet and running across the darkened pasture. Running toward a car in a snowy square in Vienna. Running toward death. The blow that Katerina delivered to the neck of the man holding the AK-47 resulted in a partial decapitation. Even so, he had managed to squeeze off a shot before she wrenched the gun from his grasp—a shot that struck the hay bales a few inches from Madeline’s head. Katerina shoved the dying man aside and quickly fired two shots into the chest of the second man. The fourth shot she fired into the partially decapitated creature twitching at her feet. In the lexicon of the SVR, it was a control shot. It was also a shot of

Then, impossibly, another figure ran toward her. The sideburns and stiff-collared jacket looked ridiculous out of the context of Pembrook Park, though he’d stuck on a baseball cap and trench coat, trying to blend. His face was flushed from running, and when he saw Jane, he sighed with relief. Jane dropped her jaw. Literally. She had never, even in her most ridiculous daydreaming, imagined that Mr. Nobley would come after her. She took a step back, hit something slick with her boot heel, and tottered almost to the ground. Mr. Nobley caught her and set her back up on her feet. Is this why women wear heels? thought Jane. We hobble ourselves so we can still be rescued by men? She annoyed herself by having enjoyed it. Briefly. “You haven’t left yet,” Nobley said. He seemed reluctant to let go of her, but he did and took a few steps back. “I’ve been panicked that…” He saw Martin. “What are you doing here?” The brunette was watching with hungry intensity, though she kept tapping at a keyboard as though actually very busy at work. “Jane and I got close these past weeks and--” Martin began. “Got close. That’s a load of duff. It’s one thing when you’re toying with the dowagers who guess what you are, but Jane should be off limits.” He took her arm. “You can’t believe a word he says. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier, but you must know now that he’s an actor.” “I know,” Jane said. Nobley blinked. “Oh.” “So, what are you doing here?” She couldn’t help it if her tone sounded a little tired. This was becoming farcical. “I came to tell you that I--” he rushed to speak, then composed himself, looked around, and stepped closer to her so he did not need to raise his voice to be heard. The brunette leaned forward just a tad. “I apologize for having to tell you here, in this busy, dirty…this is not the scene I would set, but you must know that I…” He took off his cap and rubbed his hair ragged. “I’ve been working at Pembrook Park for nearly four years. All the women I see, week after week, they’re the same. Nearly from the first, that morning when we were alone in the park, I guessed that you might be different. You were sincere.” He reached for her hand. He seemed to gain confidence, his lips started to smile, and he looked at her as though he never wished to look away.