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FINAL EXTRACTION
INTERFACE REACHED
EPILOGUE:
OIPEP EMERGENCY SAFE HOUSE
(ESH: “KINGFISHER”)
SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE LONDON
That was my second death.
Which brought me to my third life: I didn’t make it through the golden door. Just as I was about to step over the threshold, I heard a woman’s voice calling me back. I didn’t want to go back. I guess that isn’t hard to understand. But the voice kept calling and the door began to recede into the white mist that also wrapped itself around the shapes of my mother and my father, then around me, until I couldn’t feel them beside me anymore but felt something or someone else, hugging me, and then there was this sensation of falling and this being was falling with me. I didn’t have to hear the voice calling me beloved to know who it was. I “pushed” against him. I was hungry and tired and I never wanted to leave my mom again, but I heard Not yet, not yet, my beloved.
I told him I hated him. I told him it wasn’t fair, that some fine guardian angel he was, letting me steal his Sword and letting all the knights get killed and me too—twice now. I wanted to stay with my mom.
Someone kept calling me, though, and that someone wasn’t the Archangel Michael.
That someone was Abigail Smith.
“Alfred . . . Alfred . . . ! Alfred, can you hear me?”
I opened my eyes. I was lying in a bed inside a room with whitewashed walls and a wooden floor, and beside me on a little table was a vase full of flowers. Daisies, I think.
“Oh, crap,” I said. “Extracted again.”
She was sitting beside the bed, smiling, and the white on the walls seemed yellow compared to her dazzling orthodontics.
“More lives than a cat,” she said.
“Two down, seven to go,” I said. “Where am I?”
“A safe house.”
“Am I? Safe?”
“Of course you are.”
“Where’s Sam?”
“He’s here. Would you like to see him?”
“Maybe not right now. Did he tell you what happened after you left Camp Echo?”
She nodded. She took my hand. “I should not have left you there, Alfred.”
“Well, that’s obvious,” I snapped back. “Why did you?”
“I believed the only hope of saving you was a direct appeal to the board.”
“And you didn’t know what Nueve was planning?”