Nio awoke in a box amid a tangle of human limbs. Wide-eyed, she kicked and pushed—only to brush against the impossible silkiness of synthetic skin. A bald sex doll stared serenely past her in the dark, seemingly enraptured at whatever fate was about to befall them. For a moment, Nio was mesmerized. The doll didn’t seem fake at all. Her skin was more than simple silicone. It had tiny pores and very faint hairs and it wrinkled slightly at her slender knuckles. Her lavender irises, glistening as if moist, were speckled in beautiful imperfections. The dimples around her areola were varied and asymmetrical. She looked organic—alive, even. But she didn’t look real. She couldn’t be. Her eyes were enormous, her nose little more than a pert knob. Her full, supple lips smoldered in permanently passionate pink. She wasn’t real because she was fake. She wasn’t real because she was hyper-real.
“I don’t suppose you can get me out of here,” Nio joked.
As her panic subsided, pain returned. She grimaced and shut her eyes. Her head throbbed from Dalrymple’s blow. She needed her pills. Ostensibly, they were still in her jacket, which was wrapped warmly around her. But amid the nest of limbs, some of which had been detached from their torsos, she couldn’t move. She struggled to slide her right arm up, but her elbow kept getting caught in the crook of an inhumanly perfect knee.
The heavy box shook then as if being loaded into a vehicle. When it kept shaking, Nio realized it wasn’t a vehicle. It was a rumbling conveyor. When it stopped, she heard a muffled roar. She felt the heat almost immediately.
She was being incinerated.
So realistic were the dolls that Nio glanced instinctively to the goddess as if to gauge her reaction to their shared predicament.
“You’re no help,” she said, struggling.
Nio had to admit, it was a clever way to dispose of a body. They wouldn’t have to worry about hiding her remains. Any sanitation worker who handled the mess wouldn’t think twice about seeing teeth or hair.
The smell of smoke hit her nostrils and she shut her eyes to keep from panicking. She pulled and pushed and kicked.
“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” she screamed, over and over, as if it were a magic chant.
Smoke gathered in swirls until she could barely breathe. When she couldn’t hold her breath anymore, she inhaled and coughed uncontrollably. The heat intensified and her scalp tingled. A glob of molten plastic fell across the face of her companion and melted away her pert nose, revealing her hollow interior.
The box shook hard and Nio turned and fell with the limbs and bodies across the cool floor. She coughed and coughed, trying to catch her breath while scrambling to her feet. Someone grabbed her and she struggled.
She saw Dalrymple flat on the warehouse floor.
“It’s okay!” Del said. “It’s okay. I got you.”
He let her go and she slipped to the ground again. They were in a small tool-lined workshop walled in sheet metal. The incinerator stood above the floor on six legs, like a steel insect. The side release was open and flames spewed like jet exhaust. The interior was lined in glowing ceramic tiles. Del stepped over to turn a lever and the door slid shut.
“You are officially trouble,” he said.
Nio was on her back coughing and panting for air. “Are—” She coughed. “Are you following me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I told you. Nothing good happens there.”
She looked to the big man on the floor, half expecting his arm to shoot forward and grab her throat. “How’d you—” She coughed again.
“I got lucky. We gotta go.”
He grabbed her jacket. Before she could object to his explanation, he jerked her to her feet.
“No.” She pulled away and almost fell again. “They’re gonna kill her.”
“Who?”
“The alabaster girl. She—she asked for my help. They’re gonna kill her. We gotta call the police. We gotta—”
“Okay, okay. But we gotta get out of here first.”
Nio was swaying on her feet, and Del reached for her again.
“Where’s your phone?” she asked. “We gotta call 911.”
“We can’t.”
“Are you listen—”
Del covered her mouth and shot a glance back toward the open garage door. “Would you be quiet! The city cops all work for Raffe. Or may as well anyway. You saw how they were at the roadblock. Folks around here know that if you get in trouble, you call the county sheriff, which I already did. Understand?”
Nio nodded and he removed his hand.
“How long will it take him to get here?” she asked.
“Depends on where his people are. It’s a big county.”
“I thought you said we were five minutes from everywhere.”
“In town,” he objected, dragging her out of the shop. “My truck’s parked around the block.”
“If we pull up in that, they’ll know it’s us.”
“Pull up? Pull up where?”
She yanked her arms out of her jacket and trotted unsteadily back to the unconscious Dalrymple.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Del demanded in a stout whisper. “Are you trying to get us killed?”
Nio kicked him and stepped back. When he didn’t move, she reached into his jacket and found the fob to Maybach. She pressed the button and heard a car beep and start its nearly silent engine.
Del threw her coat at her and followed her into the back of the luxury car.
“You’re not coming” she said.
“You clearly can’t take care of yourself.”
“Whatever,” she scoffed, fumbling with the fob. “I don’t have time to argue with you. Take us to the ranch,” she told the vehicle.
“I’m sorry,” it said pleasantly. “You are not an authorized driver.”
“This is an emergency!”
“Please speak or type your emergency code.” A keyboard appeared on the touchscreen in the dash.
“Stupid machine.” Nio climbed in the front and began tapping.
Del watched her access the car’s settings. “Are you seriously trying to hack a half-million-dollar car with your finger?”
“What do you think hacking is?” she asked as she held down the left turn blinker while tapping the clock button three times. The car’s BIOS appeared on the screen in white letters on a deep blue background.
“Cars like this have anti-theft,” Del said, “remote disabling, all that.”
“Exactly. But say for some reason you leave the car at a friend’s, or at work, or at your lover’s house. Rich people don’t wanna have to go back get it.”
Del sat back. “It’ll drive itself home.”
“I’m just making sure home is where we want to go. There.” She pointed to a line of the blue screen. An address was labeled HOME.
“That’s it,” Del said. “Raffe’s is the biggest house in the county.”
Nio touched the screen and the car raised its headlights and asked them to please use their seatbelts.
“It’s not theft if you return it,” she said, climbing over the console to the passenger’s seat. “That’s hacking.”
The vehicle pulled through the slush at the edge of the parking lot and onto the main drive, where it resumed the song it had been playing: “El Paso” by Marty Robbins. After turning left at a light, the car accelerated and the lights of the town rapidly disappeared. Nio’s heart rate slowed, which brought Del’s bioelectrics to the front of her mind. They had barely changed.
“You don’t seem nervous,” she accused.
“Would you rather I freak out?”
“Not exactly,” she said as she searched the glove compartment.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think? Looking for a gun or something.”
“Raffe’s house is a mansion. What is it you think we’re gonna do there, exactly?”
“No one asked you to come,” she retorted, bending to look under the seat.
“I’m serious!”
He was. Nio felt his bioelectrics spike sharply.
“The best thing to do is wait for the sheriff,” he said. “Look. I hate to say it, but you have to accept there’s a very real chance the girl is dead already.”
“All the more reason to hurry.”
Del shook his head. “What does that even mean?”
“Her death might be the trigger.”
“The trigger for what?”
“This may come as a surprise to you, cowboy, but I didn’t schlep all the way out here to tussle with the local riffraff. Trust me, we’re dealing with someone much worse.”
“What do you mean worse?” When she didn’t answer, Del insisted. “What’s worse?”
The car dinged to announce it was nearing the destination HOME.
“The guy who posted that seq isn’t some two-bit biohacker. You really shouldn’t have come.”
“So what are going to do? Waltz in? The car bit is clever. It’ll get you through the front gate. But then what? You just gonna knock?”
Nio could see the lights of the mansion on the road ahead. Everything else but the cluster of dots at the horizon was a bleak darkness.
“I’m working on it,” she said.
Del climbed into the driver’s seat.
“What are you doing?”
“I got an idea.” He stared at the wheel. “Shit. How do you make it pull over?”
The car pulled through an automatic gate and stopped in a paved roundabout in front of a large coral-colored mansion with a false colonnade. To the west, a four-stall garage sat closed. Two cars and a Jeep were parked at an angle in the snow-covered clearing to one side. The air was still and frigid. A man in a crisp suit coat and jeans opened the front door and shivered as he waited for the car’s occupants to exit. When nothing happened, he stepped forward through the packed snow to open the passenger’s side door.
But there was no one inside.
He heard footfalls and turned just in time to get whacked across the temple by a tire iron. Del patted him down and took his gun and his keys. Then he heaved the body into the back seat of the car, where it was out of sight. He opened the trunk and Nio climbed out.
“That was a good idea.” Del smiled.
Nio scowled. “It was yours.” She looked at the line of tracks across the wide snow-covered lawn. “How did you get here so fast?”
“I keep in shape.”
“That’s 400 meters.” She glanced again. “In deep snow.”
“They’re gonna be right behind us,” he said, his voice shivering. “Why are we arguing about how fast I can run?”
“Because. It’s freaky.”
The front door of the house was wide open and several Pomeranians appeared. One of them barked. Del and Nio darted to either side of the open door. He peered inside. There was no one.
Nio saw the gun in his hand. “Where did you get that?”
“Dude had it in his jacket.”
“You’re holding it properly.”
He kept one finger loose, ready to release the safety.
“Shooting’s a thing out here.”
Nio scowled and walked in cautiously. The interior of the house was a nightmare in pastel. Everything was a similar shade of coral or taupe. But other than the dogs, which growled at her playfully and wiggled their tails, she didn’t hear anything.
She shut her eyes.
“Lab’s downstairs,” she breathed.
“How do you know?” Del whispered as he quietly shut the front.
“I just do.”
She could feel a magnetic tug emanating from below them. They walked under a chandelier that hung from the second-story ceiling of the open foyer. A wide carpeted stairway rose to a sitting area under a dome skylight. Beneath the balustrade was a hall to a long living area. Nio could see a massive TV surrounded by custom shelves. Floor-to-ceiling windows at the back revealed the house had a pool, whose side-lit winter cover was topped in snow.
She felt a faint quiver of a bioelectric field. She couldn’t see the source, but she recognized the pattern. It was the Native man who had taken Beckham. She pointed silently and mouthed the word “kitchen.” Dell nodded and crept back around the stairs to come in through the dining room. After giving him a moment, Nio peered around the doorway. The Native man was digging in the fridge and chuckling at some program in his AR goggles.
“Hey,” she said, ducking back out of sight.
She heard an exclamation of surprise followed by two fast strides. Del came from behind to grab the man in a headlock, but he was as tall as Del and they struggled. The Native man slammed Del back into the cupboards and he lost his grip. When the man turned to face his attacker, Nio kicked him in the groin from behind. He grimaced, giving Del a moment to whack him with the gun hard across the side of his head. He slumped to the tile.
They both listened. But except for dogs’ panting and the laugh track that still emanated softly from the downed man’s goggles, the house was quiet.
Plugged into the wall near Nio’s socked feet was a small orange-and-white Canine Companion—a doggie love doll, a four-legged plastic receptacle designed to appease dogs with a humping problem. A sticker on the side said CLEANSAFE RESERVOIR. Across from it was an open doorway. Polished hardwood steps took a hard left and descended to a well-lit finished basement. Nio descended slowly, occasionally closing her eyes to sense her surroundings. At the bottom, a pair of tall gun safes rested in custom-built nooks, surrounded in pictures of animal kills. She tried the handles. Locked.
The dogs barked again from the top of the hardwood steps. But they didn’t move, as if they knew they weren’t allowed on the lower floor, which was plushly carpeted and well lit. Around a bend was a long hall. The upper half of the left wall was made of glass. Beyond was a well-stocked maker lab. A blinking slab of angled plastic, a refraction panel, stood like a skinny white monolith near the full glass door, scattering EM signals and making it hard for anyone outside to eavesdrop, or detect the equipment being used. It was an expensive bit of hardware, and its presence suggested whatever they were doing there was worth a lot of time and money to conceal. It also gave Nio an immediate headache, despite that she had swallowed three pills in the car.
She grimaced.
“You okay?” Del asked.
She nodded.
“You sure?”
At the back of the lab, rows of IV stands dangled plastic bags linked to each other by looped tubing. Bubbles flowed between. They were brewing something. Three makers were set against the left wall, including an old glass-walled 3D printer, about the size of a commercial oven, that had been stripped for parts. It looked like an empty arcade claw game. On the right was a brand-new industrial sequencer. Three block canisters rotated on a central pedestal under the diamond-shaped control console. The box and sheet plastic were crumpled in the corner.
In the middle of the room was a large reclining dentist’s chair. Beckham lay on it, naked and curled in a fetal position. Nio could see her blistered back. The cysts looked different. They were darker inside and looked like spider’s eyes. Next to her, Guillermo sat motionless on a rolling stool. Del pressed a button on the wall and the glass door slid open. Nio’s headache immediately worsened, and she grimaced again. She felt like she might vomit at any moment.
Guillermo turned. He didn’t seem at all surprised. His face was blank, his eyes dull, as if his teenage brain had experienced something it didn’t know how to process.
“Anyone here besides the two guards?” Del asked.
“Celine,” he answered softly.
“Dancer?”
He nodded. “She’s upstairs.”
“Is there any other way out of the basement?”
Guillermo shook his head.
The lights cut off suddenly, and the room was side-lit by an emergency lamp in the corner neat the ceiling.
“They know we’re here,” Nio said.
“No,” Del corrected, looking at this watch. “10:00. Moving day.”
He nodded to the stairs, indicating he would cover the exit.
“She was so pretty,” Guillermo said, staring.
“Was?”
Beckham’s head was lit in a halo by the flood lamp. Nio felt her cool, stiff neck. She had a pulse. But it was weak.
Guillermo didn’t move. “Raffe wanted me to give her a third breast. A real one. Beckham’s mom died of breast cancer. Can you imagine? Raffe didn’t care. She thought it would be funny, get us a lot of publicity. Beckham didn’t want to be a circus freak. She wanted to be an angel. No one had done wings before. Real ones that could move and had feathers. I was sure there’s a way. She knew they would just be ornamental. It’s not like she could fly. But she was so excited. She was going to be like a Victoria’s Secret model. I thought if I made her the first...”
“She would like you,” Del said from the doorway.
Guillermo looked down at his hands. “But I didn’t know how.” He was holding a needle. It was empty.
“What did you do?” Nio asked, grabbing it.
He started crying softly.
“What did you do?” she demanded.
“Raffe made me give her an OD,” he sobbed.
Nio kicked the kid’s stool. As he rolled away, she dropped the needle and stomped on it. She started searching a wheeled glass-and-steel medicine cabinet.
“What are you doing?” Del asked. “We need to get her out of here.”
“She’s not gonna make it a mile without an opioid agonist.”
Del cursed. “I’m gonna go check the foyer.”
With two hands on his gun, he moved cautiously around the corner.
“Gotcha.” Nio lifted a bottle with clear liquid. She rifled through the drawers and cabinets until she found a needle. She measured an extremely large dose and injected the girl in her arm. Guillermo didn’t move. His shoulders were slumped. He was sobbing.
“Beckham? Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
“Beckham?”
Guillermo stood suddenly. “What is that?”
Nio walked around the chair. The cluster of cysts on the girl’s back were moving. Something twitched inside each, like hatching eggs. Whatever they were, they wanted out.
Beckham’s marbled body started convulsing.
“She’s having a seizure.”
Nio stepped to the medicine cabinet again as the girl went stiff as a board. She extended everything—elbows, legs, fingers—and her stiff skin cracked and bled. The cysts on her back ruptured in every direction, spewing long streams of clear mucus.
“Shit!”
Del came running. “What the fuck is that?”
The strands of mucus spread like a web from the girl to various warm spots around the room. One sagging strand stretched from a baseball-sized blister to the vent of a nearby computer screen. Another stretched toward the door. A third attached itself to Guillermo’s chest. The kid was frozen. He stared down at it, wide-eyed, as a black jellylike mass, like a hairy amoeba, wriggled out and started crawling over him. He screamed and swatted it off and jumped back into the corner.
Del covered his nose. The smell was intense—sweet but not sugary. It was pungent, like raw steak left too long in the sun. Nio looked around the room. All of the mucus strands were slowly sagging as similar amoeba, each about the size of the cyst it had emerged from, began crawling over the walls, looking for an exit. The largest, the one that erupted from the middle, squeezed through a heating vent in the ceiling, near the back of the house.
Nio watched it disappear through the slats of the grate. “Shit!”
“What do we do?” Del asked.
The blob that Guillermo had swatted to the floor had split, and a winged larva, like a soft albino dragonfly, flopped out. Its skin was flabby, and it fluttered weakly, trying to take flight. But it had hatched too early.
“What do we do?” Del repeated.
“I can hear them...” Beckham breathed. The empty red circles in the girl’s back were dripping pus.
“She’s alive.” Nio swiped the gun out of Del’s hand. “Get the sheet plastic out of the box.” She pointed to the corner. “Wrap her up. Tightly.”
“I can hear them...” the girl repeated.
“Hear them?” Nio asked. “Hear who?”
“Angels... chanting...”
Del pulled the sheet free of the cardboard and draped it like a blanket over the naked girl.
“Take the car. Get her to a hospital.” Nio glanced to Guillermo. Raffe had said his mother was a doctor. “Not the one in town. Somewhere else.”
“What about me?” Guillermo asked. His shaking hands were stretched out like he was afraid to touch himself.
“Strip,” Nio said.
“What?”
She shot the wall behind him and he began to strip as ordered.
“What are you gonna do?” Del asked, heaving the girl up from the chair.
Nio looked up. “I gotta make sure whatever got out of her doesn’t get away.”
“What the hell are those things?”
“I don’t know. Just go.”
Guillermo stood with his arms crossed in front of his boxers. He flipped his hair out of his face.
“You too,” she told him.
“What... like, outside? There’s snow.”
She walked over with the gun raised. He cowered as she pushed the barrel against his forehead. “A minute ago, you were willing to let that girl die. You’re lucky I don’t shoot you, you little brat. Now, GO.”
With hands raised defensively, the kid scampered out and up the carpeted stairs.
Del followed with some difficulty. “She’s heavier than she looks,” he said when he saw Nio’s face.
The dogs were waiting at the top. Nio shooed them out the front, where Guillermo shivered in his boxers and danced in socked feet.
“They’re here,” Nio said.
Car lights were approaching. Fast.
“Where are you going?” she asked Del, who was walking through the snow toward the garage.
“They can disable that thing, remember?”
“Fuck.” Nio glanced to the approaching lights before running after him through the snow in her socks.
“Left pocket.”
She pulled keys from Del’s mechanic’s suit. “Where did you get these?” They were stamped with the Jeep logo.
“Same place I got the gun.”
She opened the vehicle and helped Del lay Beckham in the back. The approaching vehicles crested the nearest rise. Their engines roared. Two SUVs.
“Get her out of here!” Nio yelled, running back to the house.
“Where are you going?”
“Just go!”
She ran through the living room and around to the kitchen and opened the cupboards, one after the next, until she found a bottle of vegetable oil. She trotted to the stairs and tossed some down the wall and poured a trail across the hardwood to the hall, where she set the bottle on the floor. She yanked the Canine Companion free and smashed it. Inside, the electrical cord was attached to a long heating prong. Dogs liked a warm companion, it seemed, just like people. She plugged the cord into a socket under a side table and inverted the prong into the half-empty bottle of oil. Then she ran upstairs. The dancer, Celine, was singing in a bathroom. She had lined the tub in lit candles and was soaking while smoking a joint and listening to music. Nio pushed in and shot the ceiling. The girl yelped in the water and splashed. She pulled the buds from her ears and curled her arms in front of her naked body.
“Who are you?”
Nio saw the lighter next to the candles on the tub and grabbed it. “You need to get out of here.”
“I live here! Who the hell are—”
Nio shot the wall behind the tub three times. Bits of tile flew as the young woman screamed repeatedly and ran from the bathroom, slipping once on the tile. She reached for the robe on the bed and Nio shot the bedroom wall. She heard the woman screaming all the way down the stairs to the front. She grabbed the bottle of hair spray next to the sink and stuffed it in her pocket. She heard car doors shut. The SUVs had already stopped in the roundabout.
“Shit.” Nio ran to the stairs.
“—but she’s still inside,” she heard Guillermo say.
“Go after them,” ordered another voice.
Dalrymple.
Nio backed down the hall as the second car pulled away to chase Del in the Jeep. She heard heavy footsteps enter the foyer. At least three. She ran to a bedroom and looked around. By the kid-sized clothes in the walk-in closet, it was Raffe’s. True to form, she had an antique full-length mirror. Nio rifled through the drawers for a pistol, but Dalrymple came up the stairs and she had to duck into the opulent private bath, which had a second exit on the far side. She tiptoed in the dark and quietly unlocked the other door. She listened as Dalrymple searched the two bedrooms closest to the stairs.
They didn’t know where she was. If they were smart, the other two men would be guarding the front and back doors. If she was in the basement, then she was trapped and they would find her eventually, leaving Dalrymple free to start at the top and work down.
He turned down the hall and froze when he saw her reflected in the mirror in the bedroom. She jumped up as if to escape, and Dalrymple extended his artificial arm like a battering ram and punched through the drywall. He would’ve snagged Nio easily if she hadn’t disguised her location with a second mirror in the bathroom. Raffe was nothing if not vain. Whether from haste or stupidity, the big man hadn’t noticed that the reflection wasn’t reversed, as it should’ve been. His mechanical arm punched through the wall and grabbed air, and Nio jammed the shower curtain rod between the pivots of his arm. When it retracted, the rod hit the wall and trapped him.
“FUCK!” he pulled and pulled.
As the other two men came running up the steps. Nio darted to the window over the jet-tub and dropped with socked feet into the snow of the back lawn. She immediately saw an odd trail in the otherwise pristine white. It undulated like no animal track she’d ever seen turning end-over-end as it wobbled toward an adjacent field, just beyond a line of bare trees.
Shouts.
Nio looked up. But instead of shooting at her from the window, the men inside had discovered that the house was on fire. Once the oil ignited, it spread across the hardwood and up the stairs. Soon the entire structure would be burning. With her pursuers momentarily distracted by their own safety, Nio broke cover for the field. Her socks crunched through the piled snow of an invisible ditch and she sunk to her knees.
“Shit!”
The trail passed through a row of leafless bushes to the open field beyond: a giant square bounded by straight lines of windbreaker trees. The field would be pitch black on a moonless night, but then it was covered in a foot of snow that faintly reflected the exterior lighting from the house, giving everything a twilight glow. It was empty except for three piles of railroad ties, stacked in alternating layers, and an enormous grooved metal loop, like a discarded magnet from a supercollider—at least a hundred feet across and well rusted.
A siren.
“Way to go, Del.”
But there was only one, and it was still quite distant—sound carried far in the still, cold air. She still had time to escape.
The track in the snow arced right to the railroad ties. As Nio approached, shivering, she could see they were stacked irregularly, and although not rotted through, they were deeply weathered and fraying. That gave the creature plenty of places to hide.
With toes so numb it was becoming painful to walk, Nio stepped cautiously toward the dark stacks. Her breath seeped like smoke signals from her nose as she flicked the lighter and held it. The odd track rolled into the space between the piles, where it turned quickly toward to the right. Nio knelt slowly and extended the tiny flame. There was no telling how the organism might react, and she had visions of it launching itself at her and squeezing down her throat.
But there was nothing, just a small pile of snow on the third tie from the top. In squeezing between the ties, it seemed, the organism had lost a bit of snow that had clung to it. Nio walked, flame in hand, around the stack, looking for signs of an exit. She saw the dragonfly creature struggling in the snow. It had hatched. And it was freezing.
Nio stood over it.
“Homeostasis for the win, bitch.”
She raised the can of hair spray and burned the winged larva in the snow. It popped and shrunk like plastic as it boiled, releasing a malodorous scent. Nio scrunched her nose as she waved the flame back and forth. She watched as the wings turned brown and briefly caught fire. The flame went out and there was nothing but a few thin tendrils of black.
She collapsed against the ties. Her socked feet were no longer numb. They were burning. Although she was hidden by the stack of ties, she had left an easy trail for anyone to follow. Since the odds that she could out-pace someone with proper footwear through deep snow was practically zero, she dropped to her butt and sat cross-legged, her frigid feet pressed between her thighs and the tail of her jacket. She pulled the flaps around her. Raffe’s house, now a fireball, had been built on a small rise, almost certainly for the view of the wide plains out back. Through a gap in the bare trees, Nio could see the deep core miner in the distance, its massive column-legs aglow in spiraling light, like tornadoes of blue fireworks. It was beautiful.
A few light flakes fell through the still air, and Nio held out her hand to catch one as a speckled trout landed in the snow with a plop. It twitched twice and lay gasping. Nio looked around, but there was no one who could’ve thrown it. She looked up in time to see another fall from the night sky some ten yards away. A moment later, a large striped bass fell through the tree line with a ruckus.
It was raining fish.
She heard the crunch of snow then and turned to see a woman in an octagonal hat some 20 yards away. Her uniform said Brown County Sheriff. She had a hand on her belt and looked in silence at Nio’s shoeless feet in the light from the burning house.
“H-hi,” Nio said, shivering.