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The flames licked his porch and the hot air had blown out two of the
windows on the second story. The flames were lapping at the outside of
the building, crawling over the inside walls.
No coincidence.
Kurt coughed hard, his chest spasming against Alan's back. Alan set him
down, as in a dream. As in a dream, he picked his way through the flames
on his porch and reached for the doorknob. It burned his hand.
It was locked. His keys were in Kurt's door, all the way up Augusta.
"Around the back," Bentley called, headed for the fence gate. Alan
vaulted the porch rail, crashing though the wild grasses and ornamental
scrub. "Come on," Bentley said.
His hand throbbed with the burn. The back yard was still lit up like
Christmas, all the lights ablaze, shining through the smoke, the ash of
books swirling in it, buoyed aloft on hot currents, fragments of words
chasing each other like clouds of gnats.
"Alan," Kurt croaked. Somehow, he'd followed them back into the
yard. "Alan." He held out his hand, which glowed blue-white. Alan looked
closer. It was his PDA, stubby wireless card poking out of it. "I'm
online. Look."
Alan shook his head. "Not now." Mimi, somewhere up there was Mimi.
"Look," Kurt croaked. He coughed again and went down to his knees.
Arnos took the PDA in hand and peered at it. It was a familiar app, the
traffic analysis app, the thing that monitored packet loss between the
nodes.
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