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by Christopher Pate
‘The future bears down upon each one of us with all the hazards of the unknown. The only way out is through.’
Plutarch
PHILLIPA CRENSHAW SHRIEKED and cringed beside the wrecked SUV as the cloud’s shadow swept across her trembling form, momentarily dimming the noonday sun.
‘Damn it, damn it, damn it,’ she panted, crouching amid chunks of the coffee shop’s wall scattered across the cracked sidewalk, fingers clutching the buckled fender and badly canted tire. Tentatively peering past the bent metal, her gaze swept upward toward an azure slice visible overhead from the depths of the concrete slot canyon where she cowered. Ragged grey filaments trailed and disappeared past the roof edges, following the lone cloud as it sailed out of sight. No other clouds tumbled into view.
The brief upward glimpse made Crenshaw’s chest constrict and pulse thump at her temples. Her vision narrowed as she slipped to her knees beside the wrecked vehicle. Her ears roared, and the pain in her chest amplified as panic took hold, threatening to immobilize her in this horridly exposed place.
A voice whispered in her ear, at least it seemed to. A familiar voice. One she trusted once upon a time. A voice from long, long ago—twelve days or more. Fifteen? Twenty? Her thoughts whirled and fluttered blackly. All she wanted to do was wedge herself beneath the SUV until she felt safe, but she clutched at that remembered voice, clinging to it desperately. She was drowning on that sidewalk and lashed out to grip the only thing that might keep her afloat and prevent her from plunging down into the inky depths of her fears.
Crenshaw took a long, shuddering breath and focused inwardly, re-imagining the space where she knelt. Reconstructing it with eyes screwed tightly shut and tears rolling down her cheeks, forming a bubble of the scene with herself at the centre, and pushing it outward bit by bit to reveal more and more of the remembered setting. She held the vision. Gripped it tightly. Her breathing slowed and deepened. Nothing threatened. Nothing leered from the shadows of the ruined coffee shop. Nothing lurked inside the wrecked SUV. Nothing prowled the sliver of sky above. She was alone on the sidewalk. Isolated and safe—as safe as she could be these days. Her eyelids slowly cracked open, and she gradually confirmed her inner vision’s truth.
She unlimbered and dusted herself off but kept her eyes cast downward, not daring to glimpse the sky. Still somewhat shaky, she looked into the SUV once more. No bodies. She breathed a sigh of relief, but her nose had already told her there weren’t any before her eyes confirmed the truth. The steering wheel and deflated airbag were glazed in old blood dried to a slick sheen, but there were no rotting corpses. No blackened skeletons. Whoever crashed here walked or was carried away. She wondered how far they’d gotten.
Metal screeched as she tugged the driver’s door open. The sharp echoing noise made her flinch again and drop into a half-crouch, eyes snapping automatically up toward the blue, using her peripheral vision to scan for movement. She waited, breath held and teeth biting lip, for several thudding heartbeats. The sky remained unblemished. Empty. Safe.
Her breath puffed through pursed lips as she began to rifle through the interior. It was mostly junk. The kind of things that come loose in a crash. Items from under and between the seats. Things spilled out of the glove box and from the centre console. Discarded things. Forgotten things. As if they all sprang purposefully back into awareness during the awful moment of collision to add their old weight to newly flying debris—glass and shattered plastic. The cast-aside and the unexpected merged and mingled during the crescendo of tearing metal, screeching tyres, and abruptly cut-off screams.
Crenshaw searched through the debris of someone else’s life and tucked each thing of potential value into the bag hanging at her side. After she’d been over everywhere she could reach, she moved cautiously around the wreck and into the coffee shop with guarded glances toward but not quite up to the blue sky. The place was thoroughly looted, but she righted a chair and sat at one of the small tables to examine her finds well away from the big, shattered window, deep in the cloaking, comforting shadows.
An unopened water bottle, full and clear. A small bag of trail mix. Some Chapstick, partially used. Gum in a plastic container gone hard, but probably still chewable if she felt like giving her jaw muscles a workout. A pen and a small notepad, the pages untouched. A small pocket knife with a good blade. All useful stuff.
But the thing that made her fingers tremble so that she had to make fists and calm her breathing for several moments was the palm-sized object placed centre-most amongst her prizes on the dusty table—a portable USB charger.
Crenshaw bent to carefully examine the ports, unwilling to handle the charger too much, reluctant to put too much hope into the find. Hope was not something one held onto when the sky turned on you and everyone you knew, even those you didn’t and would never know.
She rummaged through her bag until grimed fingers found looped cables. The bag’s canvas strap remained about her body as she hunched forward, looking over cable ends until she found the right one. Carefully, almost timidly, she slotted it into the charger and snapped an adapter on the other end of the cable.
‘Please, please, please,’ came the low whisper as she plugged the adapter cable into the phone. Her shoulders slumped when there was no reaction. Then her phone beeped once, and the charging indicator began to pulse with a dim amber glow. Crenshaw sat back in the chair as a tear rolled down one cheek.
‘This calls for a little celebration.’ Her voice fell softly in the tossed coffee shop. She cracked open the water bottle and gestured in a toast toward the SUV outside. She drank deeply and then carefully sliced open the trail mix with the penknife, unwilling to trust tearing it open with shaky fingers and scattering the precious contents across the dirty floor.
Munching one tiny piece at a time, she arranged the mix into little piles. Raisins here. Nuts there. Pretzel pieces over there. Slivers of dried banana and mango made a bright centrepiece to the arrangement. The candy-coated chocolate bits were carefully scooped back into the bag she wrapped tightly with a rubber band and placed back into the canvas sack.
The sunlight slanting in through the shattered windows arced across the floor but thankfully never dimmed as the sun slowly slid westward.
Crenshaw savoured the last of the dried fruit when the phone’s charge light glowed green instead of amber. She pulled the plug on the phone immediately to save any remaining charge and re-rolled the cable, detaching the adapter and methodically tucking each within the bag alongside the newfound charger. She licked her suddenly dry lips and took another small sip of water before thumbing the phone’s power button. She left the phone on the table, reluctant to touch it as the power-up cycle progressed. When the screen was ready, she leaned over to peer at the indicators. Battery 100%. No Wi-Fi. No bars.
She stood and held it up, moving around in a slow circle, but still got no reception. She turned it off with a sigh, deeply conscious of uselessly wasting energy, and slipped the phone into the inner pocket of her jacket. Her eyes closed slowly as she mumbled to herself.
‘Either there are no towers still working, or there’s too much concrete between the phone and any that still might be. Whaddya gonna do now, Crenshaw?’ She had no answer to her question by the time she fell asleep, huddled beneath the coffee shop’s counter upon tablecloths and aprons piled for a rude bed. She clutched two more full water bottles found beneath the aprons. Someone’s buried treasure. Hers now.
She dreamed of cloudless starry skies, but the placid dream curdled into a nightmare as the far-off rumble of thunder intruded.
Crenshaw crept from one place of concealment to the next. A shop doorway. Beneath a delivery truck. A subway entrance. Under the torn, drooping awning of a burned-out bookstore. She slipped from grey, pooling shadow to the dim, watery shade beneath a hazy sky the colour of steel. A grey hunched form that moved furtively, hesitantly, like a lone gazelle on the edge of the veldt, wary of unseen, hungry eyes in the tall, sun-seared grass.
Huddled in some corporate office’s ground floor amidst shattered glass and broken furniture, Crenshaw checked a street map. Navigating street to street was challenging with all the wreckage and ruin. The blocks she once knew so well had become a bewildering warren of fallen masonry, glittering shards of glass, tangles of charred vehicles, and collapsed buildings.
Time was leaking away. Her watch still kept time, but she didn’t like looking at it. It made everything more real, somehow. More painful. Crenshaw’s eyes flicked downward. The time wasn’t important. It wasn’t what bored its way deep into her head. It was still morning. It was the date that bothered her.
It had only been three weeks since that day.
A mere twenty-one days since everything changed. When everything had come undone. After the world Crenshaw knew unravelled. It didn’t even have a name—the day when the sky turned on everyone.
She crept to the edge of a doorway, took a long, cleansing breath, clenched her fists, and nodded. Prepared herself. Little by little, she lifted her head, craned her neck upward, and felt the sun fall on her face, but kept her eyes tightly closed. The soothing voice echoed once more in her thoughts. When she felt ready at last, her eyes opened. An unsullied blue strip overhead met her gaze. She held the view for several thumping heartbeats, but the sky remained clear. She tore her eyes away with a relieved shudder and peered closely at the map, nodding after several moments. Another block, and she’d be at the tallest building in the city. If any place could get reception, she figured it would be the top floors or the roof.
Of course, that would mean climbing into the sky. The mere thought weakened her knees and caused black flowers to blossom at the edges of her vision. She leaned against the door frame, closed her eyes again, and concentrated on controlling her suddenly ragged breathing and calming her thudding heart. This part of the city was picked over. Stripped. Crenshaw knew she couldn’t stay any longer but couldn’t bring herself to randomly head off on a compass point. She was too methodical, too careful, and too fearful of trusting luck in finding a safe haven. Luck didn’t have a place in this new, terrifying world.
She needed a plan. Needed to know where she was headed and map out a route. To find hiding places along the way and seek the path of least exposure. If someone responded to emergency calls, they might tell her where to go. She could plan, work out the details, and control her fear. She might live.
With no plan, and no destination plotted out ahead of time, she might end up on a road among empty fields with nothing to break up the openness for miles. Trapped beneath the awful, traitorous blue bowl.
Crenshaw forced the terrible thought down. Down deep. That was what she was going to avoid. It wasn’t her fate. At least she clung to the hope it wouldn’t be.
She leaned out, staying within the shadows but far enough to look down the street. A few cars and trucks clotted the avenue, but a fire truck, its ladder spilled off to one side, blocked the view of the cross street she needed to get to. Beyond the fire truck, a thin, greasy trail of smoke wound up between the grey bulks of buildings defining and confining the street. With another deep breath and a final nod, she left the shadows at a trot.
She came across the first skeleton a few yards along the avenue.
The bones lay where the person had fallen, burnt dry and utterly desiccated, but with a greasy patina of seared blood and muscle that shimmered sickly in the sunlight. Hard and blackened as if exposed to extreme heat—intense enough to melt the flesh off the bones. It looked as if someone had immolated themselves or been doused in gasoline and set ablaze, but the asphalt beneath wasn’t scorched or blackened. It never was.
Crenshaw couldn’t make out the gender. Not that it mattered. There were so many blackened remains like this all over the city. Their number was beyond counting, but each never failed to make her stomach knot and flip. The seared skull grinned mockingly as she crouched in the doorway of a haberdashery, staring at the blasted bones, and heard the screams of that day echo in her head once more.
It had been a pleasant spring day with summer’s oppressive heat and humidity still weeks away. Crenshaw walked in the park with her therapist, Cynthia. They were working on overcoming Crenshaw’s suffocating phobia that had made her all but a hermit for the past two years. Progress had been good through months of therapy. Still, it was a pleasing revelation that she carried on a relaxed chat as the pair walked—out in the open, exposed, unsheltered—and mingled with families, couples, joggers, and people walking their dogs beneath flowering trees. Everyone relished the sweetly fragranced, lovely spring day. That last, wondrous, carefree day.
It was a good day. A day Crenshaw believed signalled a long-awaited change in her life by finally overcoming her stultifying fear. A return to an ordinary life seemed finally within reach. She and Cynthia paused in their stroll to admire the mirror sheen of the pond. The azure above reflected upon the still surface. The sight hadn’t made Crenshaw feel faint or dizzy. She stood next to the woman who had helped overcome her fears and anxieties and found she could appreciate the tranquil loveliness of the scene.
‘Your fear isn’t anything truly new, Phillipa. Imagine how our hominid ancestors felt when confronted with the wide-open savanna separating clumps of their familiar, safe forests. The unknowns. The dangers lurking unseen in the tall grass. They had to control their fear, not let it rule them—overwhelm them. Fear is a good friend who looks out for us, but sometimes it’s over-exuberant.’ Cynthia’s analogy played on her patient’s anthropological interests, bringing a smile to Crenshaw’s lips.
‘Well, at least I don’t have to climb any trees today. One phobia at a time,’ Crenshaw quipped, and they chuckled. At the time, she imagined the memory of that day would be with her for the rest of her life. And it was, but not for the reasons she thought in those idyllic moments.
A peculiar sensation staggered Crenshaw, and she clutched at her therapist’s arm. Cynthia groaned and wobbled too. The world seemed to go out of focus and tilt nauseatingly. Bile rushed up Crenshaw’s throat, and she bent to spit up the light lunch they enjoyed before the stroll. The therapist, too, fell to her knees and retched. All around, people cried out, moaned, and reeled. Dogs went wild and rushed about, howling and snapping at anyone who drew near.
As quickly as the sensation came, it was gone. Crenshaw felt fine again. Head clear, and everything in focus and right as it ever was. All around, voices murmured in concern. She stared. Everyone seemed to have been affected. A few people were still kneeling, and some lay crumpled in the grass. None of the dogs were anywhere to be seen. She bent to help her therapist rise.
That’s when she saw it.
A lone cloud, typical of any spring or summer day, rolled across the cerulean bowl above. Fluffy and brilliantly white beneath the sun. Insubstantial and lovely in contrast to the deep blue it traversed.
But it was moving fast as if driven by hurricane winds. Still, that wasn’t all that unusual. Crenshaw’s muddy mind knew winds could move at different speeds at ground level and aloft. Yet, it seemed to plough across the blue with unnerving determination. A lone cloud stalked across the otherwise empty heavens.
Then it changed direction sharply, angling toward the park—and dove.
Its roiling bulk engulfed the buildings lining the park to the west. It was odd, very odd behaviour. Crenshaw’s thoughts were molasses-slow as she helped her therapist to stand. Clouds were only clots of moisture at the mercy of the wind, weren’t they? Clouds didn’t behave like this. The thin wails and shrieks echoing across the green space reached their ears a moment later. A chorus of agonized voices rose and spread, drawing closer as the cloud rolled into the park.
The swirling vapor advanced bull-like, ploughing over and through everything in its path. As the people were engulfed, sickly-hued lights throbbed within the wispy bulk. The cloud seemed to fatten, growing more substantial as it rolled along. Where the misty, semi-transparent wisps tumbled, people fell shrieking and didn’t rise.
She tugged at Cynthia’s arm, screaming at her to run, but the woman’s knees gave out, and the therapist sank to the grass once more to gape at the on-rushing mist, eyes wide in confusion and disbelief. A strange sound burbled in the woman’s throat. In later dreams, Crenshaw would recognize the tone—horrified revelation.
‘You were right, Phillipa. Oh my god, you were right.’
However, Crenshaw wasn’t confused and had no trouble believing what she had witnessed. It was precisely what she’d feared all her adult life. The gnawing anxiety that had built until she had become a shut-in, paralyzed from stepping outside her basement apartment door. What she’d spent two years attempting to prevail over. It was everything she dreaded. The sky was predatory. It hungered, and it had come to feed at last.
Crenshaw never clearly recalled fleeing the park. She supposed she must have, or she would have been dead like all the others who didn’t run or couldn’t run fast enough. She’d left the woman who had befriended and coached her back to sanity and society. Left her to be devoured by the ravenous cloud. She only remembered huddling later in her tiny, dark apartment. Her TV blared. Sirens wailed outside. Jets thundered overhead. Bombs and artillery boomed. The floor trembled, and plaster shook loose to drift down from the ceiling as she cowered beneath her bed.
The TV broadcast blackened skeletons in the park or others fallen in the city’s streets. Amateur videos showed airplanes plummeting from the skies to smash into fiery ruin in fields, against mountains, and crashing into suburbs. Shaky camera views as someone walked through a skyscraper’s office spaces where the cubicle aisles were choked with dark, skeletal forms. A highway jumbled with crumpled cars, buses, and trucks. Fires raged amid the bones on the pavement and within the vehicles. All the bodies were stripped of flesh. All were seared to blackened bones.
Only bones were ever left in a predatory cloud’s wake. No one crawled, walked, flew, drove, or ran out of the hunting clouds. Ever.
Theories flew on radio, TV, and the internet for as long as they lasted. A quantum experiment gone wrong. Aliens. A new weapon of our earthly adversaries. A collision between parallel universes. Or maybe God was just sick and tired of humanity. It really didn’t matter. All the sirens, the jet noises, gunshots, and booming rumbles of warfare, ceased entirely by the fourth day. After the first week, the screams stopped too.
Mostly.
She made the lobby of the target building by midday. Huddled behind the security desk, she paused to drink and eat a little. With no power, a very long climb awaited her—fifty storeys according to the floorplan near the desk. That high up, she might get a phone signal or, failing that, at least catch sight of something to better inform her direction of escape from this dead city. She’d have to check the sky out of the windows often to ensure no clouds stalked nearby. The higher she climbed, the greater the danger and the slimmer the chance for escape.
Crenshaw stood at last and shouldered her bag, checked her phone was secure, and stored away the dwindling water supply. As she entered the stairwell, she thought scavenging office spaces might not be out of the question.
She cracked a light stick, hanging it about her neck, and climbed, step by step. It was dark and claustrophobic, but fortunately, she had no problem with such spaces—she found them comforting.
It was a long, hot, and exhausting trudge. She paused every five floors to rest and sip a little water. At the thirtieth, she cautiously peeked out the stairwell door.
The floor seemed occupied by what was once an accounting firm. She made her way carefully and quietly toward a window at the end of the hall. Sunshine streamed in, yellow and hot, forcing Crenshaw to pause and blink until her eyes adjusted to the brilliance. After a few moments, she approached the window, steeling herself. Finally, she peered through the window while standing outside the slanting light beams. No clouds were visible.
She plucked the phone from her jacket, powered it up, and moved to one side of the window, holding it in front of the glass. No bars. A disappointed sigh fell past chapped lips. She was about to power it off and tuck it away when she gasped and nearly dropped the phone.
The Wi-Fi symbol flickered and steadied. She quickly thumbed, trying to access the network, but it refused to connect. Crenshaw decided the signal was too weak. Who had working Wi-Fi? And power? It had to be on one of the floors above. The surrounding buildings were too far away. Slipping the phone into her pocket, she entered the stairwell again, taking the steps two at a time as she climbed.
On the forty-fifth floor, she heard a low, indistinct rumbling from above. Not thunder, for it went on and on. By the forty-seventh, the stairwell walls reverberated, making them quiver against her outstretched fingers.
The door on the forty-eighth floor was blocked open. Light streamed into the stairwell, and Crenshaw heard shouting voices from within, amidst a generator’s coughing roar. Flattened beside the door, she rechecked her phone and saw the Wi-Fi signal was strong, but when she tried to access it, she found it was secured.
‘Shit,’ Crenshaw hissed. The word was drowned in the generator’s harsh voice. Booted feet ran past, and the light blinked as bodies passed before the door. Voices shouted once more, and she thought she made out something like, ‘…max power…’ and ‘…we’re a go…’ Curiosity and the prospect of finding other people proved more potent than her resurgent fears, and she knelt beside the door, cautiously peering inside.
This floor had been under construction or renovation on that day because it was stripped down and wide open, but for the outer walls and windows. Men and women in military uniforms rushed about, tending two large and several smaller generators. Computers blinked and scrolled data where they perched upon large impact cases. Two figures in dark suits stood near a large flatscreen, their fingers a blur on keyboards and odd-looking controls, but what speared Crenshaw’s attention was the strange machinery hulking beside one huge window. Light pulsed along its steel frame, and a steady drone that made her teeth ache pitched up as the rear of the strange device throbbed brighter and brighter.
A soldier skittered to a stop as he spotted the crouching Crenshaw. He looked surprised but quickly smiled and waved her closer. After a few hesitant moments, she emerged from the shadows and stood beside the man.
‘Didn’t know there was anyone still alive around here!’ He shouted to be heard over the multiple generators. ‘You’re lucky. We haven’t seen anyone else in days.’
Crenshaw grimaced at the machinery’s thunder, the weird device’s keening, and the soldier’s shouts. So long with only her voice and the sound of the wind, she felt as if she had been plunged into a cacophonous tempest.
‘What’s going on?’ she finally shouted back. It pained long under-used vocal cords to be heard over the noise.
‘Field test!’ The soldier’s arm gestured out the window. ‘We may have found a way to reverse the quantum effects that made the clouds turn on us. There’s one coming into range now!’ Crenshaw blanched and felt her knees go watery as a fat cloud hove into view over the city’s skyline. It didn’t simply drift across the azure firmament; it bore down with terrible intent on the building in which they stood. Focused. Hungry.
There was a shouted command. The light playing over the machine at the window shifted to a pulsing violet that was hard to look at, and the generators’ roars deepened and slowed under an intensifying load.
No radiant energy beam swept out from the machine toward the cloud. No hot burst of light and ear-shattering noise. Just that low, teeth-vibrating hum. The uniformed men and women started pointing and smiling as the two suits continued to hammer at their controls.
The cloud’s headlong plunge toward them faltered, and it began to dissipate and drift away. Like a ship suddenly gone rudderless before a strong wind, it slanted hard away from the building, its wisps sloughing off, fading into nothingness. It broke up even as Crenshaw’s tearing eyes stared.
‘It’s working,’ shouted the soldier. ‘It’s working!’ Military personnel clapped each other’s shoulders, whooping and pumping fists. Crenshaw dared for a moment to smile, tears rolling down her cheeks. The cloud shrank and dissolved.
A shuddering bang made her jump. One of the large generators choked to a metal-screeching halt. The second large generator growled in protest at the increased load and spewed sparks. The device’s hum fell off, and the violet hues lancing over its angles and lines flared and went dark. Faces fell as the celebration died as quickly as it had erupted. More shouts and barked commands. Soldiers raced to revive the now-silent generator. The suits turned to face the window—sweat gleamed on their pallid features.
Outside the window, the cloud slowly re-congealed and stopped drifting. Within a few heartbeats, it began to close once more upon the building where they stood with appalling swiftness and unstoppable purpose.
Crenshaw bolted for the door. Her breath rasped in harsh gasps and cries of animal fear. The military fought to the last moment to revive the machine, but they were too slow to counter the thing that swept down on them. She paused for a moment at the door to glance back. The cloud rolled against the building and melted through the walls and windows, rolling over the people in a horrifying spill of otherwise cool, moist air. Immediately screams exploded from frothing lips, and flesh began to cook off their bones only to be whipped away into the cloud. A red-black mist oozed off each person caught within the intangible wisps. Its tendrils and wisps thickened—fattened—upon the kills, as it fed voraciously. The smell of burned flesh smashed her nostrils like a bloodied fist.
She half-tumbled, half-raced down the many flights of stairs until she collapsed, panting, inside the building’s ground-floor lobby. She coughed up bloody spittle and could hardly rise on weak, shaky legs, but she knew deep down, with a prey animal’s keen sense of utter vulnerability, that she mustn’t linger inside the killing grounds. She staggered out to the street, plastering herself against the building’s wall, eyes darting as she frantically sought an avenue of escape. A safe place to cower and hide. Someplace to simply survive the next few minutes. She risked a glance upward.
The cloud enveloped the building’s upper floors. It descended slowly. An engorged predator leisurely sucked the bloody marrow from the skyscraper’s bones.
Ground-level movement caught her eye. Two soldiers near a subway entrance waved to her urgently, gesturing toward the darkness at their backs—the safe, deep, confining darkness.
She pelted across the street, bag slapping at her side and her breath sawing in agonized gasps.
A soldier caught Crenshaw as she stumbled at the very end. The woman spoke into her ear.
‘Did it work? Did anyone else make it?’
‘Only for a moment.’ Crenshaw shook her head, wheezing out the words. ‘And no.’
The soldier grimaced. ‘Damn it. We thought this might be the answer. Better go down. The haven is a long hike, but it’s safe. The clouds can’t go that deep. There’s food, water, and warmth. Go on.’
Crenshaw nodded numbly, clutching her bag. The second soldier pointed into the darkness below, lit by chem lights at intervals—a green trail leading into the earth’s bowels.
She paused in the entry as the soldiers waved a few more survivors from surrounding buildings toward the subway. And at that moment, something Cynthia had said on that day long ago amidst warm spring sunshine returned to her. In her friend’s words lurked a hidden epiphany. A hard lesson that sank in bone-deep. Humans weren’t always at the top of the food chain, and each knew deep down—cell deep—how to survive predators if only those primal instincts were heeded. Don’t panic. Band together. Be cautious. Hide. Be the smart prey until we no longer had to be prey. Until the day the tables could be turned on the predators.
Before she entered the deep underground beneath the city, Crenshaw turned to look up at the sky for perhaps the last time. Lips curling into a defiant snarl, she flipped off the cloud hugging the building’s upper floors and the deep blue overhead, shouting, ‘We’ll be back! We’ll be back with the spear and the fire. We’ll be back, you bastards, and then you’ll be the hunted!’
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