I’M NOT GOING TO LIE; I hadn’t really expected to find it—the key—regardless of what I’d expressed previously; so, imagine my surprise when I searched the corpse’s stained pockets—managing, somehow, to keep a tenuous grasp on my breakfast—and touched a crenulated edge.
Bingo, I remember thinking, not lastly because it seemed to absolve Amelia—whom I’d come to suspect had taken it and not told me—but also because it would allow me to test something; something I’d been thinking about a lot since discovering the strange crater. One of many things I’d been thinking about.
I peered up at the lantern as the rain fell and the clouds drifted, as the melancholy of the day hung over everything like a shroud. Tell me now why humanity is worth saving, and why we shouldn’t finish what They started. W
