Head of Zeus

though its original purpose observation? Defence, maybe? was long forgotten or possibly preserved somewhere, buried deep in a government archive. Now it was being noted by officialdom again.
Hanlon peered in through the glassless window. Inside the hexagonal interior of the building she could see the two CSI men in their white disposable overalls, gloved and booted, masked, and in plastic caps, working in the blaze of two powerful arc lights powered by the generator outside. She watched as they carried

Well. Because I love you, Bunny. Actually. You’re actually my favorite.

You’re my favorite too, I lied. But in that moment, I meant it. I meant it so much I cried.

(Is it me drowning you, Samantha, or did you wade in here of your own free will, your pockets full of black stones?)

A pause so pregnant it delivers, consumes its own spawn, then grows big with child again

It was hard to tell because the eyes were as dark as the rest of it, except when the light caught them just right, then they gleamed a golden color.

The horn blew

Therefore, we have to leave and then ignite the protective state."

"How will be get back in?" Cara asked.

"I will have to shut the thing down. I know the sequence necessary to inactivate the spell. Once I shut it down, though, I don't believe it can be reactivated, so we dare not shut it down unless it's absolutely necessary for some reason, or until

With the back of her wrist, Rachel wiped sweat from her forehead. She knew that as soon as she stopped working she would get cold, but at the moment she was sweating. It was hard to stop, because she was in a hurry. She knew that she couldn't hurry when she was stopped for the night, but she still felt driven to rush, so she raced to as she built her shelter.

Kahlan said. She smiled sheepishly. “Like this, I mean.”

Dortmunder slumped on the hard wooden chair, watching his attorney try to open a black attaché case. Two little catches were supposed to release when two bright buttons were pressed, but neither of them worked. In other cubicles all around this one, defendants and their court-appointed attorneys murmured together, structuring threadbare alibis, useless mitigations, attenuated extenuations, mathematically questionable plea bargains, chimerical denials and hopeless appeals to the mercy of the court, but in this cubicle, with its institutional green walls, its black linoleum floor, the great hanging globe of light, the frosted-glass window in its door, its battered wooden table and two battered wooden chairs and one battered metal waste-basket, nothing was happening at all, except that the attorney assigned to Dortmunder by an uncaring court and a malevolent fate couldn’t get his goddam attaché case open. “Just a—” he muttered. “It’s always a—I don’t know why it—I’ll—It’s just a—”
Dortmunder shouldn’t have been here at all, of course, waiting for his preliminary hearing on several hundred counts of burglary and knowing he was merely the victim of another accident of fate. Two weeks, two solid weeks, he’d cased that TV repair shop—he’d even brought in a perfectly good Sony table model and let them charge him for six new tubes and nine hours’ labor—and not once had any police patrol gone down the alley behind the row of stores. A prowl car cruised past the front from time to time, but that was all. And the cops were definitely never there when the pornographic movie house around the corner let out; at those moments they were always parked across the street from the theater, glaring through their windshield as the patrons came slinking past, as though their moral disapproval would somehow make up for their legal inef