Chapter Nineteen

Marcone and company dropped me off a hundred yards from the emergency entrance to the hospital, and I had to hobble in alone. It was hard, and I was tired, but I'd been hurt worse before. It wasn't like I wanted to do this every day or anything, but after a certain point of ridiculous discomfort, the pain all feels pretty much the same.

Once I made it to the emergency room, I was a big hit. When you drag yourself inside panting and leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind you, it makes a certain impression. I had an orderly and a nurse helping me onto my stomach on a gurney within a few seconds while the nurse examined the wound.

"It isn't life-threatening," she reported after she cut away my pant leg and took a look. She glanced at me almost in accusation. "From the way you came in here, you'd think this almost killed you."

"Well," I said, "I'm kind of a wimp."

"Nasty," commented the burly orderly. He produced a clipboard layered in forms and a ballpoint pen and handed them both to me. "They'll have to cut this out."

"We'll let the doctor decide that," the nurse said. "How did this happen, sir?"

"I have no clue," I said. "I was walking down the street and all of a sudden I thought my leg was on fire."

"You walked here?" she asked.

"A helpful Boy Scout brought me most of the way," I said.

She sighed. "Well, it's been a slow day. They should be able to see to you shortly."

"That's super," I said. "Because it hurts like hell."

"I can get you some Tylenol," the nurse said primly.

"I don't have a headache. I have a four-inch piece of steel in my leg."

She passed me a paper cup and two little white tablets. I sighed and took them.

"Heh," the orderly said after she left. "Don't worry too much. They'll get you something when the doctor sees to you."

"With this kind of loving care, I probably won't need it."

"Don't be too hard on her," the orderly said. "You should see what people try so that they can get to some painkillers. Vicodin, morphine, that kind of thing."

"Yeah," I said. "Hey, man, can I ask you something?"

"Sure." He had brought a bowl of ice with him, and he started sealing it into plastic bags, which he started packing around my leg. "This should numb it a little, and maybe take down some of the swelling. It ain't a local, but it's what I've got."

The ice didn't actually burst into steam upon touching me, even though it felt like it should have. The pain didn't exactly lessen, but it did suddenly feel a little more distant. "Thanks, man. Hey, I was hoping I could talk to a couple of guys I know while I was here," I said. "They're EMTs. Gary Simmons and Jason Lamar."

The orderly lifted his eyebrows. "Simmons and Lamar, sure. They drive an ambulance."

"I know. Are they around?"

"They were on shift last night," he said. "But it's the end of the month and they might be on their swing shift. I'll ask."

"Appreciate it," I said. "If Simmons is there, tell him a school buddy is here."

"Sure. If I do that, though, you gotta do something for me and fill out these forms."

I eyed the clipboard and picked up the pen. "Tell the doc to sign me up for carpal tunnel surgery when he gets that thing out of me. Two birds with one stone."

The orderly grinned. "I'll do that."

He left me to fill in forms, which didn't used to take terribly long to fill out since I didn't have any kind of insurance. One of these days, when I had the money, I was going to have to get some. They say that when you pay for insurance you're really buying peace of mind. It might make me feel peaceful to think of how much money the company was probably going to lose on me in the long run. If I lived my whole life in the open, as I had been since I'd come to Chicago, they might be dealing with me for two or three centuries. I wondered what the yearly markup would be for a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old.

A young doctor came in after I was finished with the forms, and true to the orderly's prediction, he had to cut the shuriken out of me. I got a local, and the sudden cessation of pain was like a drug all by itself. I fell asleep while he was cutting and woke up as he was wrapping my leg up.

"... the sutures dry," he was saying. "Though from the looks of your file I suppose you know that."

"Sure, Doc," I said. "I know the drill. Do you need to take them out or did I get the other kind?"

"They'll dissolve," he said. "But if you experience any swelling or fever, get in touch. I'm giving you a prescription for something for the pain and some antibiotics."

"Follow all the printed instructions and be sure to take them all," I said, in my best surgeon-general-slash-television-announcer voice.

"Looks like you've done this as often as I have," he said. He gestured to the steel tray where the bloodied shuriken lay. "Did you want to keep the weapon?"

"Might as well. I'll have to get a souvenir in the gift shop otherwise."

"You sure you don't want the police to look at it?" he said. "They might be able to find fingerprints or something."

"I already told you guys it must have been some kind of accident," I said.

He gave me a look of extreme skepticism. "All right. If that's the way you want it." He dropped the little weapon into a metal tray of alcohol or some other sterilizer. "Keep your leg elevated. That will ease the swelling. Stay off of it for a couple of days, at least."

"No problem," I said.

He shook his head. "The orderly will be by in a minute with your prescriptions and a form to sign." He departed.

A minute later there were footsteps outside the little alcove they'd put me in, and a large young man drew the curtain aside. He had skin almost as dark as my leather duster, and his hair had been cropped into a flat-top so precise that his barber must have used a level. He was on the heavy side-not out of shape or ripped out, but simply large and comfortable with it. He wore an EMT's jacket, and the name tag on it read LAMAR. He stood there looking at me for a minute and then said, "You're the wrong color to have been in my high school. And I didn't do college."

"Army medic?" I asked.

"Navy. Marines." He folded his arms. "What do you want?"

"My name is Harry Dresden," I said.

He shrugged. "But what do you want?"

I sat up. My leg was still blissfully numb. "I wanted to talk to you about last night."

He eyed me warily. "What about it?"

"You were on the team who responded to a gunshot victim on Wacker."

His breath left him in a long exhale. He looked up and down the row, then stepped into the little alcove and closed the curtain behind him. He lowered his voice. "So?"

"So I want you to tell me about it," I said.

He shook his head. "Look, I want to keep my job."

I lowered my voice as well. "You think telling me is going to endanger that?"

"Maybe," he said. He pulled open his jacket and then unbuttoned two buttons on his shirt. He opened it enough to show me a Kevlar vest beneath it. "See that? EMTs have to wear them around here, because people shoot at us sometimes. Gangbangers, that kind of thing. We show up to try to save lives and people shoot at us."

"Must be tough," I said cautiously.

He shook his head. "I can handle it. But a lot of people don't. And if it looks like you're starting to crack under the pressure, they'll pull you out. Word gets around that I'm telling fairy tales about things I've seen, they'll have me on psychiatric disability by tomorrow." He turned to go.

"Wait," I said. I touched his arm lightly. I didn't grab him. You don't go unexpectedly grabbing former marines if you want your fingers to stay in the same shape. "Look, Mr. Lamar. I just want to hear about it. I'm not going to repeat it to anyone. I'm not a reporter or-"

He paused. "You're the wizard," he said. "Saw you on Larry Fowler once. People say you're crazy."

"Yeah," I said. "So it isn't as if they'd believe me, even if I did talk about you. Which I won't."

"You're the one they arrested in the nursery a few years back," he said. "You broke in during a blackout. They found you in the middle of a wrecked room with all those babies."

I took a deep breath. "Yeah."

Lamar was silent for a second. Then he said, "You know that the year before, the SIDS rate there was the highest in the nation? They averaged one case every ten days. No one could explain it."

"I didn't know that," I said.

"Since they arrested you there, they haven't lost one," he said. He turned back to me. "You did something."

"Yeah. Do you like ghost stories?"

He snorted out a breath through his nose. "I don't like any of this crap, man. Why do you want me to tell you what I saw?"

"Because what you know might help me keep more people from getting hurt."

He nodded, frowning. "All right," he said after a moment. "But I'm not saying this right now. You understand me? I'm not going to say this again. To anyone. Only reason I'll tell you is that you helped those babies."

I nodded.

He sat down on the edge of the gurney. "We got the call around midnight. Headed over to Wacker. The cops were there already. Found this guy on the street, all busted up. Two hits in the chest and two in the abdomen. He was bleeding bad."

I nodded, listening.

"We tried to stabilize him. But there wasn't much point to it. Simmons and me both knew that. But we tried. It's what you do, you know? He was awake for it. Scared as hell. Screaming some. Kept begging us not to let him die. Said he had a little girl to look after."

"What happened?"

"He died," Lamar said, his voice flat. "I've seen it before. Here in town. In action while I was in the corps. You get to where you can recognize death when he comes knocking." He rubbed his large, rather slender hands together. "We tried to resuscitate, but he was gone. That's when it happened."

"Go on."

"This woman shows up. I don't know from where. We just looked up and she was standing over us looking down."

I leaned forward. "What did she look like?"

"I don't know," Lamar answered. "She was... like, wearing this costume, right? Like those people at Renaissance fairs. Big old black robe with a hood over her head. I didn't see much of her face. Just her chin and her throat. She was white."

"What did you do?"

"I figured she was a nut. You get them a lot this time of year. Or maybe going to a costume party or something. Hell, it's almost Halloween. She looks at me and tells me to back up and let her help him."

How many women in a black hooded robe could have been running around town last night? Kumori. That would have been maybe forty-five minutes or an hour before I saw her at Bock's.

Lamar peered at my face. "You know her," he said.

"Not personally. But yeah. What did she do?"

His face grew more remote. "She knelt down over him. Like, straddling the stretcher. Then she leaned down. The robe and the hood fell over them both, right. Like, I couldn't see what she was doing." He licked his lips. "And it got cold. I mean, ice started forming on the sidewalk and the stretcher and on our truck. I swear to you, it happened."

"I believe it," I said.

"And the victim all of a sudden starts coughing. Trying to scream. I mean, it wasn't like the wounds were gone, but... I don't know how to describe it. He was holding on." His face twisted with a sickened expression. "He was in agony, and he was stable. It was like... like he wasn't being allowed to die.

"So the woman stands up. She tells us we've got less than an hour to save him. And then she's gone. Like, poof, gone. Like she was all in my imagination."

I shook my head. "Then?"

"We get him brought in. The docs patched him up and got fresh blood into him. He passed out about an hour later. But he made it."

Lamar was silent for a long moment.

"That couldn't have happened," he said then. "I mean, I've seen people pull through some bad stuff. But not like that. He should have been dead. Everything I know tells me so. But he kept going."

"Sometimes miracles happen," I said quietly.

He shuddered. "This wasn't a miracle. There wasn't any angel choir singing. My skin tried to crawl away and hide." He shook his head. "I don't want to think about it."

"What about your partner?" I asked.

"He drank himself under the table twenty minutes after our shift ended. Hell, only reason I wasn't with him was that I was teaching a CPR class this morning." He looked at me. "That help?"

"It might," I said. "Thank you."

"Sure."

"What are you going to do now?" I asked.

"Gonna go find my own table." Lamar stood up and said, "Good luck, man."

"Thanks."

The big man left, and while I got my prescriptions and filled out the last forms, I thought about what he'd had to say. I got the prescriptions filled at the hospital pharmacy, called a cab, and told him to take me to Mike's to pick up the Blue Beetle.

I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed and thought about what I'd learned. Kumori had saved the gunshot victim's life. If everything Lamar had said was accurate, it meant that she had gone out of her way to do it. And whatever she'd done, it had been an extremely difficult working to leave a mystic impression as intense as it did. That might explain why Kumori had done very little during the altercation with Cowl. I had expected her to be nearly as strong as her partner, but when she tried to take the book from me, her power hadn't been stronger than my own muscles and limbs.

But the Kemmler Alumni Association was in town with some vicious competition in mind. Why would Kumori have expended her strength for a stranger, rather than saving it for battling rival necromancers? Could the shooting victim have been important to her plans in some way?

It didn't track. The victim was just one more thug for the outfit, and he certainly wasn't going to be doing anything useful from his bed in intensive care.

I had to consider the possibility that she'd been trying to do the right thing: using her power to help someone in dire need.

The thought made me uncomfortable as hell. I knew that the necromancers I'd met were deadly dangerous, and that if I wanted to survive a conflict with them, I would have to be ready to hit them fast and hard and without any doubts. That's easy when the enemy is a frothing, psychotic monster. But Kumori's apparently humanitarian act changed things. It made her a person, and people are a hell of a lot harder for me to think about killing.

Even worse, if she'd been acting altruistically, it would mean that the dark energy the necromancers seemed to favor might not be something wholly, inherently evil. It had been used to preserve life, just as the magic I knew could be used either to protect or to destroy.

I'd always considered the line between black magic and white to be sharp and clear. But if that dark power could be employed in whatever fashion its wielder chose, that made it no different from my own.

Dammit. Investigation was supposed to make me certain of what needed to be done. It was not supposed to confuse me even more.

When I opened my eyes, thick clouds had covered the sun and painted the whole world in shades of grey.

Chapter Twenty

It was past the middle of the afternoon by the time I got the Blue Beetle from Mike's and headed back to my apartment. I tried to be wary of possible tails, but by then the local was wearing off and my leg was hurting again. I don't know if you've ever had a serious physical injury, but there's more to it than simply increasing the amount of discomfort. It's tiring. The pain carries with it a tax of bone-deep weariness that makes you want to crawl into a dark hole and hibernate.

So when I say I tried to be wary, what I mean is that I nicked a glance at my rearview mirror a couple of times whenever I had the presence of mind to remember to do so. As long as the bad guys were restricting themselves to driving brightly painted side-panel vans or maybe nitro-burning funny cars, I was perfectly safe.

I got back to my place, disabled the wards, unlocked the door, and slipped inside. Mister came flying down the stairs at my back, and thumped companionably against my legs. I all but screamed. "Stupid cat," I snarled.

Mister wound around my legs in a pleased fashion, unconcerned with my opinion of him. I limped inside and locked up behind me. Mouse waited until Mister was bored with me, then shambled over to snuffle at my legs and collect a few scratches behind his ears.

"Hey, there," Thomas greeted me quietly. He sat in the chair by the fire, several candles lit on the end table beside it. He had a book open. Sword and shotgun rested near his hand. He glanced at my leg and rose, his face alarmed. "What happened?"

I grimaced, tottered over to the couch, and plopped down on it. "Sticks and stones may break your bones, but Chinese throwing stars get you a dozen stitches." I drew the ghoul's weapon from my pocket by way of illustration and tossed it down on the coffee table. "How's Butters?"

"Fine," Thomas said. "Funny little guy. Made an awful racket with that... polka thing of his for about half an hour, babbled for forty minutes straight, and fell asleep eating dinner. I put him on the bed."

"He's had a stressful day," I said.

"He's a coward," Thomas said.

I glared at him and started to snarl something harsh and defensive.

He held up a hand and hurried to speak. "Don't take that wrong, Harry. He's smart enough to understand what's happening. And he's smart enough to know that there's not a damned thing he can do about it. He knows the only reason he's alive is that someone else is protecting him. He isn't kidding himself that he's somehow done it because of his own cleverness or skill." Thomas glanced at the door to the bedroom. "He doesn't know how to deal with the fear. It's strangling him."

I propped my aching leg up on the coffee table. "Thank you for your professional opinion, Counselor."

Thomas gave me a level look. "I've seen it before. I know what I'm talking about."

"Whatever," I said.

"When you were attacked in the morgue last night, he froze. Didn't he."

I shrugged one shoulder. "Not everyone is cut out for the battlefield."

"But he froze," Thomas said. "You had to scream orders into his ear and haul him around like luggage, right?"

"That doesn't make him a coward."

"He lets his fear control him. That's what a coward is, Harry."

"A lot of people would react the same way," I said.

"A lot of people aren't making themselves into excess baggage for my brother," he shot back.

"No one does well their first time out," I said.

"It isn't an isolated incident," Thomas said. "You told me that when he reported on the corpses taken from Bianca's manor, and they locked him up in the nuthouse."

"So?"

"So do you think he got his job back without backing down? Admitting to some shrink that he hadn't really seen what he saw?" Thomas shook his head. "He was afraid to lose his career. He caved."

I sat silently.

"Doesn't make him a bad person," Thomas said. "But he's a coward. He's either going to get you killed or else freeze at a bad moment and die-and you'll torture yourself over how it's all your fault. If we want to survive, we need to get him somewhere safe. Then cut him loose. Better for everyone."

I thought about it for a minute.

"You might be right," I said. "But if we tell him to rabbit, he's never going to be able to get over the fear. We'll be making it worse for him. He has to face it down."

"He doesn't want to."

"No," I said, "but he needs to."

Thomas looked from me to the fire and nodded. "It's your show."

I watched Mouse mosey over to his bucket-sized food bowl. He sat down by it and waited expectantly until Mister prowled over to him. Then he bent down to eat. My cat stalked up to Mouse and promptly swatted him on the muzzle with one paw. Mouse opened his jaws in a doggy grin and walked a couple of steps in the direction Mister had swatted him.

Mister regarded Mouse with lordly disdain, then ate part of a single piece of kibble. Then he slapped at the bowl of food, scattering bits over the kitchen floor, and walked away. Once he was done, Mouse padded back over, patiently ate the spilled food, and then resumed munching on the bowl.

"Remember when Mouse would slide all the way to the wall when Mister did that?" Thomas asked.

"Heh. Yeah."

"Do you think Mister realizes that the dog is about twenty times bigger than he used to be?" Thomas asked.

"Oh, he realizes it, all right," I said. "He just doesn't see how it's relevant."

"One of these days Mouse is going to disabuse him of the notion."

I shook my head. "He won't. Mister made his point when Mouse was tiny. Mouse is the sort to respect tradition."

"Or he's scared to cross the cat." Thomas's eyes drifted to my bandages and he nodded at my leg. "How bad is it?"

"I can walk. I wouldn't want to go dancing."

"Is that your next move, dancing?"

I leaned my head back on the couch and closed my eyes. "I'm not sure what to do next. How are you as a sounding board?"

"I can look interested and nod at appropriate moments," he said.

"Good enough," I said.

I told Thomas everything.

He listened, taking it all in, and the first thing he said was, "You have a date?"

I opened my eyes and blinked at him. "What. Is that so hard to conceive?"

"Well, yeah," he said. "Christ, Harry, I thought you were going to spend the rest of your life as a hermit."

"What?"

He rolled his eyes. "It isn't like you've gone looking for women," Thomas said. "I mean, you never hit any clubs. Try to get any phone numbers. I figured you just didn't want to." He mulled it over for a minute and then said, "Good God. You're shy."

"I am not," I said.

"The girl practically had to throw herself into your arms. My sister would laugh herself sick."

I glowered at him. "You are not a spectacularly helpful sounding board."

He stretched out a little and crossed his legs at the ankle. "I'm so pretty, it's hard for me to think of myself as intelligent." He pursed his lips. "There are two things you need to know."

"The book," I said, nodding.

"Yeah. Everyone is hot and bothered over this Erlking thing. You read it?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

I raked my fingers through my hair. "And nothing. It's a collection of essays about a particular figure of faerie lore called the Erlking."

"Who is he?"

"He's one of the high sidhe," I said. "And he isn't part of Winter or Summer. He's a wyldfae."

"Powerful?"

"Very," I said. "But just how powerful he is varies depending on who was writing about him. Some of them ranked him among the top faerie nobles. A couple claimed he was on par with one of the Faerie Queens."

"What does he do?"

"He's some kind of hunter spirit," I said. "Associated with all kinds of primal violence. He's apparently one of the beings who can call up and lead the Wild Hunt."

"The what?" Thomas said.

"It's a gathering of some of the more predatory beings of Faerie," I said. "They appear in the autumn and winter usually, usually along with storms and rough weather. A gathering of black hounds the size of horses with glowing red eyes, led by a hunter with the horns of a stag on a black horse."

"The Erlking?" Thomas asked.

"There are several figures who can lead the hunt, apparently," I said. "None of them are particularly friendly. The Hunt will kill anything and anyone it runs across. It's major-league dangerous."

"I think I've heard about it," Thomas said. "Is it true that you can avoid being hunted by joining them?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I've never heard of anyone who met the Hunt and survived. Could be that they won't hunt what they think of as another predator."

"Like sharks," Thomas said. "It's all about body language."

"I wouldn't count on nonverbal cues to protect you from the Hunt," I said. "Assuming you ever saw them. It appears maybe only once every five or six years, and can show up almost anywhere in the world."

"Is it the Hunt you think the Kemmlerites are interested in?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "I can't think what else it would be. The Erlking has a reputation as a being that preys upon children, or at least one that heralds their deaths. A couple of wizards even peg him as a guardian who ensures that children's souls aren't harmed or diverted as they depart dying bodies."

"Sounds like there is a mixed opinion on this Erlking guy."

"Faeries are like that," I said. "They aren't ever quite what they seem to be. It's hard to pin them down."

"But why would a gang of necromancers be interested in him? Is there anything in the book that makes sense?"

"Not that I saw," I said. "There were stories, songs, lectures, accountings, bad sketches, and worse poetry about the Erlking, but nothing practical."

"Nothing you saw," Thomas said.

"Nothing I saw," I confirmed. "But these lunatics would hardly be this serious about the book if it wasn't there somewhere."

"Do you think it's connected to this Darkhallow that Corpsetaker was talking about?" Thomas asked.

"I don't know," I said. "What's a Darkhallow?"

We listened to the fire crackle for a minute before Thomas said, "I hate to say this, but maybe you should contact the Council."

I grimaced. "I know I should," I said. "I don't know what they're doing. And these necromancers are strong, Thomas. Stronger than me. I don't think I can take them in a straight fight."

"Sounds like a good reason to call for help."

"I can't do that," I said. "Mavra would torpedo Murphy."

"I don't think Murphy would want you to get killed over this, Harry," he pointed out. "And what's going to happen if the Council hears that you knew these folk were around and didn't report it to them? They aren't going to be happy."

"I know," I said. "I know. But at the moment it's my choice, and I'm not going to choose for my friend to get hurt. I can't."

He nodded, as if he'd expected the answer.

"Plus there's one more reason not to call in the Council," I said.

"Why?"

"Right now, Cowl, Grevane, and Corpsetaker aren't working together. If I call in the Council it gives them a common enemy and a reason to cooperate."

"They have a common enemy," he pointed out. "You."

I laughed, and it came out a little bitter. "They aren't worried about me. Hell, I can't even figure out what's going on." I rubbed at my eyes. "You said there were two things I need to know. What's the second thing?"

"Your car."

"Oh, I got it back," I said. "It's out front."

"No, dummy," Thomas said. "Whoever trashed your car did it deliberately. They were trying to tell you something."

"It might not even be related to this situation," I said.

He snorted. "Yeah. It just happened now, out of all the times it could have happened."

"Whoever was sending the message, it's a little obscure. You think it's one of the Kemmler crowd?"

"Why not?" he said.

I thought about it for a minute. "It doesn't seem like something Grevane would do. I bet he's more like the kind to send undead minions to deliver his messages. Corpsetaker would send a nightmare or a forced hallucination or something. She's big on the mind magic. Ghouls don't really send messages. They just eat you."

"That leaves Cowl, his buddy, and Grevane's buddy with the liver spots."

"Yeah," I said. "I almost feel like there was something familiar about Liver Spots," I said. "I'm not sure what. I might be grasping at straws."

"What about Cowl and Kumori?"

"I don't know, man," I said. "They were just a couple of people in cloaks. I never saw their faces. If I had to guess from the way they talked, I'd bet that they were Council."

"That would be a very good reason to cover their faces," Thomas agreed.

"There's no point in chewing this over and over," I said. I rubbed at my eyes. "Bony Tony's numbers mean something. They'll lead to the book, somehow. I'm sure of it."

"Maybe a locker number?" Thomas asked.

"Too many digits," I said.

"Maybe it's some kind of cipher. Substituting letters for numbers."

I raised my eyebrows. "That's a thought." I dug the folded piece of paper out of my pocket and passed it over to him. "Stay here and work on it. See if you can make any sense out of it."

He accepted the paper. "Now I feel like James Bond. Suave and intelligent, breaking all the codes while looking fabulous. What are you going to do?"

"I think the Erlking is the key to this," I said. "And the Erlking is a faerie."

He lifted his eyebrows. "Meaning?"

"When you want to know about faeries," I said, "it's best to ask a faerie. I'm going to call up my godmother and see if she knows anything."

"From what you've told me, isn't that kind of dangerous?"

"Very," I said.

"You're hurt. You should have some backup."

I nodded. "Watch the fort," I said. "Mouse."

The big dog lifted his shaggy head from the floor, ears perked forward, serious eyes on me.

"Come on," I told him. "We're going for a ride."

"Oh, Harry," Thomas said.

"Yeah?"

"Before you go... would you mind if I, uh, helped Butters out by getting his polka contraption loaded up into your trunk?"

"What. You don't like polka?"

Thomas's expression looked strained. "Please, Harry. I like the little guy, but come on."

I rubbed at my mouth with one hand to cover up the smile. "Sure. Probably safest for everyone that way."

"Thank you," he said, and collected the polka suit and brought it up the stairs behind me as I prepared to take a chance on a conversation with one of the more dangerous beings I knew.

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