Description:

Product Description

Annja Creed jumps at the chance to join a fellow archaeologist on a quest to find a relic. But she's not so thrilled about northern Siberia, where they are hoping to discover something buried in the long-undisturbed soil of Russia's frozen terrain. When they reach the town of Jakutsk, Annja is put off by its gray landscape and highly superstitious inhabitants. They claim they are being hunted. Then one of the villagers goes missing.

The locals blame the Khosadam, a ghost of a fallen goddess said to ingest the souls of the departed. But there are no fresh graves. She is now hunting the living. When Annja seeks to destroy the apparition, she discovers an even more horrifying truth—and may have hit a dead end.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

She was being followed.

Again.

Annja Creed sighed with an almost nonchalant grin as she felt the familiar feeling wash over her. As many times and as many places as she'd been, she could tell—without even turning around to confirm it—that someone was taking more than a passing interest in her.

Even here, she thought. Even in this remote industrial complex where the concrete was as gray as the cold sky overhead, she hadn't managed to escape the eyes and ears of the locals.

The question, as always, was who was following her? Since arriving in Moscow and then taking the Siberian railroad to the northeast reaches of the former Soviet Union, Annja had kept what she thought was a low profile. She'd paid cash for her transactions. She'd used her new fake passport and booked her travels under a fake name. She'd even tossed her schedule out the window and lingered in several stops for far too long.

But it hadn't worked.

She ran down the list of people in her head who might wish her harm and then frowned. The list was long and growing longer. Every new adventure seemed to add dozens of names to the roster of folks who thought the world would be a better place if perhaps Annja Creed wasn't inhaling any more of its oxygen.

She passed the plate-glass windows of a department store advertising fashions so outdated that Annja wondered if anyone actually came in and requested them. She paused, however, and used the reflecting surface to look behind her.

Nothing.

She kept moving rather than give away the idea that she suspected she was being followed. No sense altering the hunters.

Annja knew that professionals never allowed themselves to be seen when they followed you. So the fact that she hadn't spotted anyone in the shop window might mean she wasn't dealing with amateurs.

On one level, that was good. Amateurs in this part of the world tended to be thugs and rapists who would brutalize you and then sell you off into some sexual-slavery den.

At least the professionals just killed you and got it done with.

She smirked at the thought. How my life has changed, she mused.

She turned a corner and strolled up a narrow street. Ahead of her, she could make out an outdoor market area filled with a smattering of produce, imported electronics goods and bootleg DVDs. Annja knew the mafiya controlled these impromptu bazaars. But she hoped she could use them to lose her tail.

Unless, of course, he worked for the very same gangsters who ran the marketplace. She pondered that for a moment. But she couldn't worry about that for long. Not when she had a pressing appointment to keep with Robert Gulliver, known to his friends as Biker Bob and to the rest of the world as the cycling archaeologist.

Gulliver liked riding across the world on his favorite all-terrain bike. It was how he had scouted so many famous dig sites. Before he went in to any place with loads of equipment, he would casually assess the environment from the comfort of his bicycle. So far, Gulliver had crisscrossed the globe numerous times, although this was his first outing in Siberia.

Gulliver had sent Annja an e-mail from a cybercafé in a town just outside Minsk, asking if she would join him on a scouting mission. Annja, bored with her self-imposed exile back in Brooklyn, had jumped at the opportunity.

But even she was somewhat disgruntled by the location. So far, the dour city of Magadan had failed to impress her. The entire city was formed of cookie-cutter buildings set into neat rows. The streets were all evenly paved with ancient cars zooming down them at breakneck speeds, unconcerned if they hit pedestrians. In contrast, she occasionally spotted a sleek new Lincoln Town Car that proclaimed its driver as belonging to organized crime. Poverty was rampant, and Annja had already doled out some of her money to several children who looked closer to being scarecrows than human beings.

Gulliver had promised her a spectacular adventure, but Annja couldn't see it. Not in a city so utterly drab and awash in human misery.

Still, the fact that she had someone following her at least meant that there might be a little excitement before the day was done.

She ducked under the low awning and entered the marketplace. Immediately, her ears were accosted by the sounds of techno music infused with Russian street rap. Annja spoke a smattering of Russian, but she knew better than to try to translate the music lyrics that blasted out of the nearby speakers.

And she wasn't there to listen to music, anyway.

Ahead of her, the narrow corridor seemed to twist and turn. Elderly shoppers, their heads wrapped in heavy hats and scarves to ward off the first taste of winter in the air, pushed past her, intent on finding something valuable in the midst of chaos.

One of the vendors called out to her and held up an iPod. Annja smiled but shook her head no. She knew they made the cheap knockoffs in China and shipped them north through Mongolia before they ended up here.

Besides, Annja had her own iPod back at the hotel.

She frowned. Unless someone had broken in and stolen it, she thought. She glanced back at the iPod hawker but he was already gone.

Her unpredictable turn had prompted a man thirty feet back to stop awkwardly and turn his head.

Annja smiled.

First mistake. Maybe she wasn't dealing with professionals after all.

She hurried on, aware of a pungent stench of rotting fish assailing her nostrils. Three stalls of dead fish bedded on ice bracketed the next turn. Annja glanced at them. Even the fish were gray.

She had a decision to make. She could allow her tail to continue his surveillance, or she could turn the tables on him and find out who he was. The first choice was annoying because it meant she'd never be alone. The second choice was the more dangerous of the two. Confronting a tail was always a risk. He might be following her because he wanted to harm her. Possibly, he might even kill her.

Annja closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, confirming that Joan of Arc's sword—her sword— was accessible. She could see it in her mind's eye, hovering as it always seemed to. All she had to do was reach out and grab it.

She ducked under a low-hanging portal filled with cheap polyester tapestries done up in gaudy golds and bright reds. She could see the fraying edges and knew that the quality of the material only looked good to those who knew no better and had never had anything better in their lives. To some in this remote outback of Russia, polyester was the fabric of dreams.

She risked a glance back and saw the man clearly. He had no interest in any of the wares being hawked by the vendors. His face was as dour as the rest of the city. But Annja could see the deep lines etched in his face and knew that he had a past—probably that of a hired killer. She knew finding one in this part of the world was easy. And they were always competent.

If they weren't, they simply didn't survive.

Annja made her decision. She rushed ahead and instantly heard the yells behind her as her pursuer bumped into one of the fish stalls. Ice slid everywhere and the dead fish followed, causing several shoppers to fall.

Annja ran.

More voices joined the fray. If her pursuer was with the mafiya, most likely he'd be able to enlist some help. But if he wasn't, then he was risking their wrath by upsetting one of the chief places they made their protection money.

Annja spotted an exit and took it. Fresh air smacked into her face and she saw the narrow alley ahead of her. Grateful that she'd worn her hiking boots instead of her sneakers, Annja raced down the asphalt street.

Behind her, footsteps pounded the pavement. He was close.

Annja skidded into the alley and saw that it was filled with trash. The smell of urine hung heavy in the air. She could smell cheap vodka and the aroma of body odor. Makeshift corrugated-cardboard-box homes dotted the edges of the alley. Annja had entered a town of sorts for homeless people.

She pressed on, dodging the clotheslines that hung between two buildings. Bits of spattered cloth, remnants of winter coats and shirts hung from the lines. Steam from several grates issued forth with a sharp hiss.

The entire alley seemed eerily quiet. Behind her, at the entrance of the alley, the footsteps stopped.

This was where it would get hairy.

Annja ducked low, aware that her vision was being compromised by the crowded nature of the alley. The steam, trapped by the many laundry lines and the clothes they held, seemed to hug closer to the ground, making the alley feel more like a moor drowning in early-morning fog.

Her pursuer would have moved into the alley by now. But he'd move slowly, aware that any one of the boxes might conceal his prey. He might walk right past her. Or she might ambush him.

Annja glanced ahead. Bricks. She frowned. A dead end.

Her heart hammered in her chest. She closed her eyes and tried to reach for the sword. But when she opened her eyes, it wasn't in her hands. She tried again and then it hit her.

The alley was too narrow to swing a sword.

She almost yelped when the disembodied hand grabbed her around the ankle. She yanked her leg away and shot a kick into the hand. Someone on the ground grunted and she saw the hand retreat.

This was not a place she wanted to stay any longer than necessary.

The air around her grew heavy. Annja could feel his presence now, looming and drawing down the distance between them. She ducked down by the closest cardboard box and waited.

The steam played tricks with her eyes. She thought she could see his body parting the mist like some ship on the sea. And then she saw his feet.

Without even thinking about it, Annja launched herself at him, screaming as she did so. She collided with him, knocking him to the ground. He grunted and Annja felt a breath of air come out of his mouth as the wind was knocked out of him.

She winced. Judging by the smell, he was a fan of onion bagels.

He brought his hands up and twisted, trying to push her off him. She could see his left hand reaching for something in his coat. Annja chopped down with her fist onto his forea...

Product Description

Ancient papyrus scrolls recovered among the charred ruins of the Library of Alexandria reveal astonishing texts that detail the wonders of Atlantis—knowledge that could shatter the blueprint of world energy. Archaeologist Annja Creed confronts shadow figures determined to preserve empires built on power, greed and global manipulation, finding unlikely allies in a mysterious American with connections in high places, and a young linguistics prodigy with attitude. Dodging a petroleum conglomerate and their pet killers on a high-speed chase that leads from Egypt to the North Sea oil fields to the urban battlegrounds of China, Annja becomes an unwilling conspirator in a bid for power to control the beating heart of the world's energy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"I thought Julius Caesar burned down the Great Library," Annja Creed said. She picked her way gingerly across a small lot of churned-up dust with chunks of yellow-brick rubble in it, glad for the durability of her hiking boots. She was sheltered from the already intense morning Mediterranean sun by the floppy straw hat she wore over her yellow T-shirt and khaki cargo pants.

"He did, Ms. Creed," her handsome young Egyptian archaeologist escort said, turning to smile at her. He had a narrow, dark hawk's face and flashing eyes. His white lab smock hung from wide shoulders and flapped around the backs of his long skinny legs in the sea breeze snaking around the close-set buildings. "Among others."

"Call me Annja, please," she said.

He laughed. His teeth were as perfect as his English. His trace of accent made young Dr. Ismail al-Maghrabi seem that much more exotic. I love my job, she thought.

"If you will call me Ismail," he said.

"Done," she replied with a laugh.

Ahead of them stood a ten-foot-high loafshaped translucent plastic bubble. The rumbling of generators forced them to raise their voices as they approached. Some kind of structure had recently been demolished here, hard by the Alexandrian waterfront in the old Greek quarter. Big grimy warehouses and blocks of shops with cracked-stucco fronts crowded together on all sides. Although Alexandria was a major tourist destination the rumble and stink of buses and trucks through the narrow streets suggested little of charm and less of antiquity. Still, Annja's heart thumped in her throat with anticipation.

"For one thing," al-Maghrabi said, "the library was very extensive indeed. Also parts of it appear to have been scattered across the Greek quarter. As you probably know, in 2004 a team of Egyptian and Polish archaeologists uncovered a series of what appear to be lecture halls a few blocks from here."

She nodded. "I read about it on the BBC Web site at the time. A very exciting development."

"Most. The library was a most remarkable facility, as much a great university and research center as anything else. Along with the famous book collections, and of course reading rooms and auditoria, it offered dormitories for its visitors, lush gardens, even gymnasia with swimming pools."

"Really? I had no idea."

He stopped to open the latch to a door in a wooden frame set into the inflated tent. "The envelope is for climate control," he explained, opening the door for her. "Positive air pressure allows us to keep humidity and pollution at bay. Our treasures are probably not exceptionally vulnerable to such influences, considering their condition, but why take chances?"

The interior seemed gloomy after the brilliant daylight. Annja paused to let her eyes adjust as he resecured the door. There was little to see but a hole cut into the ground. "You seem to enjoy some pretty enviable resources here, if you don't mind my saying so, Ismail."

"Not at all! Our discoveries here have attracted worldwide attention, which in turn helps to secure the resources to develop and conserve them properly. For that I believe we have to thank the Internet—and of course your own television network, which provides a share of our funding."

"Yes. I am thrilled they allowed me to come here," Annja said.

"I'm told the scrolls contain revelations about the lost civilization of Atlantis." Annja couldn't mask the skepticism in her voice.

"Come with me. I trust you don't mind a certain amount of sliding into holes in the ground?"

Annja laughed. "I am a real archaeologist, Ismail. I don't just play one on TV."

She didn't actually have to slide. A slanting tunnel about three feet wide and five feet high had been dug down to a subterranean chamber perhaps a dozen feet below ground level. Hunched over, they followed thick yellow electrical cords down the shallow ramp.

"As you no doubt know," her guide said, "the library is believed to have been built early in the third century B.C. by Ptolemy II, around the temple to the Muses built by his father, the first Ptolemy."

"That's the Mouseion, isn't it?" she said.

"Origin of our word museum?"

"Yes. It was also said that Ptolemy III decreed that all travelers arriving in Alexandria had to surrender any books or scrolls in their possession to be copied by official scribes before being returned to them. While we don't know for certain if that is true, the library's collection swiftly grew to be the grandest in the Mediterranean world."

They reached a level floor of stone polished slick by many feet over many years. Banks of yellowish floodlights lit a chamber perhaps ten by twenty feet. Three people were crowded inside, two on hands and knees rooting in what appeared to be some kind of lumpy mound. One was bending over a modern table. The air was cool and smelled of soil and mildew.

The person at the table straightened and turned toward them, beaming. He was a tall, pot-bellied young man with crew-cut blond hair and an almost invisible goatee on the uppermost of his several chins. "Greetings! You must be Annja Creed."

He held out a big hand. Annja knew at once he was a working archaeologist. He looked soft and pale overall, but his hand was callused and cracked like a stonemason's, from digging, lifting and the painstaking work of chipping artifacts from a stony matrix with a dentist's steel pick.

"This is Dr. Szczepan Pilitowski," Ismail said. He struggled with the first name—it came out sounding close enough to_ Stepan._ "He's our expert in extracting the scrolls safely from the ground."

"We all do what we can," Pilitowski said in a cheerful tone. "There is much to be done."

The other two, a man and a woman, turned around and picked themselves up from the floor. They wore kneepads, Annja noticed. One was a man, the other a woman. Both were thin and dark, and she took them for Egyptians.

"This is Ali Mansur and Maria Frodyma," Ismail said. The man just bobbed his head and grinned shyly.

The woman stuck out her hand. She wore her black hair in a bun, and had a bright, birdlike air to her. "Please call me Maria," she said in a Polish accent as Annja shook her hand.

"Annja."

"This was a library storeroom," Ismail said.

"Most of the scrolls were kept in locked cabinets, in chambers such as this. Only the most popular items, or those specifically requested by scholars, were stored in the reading rooms."

"So that heap…?" Annja said, nodding toward the rubble mound where Maria and Ali had been working.

"The remains of a cabinet," Pilitowski said.

"Damaged by the fire, it collapsed and mostly decomposed, leaving the burned scrolls behind."

"How many scrolls did the library possess?" Annja asked. "Or does anyone really know?"

"Not precisely," Maria said, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of one hand. She seemed to show a quick smile to the bulky and jovial Pilitowski, whose own smile broadened briefly. "Some have hypothesized it held as few as forty thousand scrolls. Others suggest the founding Ptolemy set a goal of half a million. On the basis of what we have found, we feel confident conjecturing the former limit is far too low. As to the upper—" She shrugged expressively.

"This isn't my time period," Annja confessed, believing as she did in professional full disclosure. "But I can certainly see how the recovery of any number of scrolls at all from the ancient world is a terrific thing."

"Oh, yes," Maria replied.

"And here you see three of them," Pilitowski boomed. A vast callused paw swept dramatically toward the table.

They looked like three forearm-sized chunks of wood fished out of a campfire, Annja thought. They lay on a sheet of white plastic.

"These are actual scrolls?"

"Yes, yes," Pilitowski said. "My friends and I extracted them this morning."

Annja felt a thrill. She'd seen older artifacts—she'd seen Egyptian papyri a thousand years older in the British Museum. But there was something about these scrolls, the thrill of something lost for two thousand years and believed to be indecipherable even if found. Yet modern technology was about to restore the contents of these lumps of char to the world.

"Even if they're just grocery lists," she said a little breathlessly, "this is just so exciting."

The others just smiled at her. They knew. "Who really burned the library, anyway?" she asked Ismail. "Was it Julius Caesar?"

The others looked to Ismail. Ali was still grinning but had yet to utter a syllable. Annja's first thought had been that he didn't speak English. But that appeared to be the common language on the multinational dig. She began to suspect he was just shy.

"Caesar was one of the culprits," her guide said.

"One of them?"

"And not the first," Maria said. The archaeologists seemed glad of the break. Annja understood that. They loved their work, she could tell, as she loved the work when she was engaged in it. But it could be brutally arduous, and breaks were welcome.

"The first major fire damage occurred around 88 B.C.," the woman said, "when much of Alexandria burned down during civil disorders. This may have been the greatest destruction. Then during the Roman civil wars in 47 B.C., Julius Caesar chased his rival, Pompey, into the city. When Egyptian forces attacked him, Caesar set fire to the dockyards and the Egyptian fleet. The fire probably spread through trade goods piled on the docks waiting to be loaded on ships. The library lay near the waterfront, like now. Many scrolls were lost in the conflagration. Also it appears Roman soldiers stole many scrolls and sent them to Rome."

### Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. She was being followed. Again. Annja Creed sighed with an almost nonchalant grin as she felt the familiar feeling wash over her. As many times and as many places as she'd been, she could tell—without even turning around to confirm it—that someone was taking more than a passing interest in her. Even here, she thought. Even in this remote industrial complex where the concrete was as gray as the cold sky overhead, she hadn't managed to escape the eyes and ears of the locals. The question, as always, was who was following her? Since arriving in Moscow and then taking the Siberian railroad to the northeast reaches of the former Soviet Union, Annja had kept what she thought was a low profile. She'd paid cash for her transactions. She'd used her new fake passport and booked her travels under a fake name. She'd even tossed her schedule out the window and lingered in several stops for far too long. But it hadn't worked. She ran down the list of people in her head who might wish her harm and then frowned. The list was long and growing longer. Every new adventure seemed to add dozens of names to the roster of folks who thought the world would be a better place if perhaps Annja Creed wasn't inhaling any more of its oxygen. She passed the plate-glass windows of a department store advertising fashions so outdated that Annja wondered if anyone actually came in and requested them. She paused, however, and used the reflecting surface to look behind her. Nothing. She kept moving rather than give away the idea that she suspected she was being followed. No sense altering the hunters. Annja knew that professionals never allowed themselves to be seen when they followed you. So the fact that she hadn't spotted anyone in the shop window might mean she wasn't dealing with amateurs. On one level, that was good. Amateurs in this part of the world tended to be thugs and rapists who would brutalize you and then sell you off into some sexual-slavery den. At least the professionals just killed you and got it done with. She smirked at the thought. How my life has changed, she mused. She turned a corner and strolled up a narrow street. Ahead of her, she could make out an outdoor market area filled with a smattering of produce, imported electronics goods and bootleg DVDs. Annja knew the mafiya controlled these impromptu bazaars. But she hoped she could use them to lose her tail. Unless, of course, he worked for the very same gangsters who ran the marketplace. She pondered that for a moment. But she couldn't worry about that for long. Not when she had a pressing appointment to keep with Robert Gulliver, known to his friends as Biker Bob and to the rest of the world as the cycling archaeologist. Gulliver liked riding across the world on his favorite all-terrain bike. It was how he had scouted so many famous dig sites. Before he went in to any place with loads of equipment, he would casually assess the environment from the comfort of his bicycle. So far, Gulliver had crisscrossed the globe numerous times, although this was his first outing in Siberia. Gulliver had sent Annja an e-mail from a cybercafé in a town just outside Minsk, asking if she would join him on a scouting mission. Annja, bored with her self-imposed exile back in Brooklyn, had jumped at the opportunity. But even she was somewhat disgruntled by the location. So far, the dour city of Magadan had failed to impress her. The entire city was formed of cookie-cutter buildings set into neat rows. The streets were all evenly paved with ancient cars zooming down them at breakneck speeds, unconcerned if they hit pedestrians. In contrast, she occasionally spotted a sleek new Lincoln Town Car that proclaimed its driver as belonging to organized crime. Poverty was rampant, and Annja had already doled out some of her money to several children who looked closer to being scarecrows than human beings. Gulliver had promised her a spectacular adventure, but Annja couldn't see it. Not in a city so utterly drab and awash in human misery. Still, the fact that she had someone following her at least meant that there might be a little excitement before the day was done. She ducked under the low awning and entered the marketplace. Immediately, her ears were accosted by the sounds of techno music infused with Russian street rap. Annja spoke a smattering of Russian, but she knew better than to try to translate the music lyrics that blasted out of the nearby speakers. And she wasn't there to listen to music, anyway. Ahead of her, the narrow corridor seemed to twist and turn. Elderly shoppers, their heads wrapped in heavy hats and scarves to ward off the first taste of winter in the air, pushed past her, intent on finding something valuable in the midst of chaos. One of the vendors called out to her and held up an iPod. Annja smiled but shook her head no. She knew they made the cheap knockoffs in China and shipped them north through Mongolia before they ended up here. Besides, Annja had her own iPod back at the hotel. She frowned. Unless someone had broken in and stolen it, she thought. She glanced back at the iPod hawker but he was already gone. Her unpredictable turn had prompted a man thirty feet back to stop awkwardly and turn his head. Annja smiled. First mistake. Maybe she wasn't dealing with professionals after all. She hurried on, aware of a pungent stench of rotting fish assailing her nostrils. Three stalls of dead fish bedded on ice bracketed the next turn. Annja glanced at them. Even the fish were gray. She had a decision to make. She could allow her tail to continue his surveillance, or she could turn the tables on him and find out who he was. The first choice was annoying because it meant she'd never be alone. The second choice was the more dangerous of the two. Confronting a tail was always a risk. He might be following her because he wanted to harm her. Possibly, he might even kill her. Annja closed her eyes for the briefest of moments, confirming that Joan of Arc's sword—her sword— was accessible. She could see it in her mind's eye, hovering as it always seemed to. All she had to do was reach out and grab it. She ducked under a low-hanging portal filled with cheap polyester tapestries done up in gaudy golds and bright reds. She could see the fraying edges and knew that the quality of the material only looked good to those who knew no better and had never had anything better in their lives. To some in this remote outback of Russia, polyester was the fabric of dreams. She risked a glance back and saw the man clearly. He had no interest in any of the wares being hawked by the vendors. His face was as dour as the rest of the city. But Annja could see the deep lines etched in his face and knew that he had a past—probably that of a hired killer. She knew finding one in this part of the world was easy. And they were always competent. If they weren't, they simply didn't survive. Annja made her decision. She rushed ahead and instantly heard the yells behind her as her pursuer bumped into one of the fish stalls. Ice slid everywhere and the dead fish followed, causing several shoppers to fall. Annja ran. More voices joined the fray. If her pursuer was with the mafiya, most likely he'd be able to enlist some help. But if he wasn't, then he was risking their wrath by upsetting one of the chief places they made their protection money. Annja spotted an exit and took it. Fresh air smacked into her face and she saw the narrow alley ahead of her. Grateful that she'd worn her hiking boots instead of her sneakers, Annja raced down the asphalt street. Behind her, footsteps pounded the pavement. He was close. Annja skidded into the alley and saw that it was filled with trash. The smell of urine hung heavy in the air. She could smell cheap vodka and the aroma of body odor. Makeshift corrugated-cardboard-box homes dotted the edges of the alley. Annja had entered a town of sorts for homeless people. She pressed on, dodging the clotheslines that hung between two buildings. Bits of spattered cloth, remnants of winter coats and shirts hung from the lines. Steam from several grates issued forth with a sharp hiss. The entire alley seemed eerily quiet. Behind her, at the entrance of the alley, the footsteps stopped. This was where it would get hairy. Annja ducked low, aware that her vision was being compromised by the crowded nature of the alley. The steam, trapped by the many laundry lines and the clothes they held, seemed to hug closer to the ground, making the alley feel more like a moor drowning in early-morning fog. Her pursuer would have moved into the alley by now. But he'd move slowly, aware that any one of the boxes might conceal his prey. He might walk right past her. Or she might ambush him. Annja glanced ahead. Bricks. She frowned. A dead end. Her heart hammered in her chest. She closed her eyes and tried to reach for the sword. But when she opened her eyes, it wasn't in her hands. She tried again and then it hit her. The alley was too narrow to swing a sword. She almost yelped when the disembodied hand grabbed her around the ankle. She yanked her leg away and shot a kick into the hand. Someone on the ground grunted and she saw the hand retreat. This was not a place she wanted to stay any longer than necessary. The air around her grew heavy. Annja could feel his presence now, looming and drawing down the distance between them. She ducked down by the closest cardboard box and waited. The steam played tricks with her eyes. She thought she could see his body parting the mist like some ship on the sea. And then she saw his feet. Without even thinking about it, Annja launched herself at him, screaming as she did so. She collided with him, knocking him to the ground. He grunted and Annja felt a breath of air come out of his mouth as the wind was knocked out of him. She winced. Judging by the smell, he was a fan of onion bagels. He brought his hands up and twisted, trying to push her off him. She could see his left hand reaching for something in his coat. Annja chopped down with her fist onto his forea...