I spun, lifting my rifle as the Croclin sprang at one of the smaller children walking towards the stream to get water. I shot the Croclin through the ...mouth and lunged to grab the little boy. I was too late but the Croclin was dead and only crashed into him knocking him away as it thrashed around. That night they crowded around in a cave I had found in the side of a low ridge.I had two men on watch at the entrance and sat behind them nodding. I was trying to think of ways to hide and feed. I closed the phone and started walking back to my truck. I had been standing in the middle of the park not far from my house. I wasn't sure that the house was bugged, but I wasn't sure it wasn't either. The last thing I wanted to do was draw more attention to anyone involved with either Rebecca or me. If the killer found out I was in contact with one of the girls he had kidnapped it would kill any chance we might have of convincing him that my relationship with Rebecca was nothing he needed to. He thrived on the scintillating border between the abstract and the unequivocal, throwing in mythology with algorithms and philosophy with microbiology. Knowing him, this won’t be straightforward. It’d be a mad prolixity between two trains of thought that no one else could ever have joined. But I’m not just anyone. And I think. I stare at the stack of books and flick through the matrices of probabilities. Mathematics. Chemistry. Geography. Arts. Biology. Anthropology. Literature. Phy- Halt.. Extends sympathy. Is, for moments at a time, the mother they never had. But she bides her time, seeing only the ones who voluntarily come into her makeshift office in a corner of the cafeteria.I smiled as I overheard one little girl tell another, “I thought Mindy was smart, but Rebecca is woke.”It was an eye-opener for Rebecca, seeing those girls. Mindy’s age and younger. Intellectually she knew they were around town. That poverty existed. But seeing these real-life girls, talking with them,.