Now:

     One of two women got in front of Whisper's cart so she could make no further progress.

     The other one got so close to Whisper as to almost touch her.

     "Something odd just happened back there," the woman said. "With that man. Just now."

     Whisper looked at Crickley a second time. He looked like someone coming out of a trance. He dropped his hand and looked around like he didn't know where he was.

     Both these women wore matching gray uniforms. No rags for them. The woman in front of the cart pulled a communicator from her pocket to speak into it. 

     "I need you to pull your hood away," the woman next to her said. "We need to know you're human."

     "And who's we?"

     Whisper didn't ask that. She didn't move or speak at all.

     The voice came from a smaller, bent figure swathed, like everyone else, in rags. It was a female voice, and it was a voice filled with a lifetime's worth of barely suppressed rage.

     The other woman said, "We need to make certain The Cellars stays free of alien..."

​     "I'll ask you again," bellowed the swathed figure. "When you say 'we', who the fuck you talking about? No, I've got a simpler question. Who the fuck are you?"

     "I believe we just witnessed some sort of telepathic..."

     "And what's the uniform bullshit all about? You part of some sort of militia or something?"

     The woman who'd blocked the cart still held her communicator, although she no longer spoke into it. Now, like Crickley before, she stared out at nothing.

     Whisper struggled to work her cart around the woman who now stood frozen.                                                                                                                   The other woman, the one who'd been talking? She, too, stood frozen, as if in mid-sentence.

     Whisper couldn't get both her and her cart to blend back into the foot traffic relentlessly pushing forward.

     Then,

     A tunnel child, on her way somewhere.

     She heard the woman ask Whisper about the hood.

     The woman wanted Whisper's hood off?

     She was close enough. She could pull Whisper's hood off just like that.

     So, with a single, thoughtless motion, she snatched at the hood to pull it away from Whisper's head...

     revealing her face to anyone who cared to see.

     Oh no! Oh no!

CONTINUE