Violet let Six look for a few more moments, then put a hand on his shoulder and tugged on him until he turned to face her. “I’ve been meaning to give you something,” she told him. She knelt in front of him, then reached into a pocket with her uninjured hand. His gaze followed the movement, then he squinted as he realized there was something . . . funny about that spot on her jacket. Was it moving?
She grinned and pulled her hand from her pocket, then held it up. Six’s mouth dropped open in astonishment. He gave a very childlike squeal and reached for the tiny object on her palm, and Violet willingly handed over the rat she’d rescued from a corner of the Mortal Sciences Lab right before she’d gathered up Six’s body. With its cage—labeled “Aurora Six”—crushed in a corner, the creature had nearly been another one of the mortalities of her battle with Daxus. She’d seen the soft white creature cowering in the corner, terrified by the flames and the fight, by the hideous smell of burning human flesh. Aurora Six had been used to human touch, and when she’d cooed at it, the rat had come to her, more than willing to hide in the safe darkness of her jacket pocket. Violet had decided it would make the perfect beginning pet for a gentle child just learning to explore the world.
Six stroked the rat’s shining white fur carefully and it chittered up at him and sat up, rubbing its whiskers with its paws and looking as if it had never been more comfortable. “It’s beautiful,” he said simply.
Violet looked back at Six, seeing not the rat, but the boy, and the world, and the future.
“Yes,” she said, and smiled. “It is.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yvonne Navarro has been a waitress, a nurse’s aide, a bookkeeper and gift shop cashier, an accounting clerk, and a secretary in everything from office furniture stores to a journalism society. Her first novel, AfterAge, was published in 1993 and was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. In 1995 her second novel, deadrush, was published, and it also was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, this time in the category of Superior Achievement in a novel. Final Impact, her third solo novel, was published in 1997, and won both the Chicago Women in Publishing’s Award for Excellence in Adult Fiction and the “Unreal Worlds” Award for Best Horror Paperback of 1997 from the Rocky Mountain News. She’s also written a number of media tie-in novels such as Hellboy, Elektra, and Species, and several Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. She is currently an Operations Officer for a military contractor at historic Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona. She has written nineteen novels and has one nonfiction book, and still has those never-ending plans for more. She lives in southern Arizona with her husband, author Weston Ochse, and two Great Danes, Lily and The Goblin.
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