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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

We made a futile attempt to coax Furbud into my garage after a futile attempt to communicate with him in English, but he refused to go inside and kept nudging the truck, even pushing it several feet down the road as if to urge us to get going.

“Apparently he’s been out here wandering the city for a while and hasn’t caused a lot of problems,” said Colander. “So just let him be. We need to go.”

I agreed, but I insisted on driving—this was my vehicle after all, and there was just something that felt right about me taking the wheel again after all this time. Colander called “shotgun” and actually had a shotgun with her—or at least my old rifle. I started up the truck and we flew down the road.

And Furbud came running behind us, ears flapping and trunk whipping about. As I increased speed, I was sure we would quickly outpace the hirsute pachyderm, but miraculously the beast continued gaining speed and jollily running beside the truck. When we were going seventy miles per hour and the mammoth was keeping pace, I knew something was amiss.

“Warbell must have modified you with cybernetics, too, huh?” I said out the window to the absurdly galloping mammal beside me. I was surprised to see Furbud actually nod. Or maybe it was my imagination and just a natural bounce to his head when running so fast.

Colander was reading the Warbell journal on the seat beside me, occasionally gasping or tut-tutting.

“Could any of this be true?” she asked. “This is the most outlandish thing I have read all week, and I read a lot of sci-fi, fantasy, and political theories in the last few days.”

“Furbud was real,” I said. “Maybe the rest of it is, too.”

“I mean,” said Colander, “this is all hand-written. How did Warbell write such a long letter with just two fingers on each hand?”

I nodded as I went into a turn, trying my best to corner without using the brakes at all.

“That’s the part that sticks out to you?” I said.

“Well, it is weird, right?” she said. “My hand would cramp up writing just a quarter of this book, and I am a librarian! They expect me to write stuff sometimes as part of the job.”

Suddenly Furbud trumpeted. We looked outside. As we did so, the mammoth disappeared. We could only see the dust being thrown up by his footsteps, or the weeds getting smashed down on the side of the road. It was actually kind of cool to watch. Then I heard a gasp beside me, and Colander reached across me, pointing into the field of corn. I looked, too—and then I gasped as well.

Out in the corn we could see something huge moving as well, the stalks breaking and falling against an invisible force. As we looked, we realized that it wasn’t just one invisible beast, but two or three based on how the crops were being crushed in straight lines.

The snaps of the foliage rang out in the quiet evening air as the three invisible beings came right towards us.

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

“It’s actually a potato launcher,” Colander said, loading the huge weapon into the back. “But instead of potatoes, I have several alternative boom-booms. Home-made Molotov cocktails. An exploding grenade of itching powder. Homemade tear gas. Flash bombs. As a librarian, it’s amazing what sorts of things you can learn on your downtime.”

I was gingerly placing a belt loaded with the aforementioned bombs and grenades into the toolbox in the back. The belt looked like it had been modified by Colander, and a number of stylized animal-mascot-styl cloth patches had been attached to the pockets, like armadillos in combat sweats, alligators with machine guns, and pangolins with battle axes cross-stitched into them. She had brought these things over in her little two-seater after I texted her, and I had never seen her so jittery and excited.

“Why do you even have all this stuff?” I asked.

“What?” she asked. “We all do what we have to in order to feel safe living in the same town as a king predator.”

I looked at her goggle-eyed.

“You were always saying I was too paranoid!” I protested. “You always defended Warbell!”

Colander pursed her lips as she tied her hair back.

“You need to be ready for anything,” she said. “I got the dinosaur massage, but I had my bear mace with me just in case.”

I started walking towards the front of the truck, towards the driver’s side, when I bumped into something. I wasn’t walking too fast, but I felt like I had hit a wall with my face. I stood still, shaking my head.

“Having second thoughts?” Colander asked. “Let me drive. You haven’t driven with that leg in months, and we need to put the pedal to the metal.”

“I ran into something,” I said, waving my arms around. “I don’t know what it was. It seems to be gone now, but I can hear something weird.”

Colander came around the truck, brandishing a bat like a baseball-themed buccaneer. We were both listening to the open space around us, me waving my arms higgledy piggledy, she poking at the air with her bat.

“You said Warbell could turn invisible somehow, yeah?” she said. “Do you have some, like, old buckets of paint or something we can throw in the air as a sort of improvised invisible dinosaur detection system?”

Just then I felt something descend on my shoulders. It was long and sinuous and wrapped around my head. I couldn’t see anything, and that just made me scream louder.

“It’s a snake!” I bellowed. “A giant invisible dinosaur snake, and it’s going to swallow my head!”

Before Colander could brain me with her unsensibly fashionable club, the “snake,” and everything attached to it, materialized before our eyes in the shadowy dark.

It was a large, very furry, very friendly mammoth with its trunk draped around my head.

“Oh gosh,” I said between uncomfortable jostling via halitosis-encrusted tusks. “You must be Furbud.”

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

The first thing I thought when I put down Warbell’s journal was that he STILL did not explain why he wanted so badly to live in MY garage. I just read through that whole thing, and all those bizarre ramblings about time travel and cyborg dinosaurs and idiotic names (Razzberry? Really?), and Warbell still didn’t have the decency to answer the first question I asked him?

And oh, man, was I ever confused after reading that tome! My brain didn’t feel up to the challenge of understanding half of what was written in that thing.

But if what Warbell had written in that journal was true, then he was not just innocent of all charges, but he was trying to protect all of humankind… and I had just told the bad guys where he was going. I texted Colander with a brief and bewildering message about what I had learned—something like, “Warbell might be saving the world from matter-stealing interdimensional lovesick dinosaurs, and I just gave directions to the evil villains as to where he is going!”

I glanced at the time. It was getting to be around eight pm. A sense of determination filled my gut. I grabbed my jacket, my rifle (it probably wouldn’t do much to stop an evil dinosaur from a timeless dimension, but I had to bring something or else I felt like I was just running naked into a fight with an army of monsters), placed it and my other things on my porch, and marched over to Charlie’s place.

I banged on the door.

Charlie’s daughter Harriet opened it.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Daddy said that he isn’t home if you come over, but you can buy some Tyrannosaurus Mex from me. It’s my new stall. Instead of just lemonade, I decided to try selling tyrannosaurus-themed tacos, and they are really popular. What do you think is a better name, Tyrannosaurus Mex, or just Rex Mex?”

“Sorry, kiddo, but this time, I really need my truck back,” I said.

“Oh,” the kid said. “Daddy said if you said you really need your truck back, then I should say he is…”

The little girl pulled out a note from her pocket and checked it, then cleared her throat.

“He is in the hospital right now with appendicitis and I am sorry but he can’t come talk with you.”

This was getting me nowhere.

“Charlie!” I shouted. “I saw your kid’s note, and I know you’re in there! Just give me my truck back because I need it to save the world!”

At first there was no response, but his daughter was looking up at me with something like awe on her face.

“I’ll get him,” she said. “If you gotta save the world, then Daddy can drive the rusty old jalopy this week.”

Within five minutes, I was in my truck, turning the key. It felt really strange to be in that truck again. My heart pounded as the engine turned over, as I hit the clutch, as I pulled slowly out of the garage. Part of me was still terrified to be behind that steering wheel. I paused for a moment and took a deep breath.

Someone knocked on my window. I looked over, and was startled to see Colander standing in the street with what looked like a bazooka strapped to her back. Her eye patch had the more traditional skull and crossbones this time, though the color was pink instead of black. I rolled down my window.

“I’m coming with you,” she said.

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

This journal has already become incredibly long, but really there is so much to explain, and even now I feel like I am just glossing over everything in a hurry. There are a few other specific tidbits I wanted to make clear, as a courtesy to our admittedly fragile working relationship up to this point.

You may still be wondering why I can speak English. Maybe you think I am using some kind of universal translating device. We do have things like that, but even a universal translating device needs to hear you speak before it can translate what you have said. It’s much more convenient to simply be able to speak the language. And because of the strange way that the frozen time of my world interacts with our brains, remembering things—anything—becomes remarkably easy. For that reason, as us dinosaurs have observed your world, most of us have taken it upon ourselves to learn a few languages. English is one of the more common languages to learn, and most of us learned a handful of tongues to fluency before even the first honeymoon trips to your world ever took place. For the record, I can speak English, Chinese, and Portuguese.

Before I came, too, I prepared what I would tell the people of Final Pumpkin about where I came from. In retrospect, the story I gave about oversleeping was really stupid, but I am not sure it was any less believable than this the real deal—would you have believed me on the first day if I opened up by talking about dinosaurs from a timeless dimension harvesting materials from the earth and breeding on time traveling honeymoon trips throughout history? And I really had lived near Final Pumpkin in your distant past. Also, the fact that your people had a nickname for my species—king of the dinosaurs—was just too cute for me to pass up. I simply had to claim I was your king. Plus I enjoy commanding people to do things, so I really wanted to give royalty a try, at least for a while.

As I said, I also went back to earth’s dinosaur age, and I put my footprints around the area as proof that I am your king. You are probably thinking it doesn’t make any sense that those fossilized footprints would remain many millions of years, and that’s true. It doesn’t make sense. However, when dinosaurs interfere with your timeline, as I said before, the reverberations through time have strange effects, and the fact that I jumped through time from there to here seems to have had a preserving effect on my footprints… as well as on my dinosaur poop underneath your house.

Sorry about that.

Oh, and my pants. I had those made because it seems that your people have a cultural prohibition against the exposure of body parts related to sexual reproduction. I don’t get it, but I thought I should try to follow the conventions of your culture, and therefore trousers.

There is more to my story of course. There is always more to say. But I wanted to know if it was true, if my mate and many others were really killed because of romantic trips and pilfering organic material from your world connected to other pockets of time throughout history and the dinosaurs dwelling in them (gosh, it’s hard to write about this whole issue sensibly in English!). If I am right, then my people are hiding the truth and destroying the lives of many. Not just dinosaurs, but even more so the people of your earth.

Part of the issue is also that my people are stealing raw materials, metals and rocks and such, and those raw materials are causing buildings to collapse and conking out electronics in your world. That makes your electrician’s business really busy, doesn’t it?

But then there’s the actual deaths.

When I saw the boy from the bacon restaurant fall, I was seeing my mate all over again. It was so similar. And it was horrific. I could not just stand by and watch him suffer, just as I could not stand by and allow my mate’s death to be covered up and lied about. And as I have realized that so many human beings and other animals may also be suffering because of these harvesting policies, I have come to the realization that I have to do something. My people must stop stealing from your people and destroying your lives.

Because as I learned during my investigations into this issue, at the time the bacon boy nearly died and several others did perish, a family of brachiosaurs returned from their honeymoon time period in the past. They re-entered the frozen kingdom at the same time (funneled through the effects of the portal) that a number of people died or were crippled by the disappearing death virus. I confirmed all of this with Thinkwilder, as I am still in contact with him.

Everything I have gathered so far points to my people’s guilt. I am trying to collect as much evidence as I can, but the truth seems apparent to me already. And I have to do everything in my power to stop this murderous business. I am sure you probably still have a lot of questions, but they will have to wait. I don’t expect you to believe me, but I hope you will at least take the time to read this letter thoroughly and carefully and consider honestly and with an open heart the critical information I am telling you. We may be able to save many more lives throughout history if we move quickly.

Take care, Wal.

Warbell

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

Let’s make this just a little more complicated. What if I leave the frozen kingdom and go to 2018, and another dinosaur, let’s say Thinkwilder, goes to 218 BC. Then time will travel the same speed for him in that time as it does in the frozen world, and the same time passes in my world of 2018. So if we both left the frozen kingdom at the same time, and we both lived in our respective “time zones” of 218 BC and AD 2018 for two weeks and then returned to the frozen world, we would return home at the same time, perhaps even bump into each other as we emerged through the portal. Thinkwilder’s theory—and this seems borne out by the data so far—is that if a dinosaur takes organic material out of the past at a specific time, and if simultaneously another dinosaur from the frozen world is living in the future and is synched up chronologically via frozen world time with the dinosaur stealing organic material in the past, then the organic material removed from the past disappears from the specific future that the future dinosaur is experiencing.

This is extremely difficult to explain, but basically Thinkwilder living in 218 BC in this scenario would be living at the same time as me living in 2018, at least in relation to time as experienced in the frozen kingdom. If Thinkwilder were to change the past in some large way, then that would have reverberating effects throughout history, but it becomes manifested specifically in 2018 because we are synched together via the frozen kingdom and our fates become intertwined through our mutual time slippage.

Let me put it one other way. We can imagine the frozen kingdom as a base world, okay? When someone leaves the frozen kingdom for your world, each time period that they go to is like a separate world—like Medieval Europe World and Wild West World and Crazy Future World. A dinosaur that visits any of these worlds would experience an hour, and that same hour would pass in the frozen world. So if someone visits Crazy Future World and spends an hour, and someone else visits Medieval Europe World and spends an hour at the same time, and then they both return to the frozen kingdom… then they will return to the same time in the frozen kingdom. However, Crazy Future World, Medieval Europe World, and Wild West World are all ultimately the same world, with the same set of matter, and so if something major is changed in any of those worlds, it affects the others according to the timeline of your earth, but those changes are funneled through the connections to the frozen kingdom somehow in such a way that the effects of the stolen matter are made manifest where and when other dinosaurs from the frozen world are living in your world.

What it boils down to is that the effects of changing your world hit the hardest at the points where your world and my world interact. Thus, if Thinkwilder takes a lot of organic material away to the frozen kingdom in 218 BC, that violent uprooting of organic material actually directly affects me and the people in 2018 because of our connection through the frozen kingdom. We don’t know why, but that is how the system works, and so the system creates victims who suffer greatly from the harvesting and mating programs of my people.

And no, I wasn’t in Final Pumpkin in 2015 when you lost your leg… but other dinosaurs were in your world at that time, such as that rebel you call Nessie over in Scotland. (Nessie isn’t a plesiosaur—he actually is a dinosaur, a runt camarasaurus with social anxiety.) Anyway, it just takes one of our kind living in your time to cause a lightning rod effect for the manifestations of what you call “the death virus.”

The “death virus” I am convinced is simply organic matter being stolen from your reality and pulled into the reality of the dinosaurs.

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

Thinkwilder’s theory was that, when dinosaurs went to mate and bear young on your earth, they would be inadvertently harvesting organic material as well. Any food they ate—plants or animals—would become a part of their bodies, and when they left your world, that organic material which would have become the basis of parts of other animals and plants in the future then disappeared from your universe. Also, any children born to those dinosaurs would also carry their organic material over to the other side, to our frozen kingdom, and some dinosaurs have large litters—lots of young, which grow to be huge animals, and then all those tons of flesh and bone ripped from your reality into ours then they grow into adults and walk through the portal. If, in the future on your side, that stolen organic material happened to be part of someone’s heart or other vital organs, well… that person would die.

Of course I had a lot of questions. Perhaps the most important question was that none of this really makes any sense. If some organic material was harvested from the past, then since it was taken away from the past, it would never have the chance to become a part of creatures in the future. It should never have a chance to disappear from the bodies of animals or humans or dinosaurs because it should never have existed so as to become a part of those animals.

Yet time travel always presents numerous logical difficulties. It doesn’t really make sense that anyone should ever be able to travel through time. If, for example, a human being were to travel back thirty years with his time-traveling car, then there would be the same matter replicated twice in one time period—the exact same matter from his body already exists in the past, but just in another form, in the trees, in the food he has not eaten yet, in the world around him. It goes against logic that the same matter should be able to exist in two places at the same time.

Nevertheless, as proved by the mysterious portal, time travel exists and is possible. There seems to be some kind of underlying system in reality, though, that prevents paradoxes from occurring. For example, for whatever reason, though attempts have been made, a dinosaur has never been able to travel to a time period in which he already exists, thus exempting two copies of the same dinosaur. Something prevents such paradoxes from happening.

And there also seems to be another mechanism in the systems of reality that governs how matter can appear or disappear from a universe. If, for example, I travel to your world in 2018 one day and spend several days in 2018, then the same amount of time is experienced in the frozen kingdom simultaneously. I mean, if I return to the frozen kingdom from your side again after several days, then several days will have passed in the frozen world, too. It’s impossible so far as we know to go back in time in the frozen world, regardless of what time we jump into and out of when we travel to and from your world. There seems to be some kind of a synchronization that happens between your world’s time and ours when we travel hither and thither for our honeymoons.

These synchronization systems have some possibly deadly consequences.

Read the next chapter.

By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

I didn’t really understand what Thinkwilder was saying at first. Myself, I had never really thought about the consequences of mining your world. I just figured, for example, if you had fewer rocks, you had fewer rocks, but that it wouldn’t cause any real problems beyond sparser pebbles on the beach.

“I guess the world has maybe twenty billion tons of rocks instead of twenty point five billion,” I said. “Maybe their gravel roads have a little less gravel.”

Thinkwilder jerked his head this way and that, then scrunched up in the inflatable chair and snorted.

“Sure, but it depends what that gravel is being used for, right?” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Furbud was crawling up into my chair, which immediately reformed to accommodate the furry beast. The mammoth was still eyeing Thinkwilder suspiciously.

“We take rocks and minerals to build something out of, yes?” Thinkwilder said. “We take things so we can build. But if those materials we are taking from the past in the living world were meant to be used to build something in the future…”

“In the future?” I asked.

Look, time travel stuff is pretty hard to grasp at first, and I was just not getting it.

“Warbell, we can see the future,” Thinkwilder said. “We can see that the rocks and minerals we are taking away are also used in the timeline of the earth for what they call skyscrapers or walls or parts of their vehicles. We can’t just take rocks from an entire universe and expect it won’t have any effect on that universe, right? Have you ever checked to see if when we take out the metals from the past, if those metals then disappear from the future buildings and machines put together by humankind?”

I shook my head slowly.

“Right!” Thinkwilder said. “You didn’t! Because you didn’t care! But I checked, and removing the rocks removes them from the buildings in the human world of the future as well. That can cause catastrophes. A wall may suddenly lose its cornerstone. Yes, that’s right. And then the wall cannot stand up, you know. And bad things happen.”

“But the humans can’t build the wall without the cornerstone. So they shouldn’t have been able to make the wall in the first place if it disappeared from the past. That doesn’t make any sense!”

Thinkwilder nodded his head.

“Yes, it doesn’t,” he said. “But the future exists with the same matter as the past. Perhaps removing it from one time removes it from all the times in the future as well. Or perhaps there is another factor that makes the rock or metal or organic matter disappear from a specific part of time. I do not know for certain, but possibly reality becomes linked across time periods through the portal in some way.”

“Alright,” I said. “So it’s a chain reaction throughout the history of the earth. But the Kingdom of All Eternity and Protection of Our People isn’t harvesting organic material from the earth. We just take rocks, metals…”

“And children,” Thinkwilder said. “Right? Children made from the organic material of the past. And everything their parents eat over the months or years abroad, yes? All that becomes a part of your body. All that muscle and sinew you build from the food of the world is torn away when you leave. So what kind of effect could that have on the people and the animals of the other side, hmm?”

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

At that time in my life, I was all raw nerves and no patience. Maybe I am still that way sometimes here, but I was worse then. Maybe it was also the fact that Furbud was still grumbling at Thinkwilder at my feet. I snapped a little bit.

“How did you know that?” I hissed. “Did you do something?”

 “I did something, yes,” said Thinkwilder. “I saw my mate die, too. Walking beside me, yes, walking beside, and then suddenly she wasn’t. She was on the ground. Twitching. Broken. Dead within seconds.”

Thinkwilder’s neck had stopped whirling about, and now his head was just inches from mine, our eyes awkwardly meeting.

“The medics came, you know?” he continued. “And they performed their autopsy. Yes, they did. And I think you know what they said.”

I looked down at the floor. Furbud was bumping his head against Thinkwilder’s thigh, and I reached out and nuzzled him to calm him down.

“Heart attack,” I said.

“Mmm,” said Thinkwilder. “Yes. Heart attack. And, yes, I saw my Peacewhistle die, and I saw the readout, the body monitor. Organs badly damaged. Organs missing their walls. Internal bleeding. That is not a heart attack unless a heart attack means the heart is eating you from the inside, right? But that’s not how a heart attacks. And I argued, yes, I did. I argued and argued. I told them about what the monitor said, but they replied…”

“Malfunctions,” I said.

“Funny how unreliable our cyber-enhancements are when a heart attack comes along, yes?” Thinkwilder said, his head beginning to bob again. “Work just fine, just fine, until you need them the most.”

I sat back on my haunches, the floor bulging out and softening to become a chair for my behind as I settled back.

“What are you saying?” I asked as the insta-couch blossomed around me. “How did you know to talk to me?”

“Didn’t know, I really didn’t,” Thinkwilder said, and he bared his teeth in a sort of grim grin. “I am asking everyone who lost their mate. Several similar stories came up. They truly did. Not everyone, but so far…”

“But why did they die?” I asked. “Why did my mate die?”

“Ahh,” the sauropod said, and he clucked his tongue, softly. “I don’t know the reason. I am just asking the questions. But folks don’t want the questions asked. And in that case it’s all the more important to do the asking.”

“You have some idea why,” I said. “Right? Are you saying that the Kingdom of all Eternity and Protection of our People is killing its own citizens?”

“Well, I do have a theory,” Thinkwilder said.

He also sat down, and the floor ballooned up around him to support him. A section of the newly formed chair extruded a cooled section shaped like a pillow to give a sense of refreshment to my guest. I needed a cool pillow myself, and touched the controls to have one made.

 Since we didn’t eat, and didn’t really have needs in the frozen kingdom, we dinosaurs created special pillows that change temperature to give us comfort. You saw me with one the first day we met.

Anyway, the conversation continued.

“Think about it,” Thinkwilder said. “What happens in that world over there where time keeps moving when we take lots of materials to our frozen world? Hm? And what happens when some of those materials are organic materials? What possible effect might it have on the world to take those things away?”

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By me, with art by Sam Messerly.

Click here to read from the beginning.

It started with a sauropod visiting me. His name meant Thinkwilder, and he was quite an unusual beast, if I do say so myself. His particular classification in your world—I had to look this up—is saltasaurus. Maybe you know them—they are sauropods with bony armor on their backs. Anyway, Thinkwilder was eccentric. He lamented that his kind has very bland skin coloring, so he had taken to painting designs on his hide. In the frozen world, those designs would tend to stay on longer, too, so he could pretend those swirls, or stripes, or rainbow polkadots were natural.

Anyway, when Thinkwilder came to visit me in my humble quarters, he had much more subdued colors, but the designs were still wild—mostly black stripes in surprising and intricate patterns, like eyes peering out of his limbs and torso. I was put off by the effect, especially in combination with his intense and sour expression and somber, erratic tongue-clicks. Furbud didn’t like him either, and trumpeted a warning at his approach.

“You are Warbell, I think, right? Right?” he said. (Well, he used my real name, not the nickname you gave me, but for convenience’ sake I am using “Warbell” in this story.)

“You are Thinkwilder,” I said. “Shh, Furbud.”

Furbud trumpeted disconsolately. Like a blat, blat, blaaaat.

“Confirm that you are Warbell,” said Thinkwilder. “I know my name already.”

“Yes, I am Warbell,” I said. “What is it you want?”

“Yes,” said Thinkwilder, bobbing his head and clicking his tongue. “You are Warbell. I have been talking with all the dinosaurs who have lost someone, on the other side over there in the living world. You lost your mate in that place, right? I mean she died.”

I didn’t smile at Thinkwilder. At that time, I wasn’t smiling much. I glowered.

“It’s no secret,” I said. “What do you want?”

Thinkwilder whipped his neck up and down again, and my ceiling contorted away so that he didn’t hit his skull. (In large part because of the influences of humankind, the dinosaur kingdom began making houses especially for those who paired off as mates. However, we added some clever bits like ceilings and doors that shift in height or width for dinosaurs of different sizes when they visit.)

“But doesn’t it bother you?” he said. “Why did she die? Did you ask?”

“What do you mean?”

My mind suddenly flashing back to the readout on Razzberry’s body monitor.

“Warbell, you are not the first I’ve talked to,” he said. “The first I talked to was myself, because I am gathering information. Because my wife died, too.”

“Well, I am sorry to hear that,” I said. “But I am not here to help you gather information.”

“Did they say your mate died of a heart attack?” Thinkwilder asked. “Even though we are cyborgs now, and we can’t get heart attacks.”

Furbud was getting more agitated, but I was the one really starting to freak out inside.

“They said there were malfunctions…” I began.

“Was one of the malfunctions,” Thinkwilder said slowly. “Was one of the malfunctions the fact that your mate’s bodily organs were disappearing?”

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