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Prologue
Durham, North Carolina
April 2016
Death is a beautiful thing, if you think about it. Elegant, even. That moment when every touch, every taste, every teardrop electrifies each cell. Imagine it—delicate crimson droplets and bruised hues of purple and yellow all creating a palette of color on an endless hide canvas. Then there’s the sweet smell of sweat as panic sets in and the pungent coppery tang that accompanies that first slice of flesh. The soothing sound of a blade working its way through a crackle of skin, then sinking dully through fatty tissue, at last finding its resting place in the slosh of blood.
Mere minutes after the penetration is the calming realization that the end is near. A peaceful cocktail of reflection and fear.
Then serenity.
The ultimate freedom from the taut restraints of life. The bindings that hold one back from experiencing true sovereignty. You become the master of your own fate through death. There is nothing more comforting than that.
How is that not eminently exquisite?
And more to the point, will you not find it equally magnificent when I intimately introduce you to it—death?
Even years after I first laid eyes on you, I still find you captivating. Your high cheekbones and contemplative eyes like shiny pennies drew me into the artful composition that was your face. Your features promised a hopeful future of attraction and self-worth. It was my appreciation for beauty and art that slaughtered my resolve to kill you back then.
Words like slaughtered make me tingle. Not in the sense of a sociopath hungry for blood. I’m no sociopath. In fact, I love what I do. I feel joy in opening these gifts given to me—gifts that keep on giving as they free me to free them. It’s all about them, really.
These pretty creatures turned ugly by life. Disfigured by pain.
Now, however, no amount of outward loveliness can save you, for I know your blemished heart. Only I can save you now.
I close my eyes, letting the visions engulf me. I imagine every heated moment as I first slip into your home. It’s dark and empty, but I smell you. Not the vanilla lotion you lather all over your skin, but an intoxicating earthy scent of grit and determination. I snake around your sparse living room furniture, padding across the dull carpet, heading into your bedroom. There I open your closet door, my fingers frisking the mixture of cotton and polyester clothing hanging from a metal bar, all cheaply made garments that scratch my fingertips.
Pushing the hangers aside, I slither against the wall, adjusting the fabric to hide me. I gingerly close the bifold door behind me, peeking through the slats into the gaping darkness as evening falls heavily. There I wait, my breaths shallow and calm, belying the anticipation that sets my heart pumping excitedly.
When I hear the click of the front door, I know the time has come. First the pale light that reaches across the hallway, narrowly slicing through the bedroom. Then keys clattering against the throwback periwinkle countertop. The thump of your kitchen-sink-sized hobo bag beside them. The soft steps across the trampled carpet as you head toward me.
A moment later a blast of light brightens the bedroom, but I’m hidden in shadows. I must practice patience, waiting for just the right moment.
Then it arrives. Through a crack I watch your silhouette slide past me and hear your footsteps on the bathroom linoleum. I am officially between you and the only means of escape, and that is my cue.
Soundless, I push the closet door fully open, careful to keep my attention on the corner of the bedroom where the bathroom door hangs ajar. Your figure creates dark waves against the bathroom light, the back-and-forth movement following along the carpet. I watch as it disappears further into the bathroom. The toilet flushes, and I pace forward. A rush of water from the sink, and I know your back is toward me.
I must move quickly, keeping to the side to avoid being seen too easily in the mirror. But by the time you do see me, I’ll already have overpowered you.
Softly I step into a puddle of light that drenches me. Yet you do not notice my movement behind you. Within two steps I’m directly behind you, a hot wet breath away, and you see my reflection smiling back at you and you yelp. As you turn, one hand presses to your mouth, the other plunges a knife into your abdomen—knowing I hit the inferior vena cava, something CSI: Miami taught me—and you slink to the floor in a heap of gasping pain and fingers clutching my arm as your cries dwindle to whimpers.
Vivid red blossoms into the threads of your shirt, and your trill of fear gives me goose bumps. I kneel beside you, still holding my palm to your face. I’m numb to your watery eyes hovering over mine, pleading but unable to focus, like two egg yolks. All I see is fading fear and encroaching peace take over you—tranquility for us both.
As I relish the euphoria, a jerking sensation overtakes me, waking me to a reality where you are a parking lot away. I open my eyes, but I don’t let it spoil the moment.
I glance down at my wandering hand, my dull nails biting and scraping across my flesh, but it’s not your skin I’m tearing at. I’m disappointed at the reality.
Sitting in my car quivering after the finale, the distance between me and you saddens me. These are the moments I live for but rarely get to enjoy. It’s a recurring dream that is usually out of reach, but I find peace in the knowledge it will soon be in my grasp.
While some may accidentally stumble into my radar, you are special. You’re chosen. Predestined. There’s a point of no return in life, when you’ve stomped too hard on someone else’s territory and smashed too many hopes. Take most families—masters at the art of loss. Negligently losing their children for the sake of their own selfish wants. Rather than sacrifice, they toss their children to the wolves.
They’re filled with fear. Fear of too little money. Fear of change. Fear of loss.
It all boils down to fear.
That’s the problem.
Luckily for you, I’m a master at the art of fear.
I’ve been watching, waiting patiently for my turn to move. For days I plotted and planned, a farmer tending his crop until the harvest. With my scythe in hand, I’m ready to reap a grim yield.
At last your turn has arrived. Let the countdown wind down until your death.
I relish the anticipation.
Perhaps you will be the final masterpiece I create. Or perhaps you’re only the beginning.
Chapter 1
Rosalita
San Luis, Mexico
1976
As the baby snuggled up against her milk-swelled breast, Rosalita Alvarez knew—they say a mother’s instinct can defy logic—there was something evil about him. Something broken. Something sinful behind those coal-black eyes.
Four tiny teeth peeked out from unyielding pink gums slathered in spittle and breast milk. The emerging white tips were crooked yet sharp, pinchers that could draw blood if clamped hard enough. Although he was her first, Rosalita innately understood it was the way of a baby—always testing the limits of a mama’s endurance. The opener being the labor pains as her body nearly split in half at the baby’s arrival. Then months of sleeplessness at the cries of hunger or need for comforting. And one mustn’t forget the excruciating tenderness during breastfeeding, coupled with the dwindling stores of energy the baby stole during these round-the-clock feedings.
Indeed, motherhood shook and rattled a mama’s previous life until she shattered into unrecognizable bits of her former self, then pieced herself back together into a shape-shifting puzzle of worries and what-ifs, memories and meaningful firsts. At the first strangled cry a mama dutifully retreated into nonexistence while the baby became all that she was, is, and ever would be. It was both beautiful and horrifying how a squirming little creature with dimpled fingers and a ridiculous round ball of a head could overpower one’s self-will so easily, inspiring both heartbreak and adoration with a sharp cry or playful chuckle.
Yes, motherhood shook Rosalita awake from a sleep she never realized was her former life. Such extremes of joy and ache, all at the hands of the baby boy she now cradled in her weary arms. Her eyelids weighted down with exhaustion as her surroundings faded to black, then sprung back alive at the baby’s squiggling arms and legs.
Rosalita sat with her child in the living room of the concrete block bungalow. On the outside the blocks were unpainted and mildewed; inside, they had been a vibrant burgundy once upon a time, when her father had first painted them when she was a little girl, but they had faded over time to the color of a fresh bruise. The blocks met the soot-stained plaster ceiling, cracked and buckling from a leaky tin roof, in jagged lines. The beige floor tiles, freshly mopped, were cool beneath Rosalita’s bare feet as she attempted to rock the baby to sleep, but the worn sofa offered precious little give to the gentle back and forth.
The wooden front door hung open, its orange paint brightened by a feverish sun sweeping across it, but the warm air was breezeless and suffocating today. An old rattletrap, belching great plumes of smoke, bumped along the dirt road, its grinding gears and blaring mariachi music momentarily drowning out the calls of the children at play. From the sofa Rosalita had a ringside seat of the doings in her humble San Luis, Mexico, barrio—the porch sitters pecking for gossip, the raggedy culo rummaging through trashcans and dumpsters, the sweat-drenched men replacing a rusty tin roof, the teen lovers exploring each other’s charms in shadowy alleyways. Beating the dry heat of the listless summer afternoon required cleverness. A resourceful youth had figured out how to open a fire hydrant, attracting a throng of kids and even some free-spirited adults to splash in the cool torrent.
Dust from her shared front yard billowed around the scurrying feet of children playing Red Rover, an American game in which a team of children, clutching hands, invites a child from the opposing team to hurl him or herself against their chain with the intention of breaking through—until, as was the case today, the children inevitably collapsed in a heap of wriggling legs and arms. Even after years of watching the game unfold, Rosalita had yet to figure out the rules or logic behind such a violent premise. What ever happened to the simple, diplomatic games like el patio de mi casa—or as the Americans called it, Ring Around the Rosie—that she had grown up enjoying?
A squeal. Then a gurgling coo.
Gazing down at her son, Rosalita swaddled him as he restlessly squirmed, his fussing rising to an ear-splitting squall. His cheeks reddened with fury; he balled his chubby hands into fists and kicked angrily. Closing her eyes against this fitful backdrop, the words came out in a whisper, then hung over his unfurling screams as the Spanish lullaby her mother once sang to her cast its spell:
“A la nanita nana nanita ella, nanita ella. Mi niño tiene sueño bendito sea, bendito sea.
My boy is sleepy, blessed be, blessed be.
Little fountain running clearly and profoundly.
Nightingale that in the jungle sings sadly,
hush while the cradle rocks.”
The mellow tune eventually soothed him, her voice sweet and pure like the molasses her abuela spoon-fed her as a child. Though his cries ceased, Rosalita’s eyes remained shut, for she couldn’t muster the courage to watch her monstrous creation as his mouth sought her brown nipple for nourishment.
By all appearances he was a normal child. Deeply olive-skinned like his father, coarse black ringlets like his mother. Cheeks thick with baby fat, legs wobbly with uncertainty.
Always probing, always watching ... but not in the curious way that infants do. There was a knowing behind his piercing black eyes. An eerie darkness. Rosalita first noticed it when he was about six months old.
“He’s evil, I tell you,” she had once confided in her husband, Eduardo.
“How can you say such things of our mijo?” Eduardo demanded. “Your lack of sleep makes you loco like your mama,” he added with a stern glare, then a warning that no such nonsense should be spoken of again.
While those dark thoughts remained buried in her nightmares from that day onward, the intimate fear of its truth never abated. Day after day Rosalita looked upon her son with a foreboding knowledge that something wasn’t right ... El diablo, perhaps, clung to him, devouring his infantile virtue.
A gentle tug on her deflated breast forced her awareness downward, where her gaze met her son’s. Though a baby, he was no longer a newborn. He had already cultivated his own cruel brand of humor. Crawling gave him independence, clearly savored as he destroyed every object within reach.
With her flesh firmly tucked between his taut lips, his raven eyes met hers—soulless orbs in which she saw twin reflections of her haggard face. A chilly smile played upon the little brown face.
“Okay, Josef, time to let go,” she urged, pressing her pinkie between his jaws to unlock his grip.
But he only became more resolute.
She probed again, firmer still.
Again he resisted with a sly grin, then he looked at her, his eyes alien and spiteful.
It happened so swiftly that the details rolled over each other like angry waves. A screech, a sharp flick, a wailing sob, a rivulet of blood trickling down her flushed skin, soaking into the folds of fabric at her waist. Amid the pain she nearly tossed Josef to the floor ... nearly, but caught herself. Roughly dropping him down beside her on the cushion, Rosalita gripped her chest, examining the injury through the fresh blood oozing out. The wound had disfigured her nipple as he ripped at it with his teeth, leaving a vulnerable gash upon the callused peak. Cursing him, she pressed a soiled burp cloth to her chest, soaking up the oozing blood.
From his upright pose beside her, the baby giggled with fascination at her wound-tending antics. Bits of flesh showed between his teeth in a crimson smirk. Warily fishing through his mouth with her index finger, his jaw clamped down. She cried out and tugged the finger free with a smart pop.
“You evil creature!” she spat through hot tears. “You bit me, and you liked it.”
Josef chuckled with glee, and at that moment she knew it wasn’t superstition, or postpartum depression, or first-time motherhood that besieged her with these haunting thoughts. Indeed, she had birthed evil incarnate ... and nothing could be done about it.
Or was there something? Something drastic ... but necessary.
Decades of superstitions trickled down the lines of her family—fabricated stories of punishments for sins woven into the folds of time. Sins of lust, theft, lies ... murder. Rosalita was only privy to a handful of those secrets, each passed down from mother to daughter, generation after generation. Whether truth or fiction, Rosalita didn’t know. But she did know one thing. Josef was the culmination of God’s retribution for her own sin, a sin only she knew about. A sin she kept hidden in her bosom, tucked away until her last breath.
The only way to stop this curse that she knew would forever revisit her family was to kill baby Josef Alvarez.
End the cycle.
She rested on the corner of the sofa cushion, dirty white stuffing spilling out of the ripped seams. Gazing at her son, she pondered the finality of what she was about to do. Yet sadness—there was none. Fear—aborted. Only hope for a better tomorrow.
A dull gray pillow was crushed between her back and the sofa. She pried it loose, held it.
Breathe, she commanded herself. You must do this. It’s the only way.
She placed the drab pillow on her lap and ran the pad of her index finger along its frayed seam.
“Do it!” The words slipped out unbidden, giving voice to her thoughts.
She grabbed the pillow firmly with both hands, lowering it with infinitesimal slowness. If her hands trembled, she didn’t notice.
She rested it on his plump face at first, gently, almost motherly. She leaned forward, giving weight behind it. The little sausage fingers clawed the air, legs kicked in protest. She increased her mild pressure. The squirming came in spasms now.
1 ... 2 ... 3 ... The seconds passed. 4 ... 5 ... 6 ...
Then a muffled sob shattered the deviant silence—but not an infant’s wail.
Startled, Rosalita looked up to find little Juanita Juarez, a neighborhood kid, standing in the doorway, struck dumb from shock. Her big doe-eyes, wide with fear, filled with tears.
As terror sent Juanita running in a panic, Rosalita’s mind cleared, jolted to sudden awareness of the lifeless silence. Had she actually killed her own child? Tossing the pillow aside, she pulled the baby to her chest, but he hung limply in her arms.
“Please, Josef ...” she pleaded to his pale blue form. Pressing her mouth to his, she forced air into his tiny lungs.
Nothing. Deadness.
Another breath.
Then cries shook the little bungalow—from Josef’s blue face, and from Rosalita as she wept for forgiveness in a crumpled heap on the floor.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” she yelled, stomping the tile. When her fury exhausted itself, she hung her head in shame. “For my sins I must pay.”
Although her punishment was yet to be revealed, Josef’s piercing gaze caught hers, as if he knew something she didn’t. As if he sensed the darkness clouding her, or had created it.
Perhaps Josef Alvarez would be that retribution after all.
Chapter 2
Ari
Durham, North Carolina
April 8, 2016
I dipped tentacled fingers into my soul, searching for my humanity, but nothing was there. A hollow had swept clean the place where my heart should have been. I didn’t mind the vacancy. Nothingness is freedom. The heart-shaped void is liberation. The weightiness of pain just wasn’t worth feeling anymore. Most normal people would disagree—the whole “better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all” syndrome people were too attached to. But I was being logical. Grief hurts, period. Why not escape if you can?
Anniversaries always brought out the raging cynic in me. Wedded bliss—screw you, because single life is the only life. Twenty years on the job—why celebrate a daily grind that gets you nothing but a corny watch? But the death of my sister ... that was an anniversary I couldn’t escape. It blindsided me year after year, its arrival disentombing the old anguish from the day she died. Died. The word was too prosaic. I always preferred the term murder, but that was the sadomasochist in me talking. After all, since I was the one who killed her, didn’t that earn me the right to name it?
Mottled sunlight dappled the acres upon acres of tombstones jutting up from the earth around me. But I was only here for one.
My eyes glazed over as I read the words at my feet for easily the hundredth time:
Carli Lily Wilburn
February 21, 1994 – April 8, 2002
Beautiful daughter, beloved friend of all who knew her, now God’s angel
Her headstone sat aged and naked before me, littered with grass trimmings from a recent mow. Somehow I never made it into the inscription; nothing to acknowledge our sisterly bond. But I suppose I lost that right when I snuffed her too-young life from this earth exactly fourteen years ago today.
Sunlight fingered the edges of the marker, slick from the morning’s dew, spattering pinpricks of light across the marbled hues of crimson and gray. While my sister lay buried beneath tons of wet earth, my own soul lay buried beneath swells of guilt. Session after session, therapists had tried to excavate my id, but it remained as lifeless as Carli’s crumbling bones.
An icy dawn breeze aroused an eruption of goose bumps on my bare arms, a stark reminder that I’d overstayed my graveyard visit. Mom and Dad would soon arrive, and it was best they not see me. Our last interaction a couple years ago only resulted in a terse exchange of non-pleasantries:
Ari, what are you doing here? Mom in her hushed-yet-stern voice, like she was reprimanding a child while pressing her palm over a phone receiver.
I’m visiting my sister’s grave. What does it look like I’m doing? My defiant reply that sounded more argumentative than I had intended.
You shouldn’t be here. She acted as if I had never been a part of the family. As if I hadn’t spent my life loving Carli, adoring Daddy, obliging Mommy.
I need to be here, Mom. I loved her too.
But one thing I realized hadn’t changed about Mom—her superhuman ability to be unreasonably unyielding. Please, I’m asking nicely, Ari, for you to leave. Don’t disgrace your sister by being here. Mom’s insistent urging rose with her tone. Her voice reached a dog whistle pitch when she was upset.
You’re not the only one who misses her.
Oh, that’s rich, coming from the one who killed her!
Screw you! I have just as much right to visit her as you do.
Mom gave an embittered haha intended to wound. Oh really? A loving sister wouldn’t have done what you did, Ari. Then she turned to Dad for support in sledgehammering my will. Burt, do something! She shouldn’t be here. Make her leave, Mom’s plea, to which Dad contemplatively stroked his mustache, then shook his head at me in apology. I muttered cuss words at their backs as he firmly guided Mom away by her shoulders, whispering consoling words in her ear.
I wasn’t ready for round two and stalked away in the opposite direction.
I had just hit my twenties at the time, and I hadn’t seen them since.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. We weren’t a family anymore, just surly acquaintances bound together by tragedy.
Pushing the sour memory aside, I gently placed a thick cluster of summer-sun-yellow dandelions on Carli’s grave. As kids, the eye-catching weeds had grown in abundance in our yard and became our favorite flower, dotting our hair, peeking from our pockets, and enchanting our bedroom décor. Grownups considered it the peskiest of weeds, the bane of the suburbanite’s perfect lawn, but we adored them unconditionally. I knew that wherever Carli was watching me from right now, she laughed at the irony. Always laughing ... up until her very last breath.
It was a moment I would never—could never—forget.
While the before and after evaporated into a foggy haze, a memory slipping away like sand through my fingers, our final moments together burned like a brand.
Blood pooling in the grass, trickling between the blades like a tiny red snake in flight. Carli sprawled out, spread eagle, unblinkingly staring up at me, a subtle smile lingering on her lips. Now you can have your own room, Sissy. A sardonic laugh later she was gone. Eyes an empty pond of algae-green, glassy and still. Sunlight kissing her pale face goodbye as her life drained into earth’s carpet beneath. And me, ever watching from above, frozen stiff with shock as she left me—her killer.
It was that horrific moment that would turn me against myself. Little by little my self-loathing stripped me down to nothing. No one was laughing now. No one would ever laugh again in my little world.
Staring blindly at Carli’s gravestone never got any easier over the years. As my eyes glazed over with salty tears, I could feel my heart quickening as the angst—not that third cup of coffee—fermented in my gut. Cheeks and neck flushing, palms sweating. The air swirled around me, threatening to hurl me onto the ground face-first.
I recognized the face of this monster inside me clawing to get out. Anxiety—a constant companion that, over the years, had made my life a living hell.
Breathe, I reminded myself. Slow breaths. In. Out. In. Out. I’d eventually get through this one, but I’d never shed this prickly skin altogether. It was Death’s brand on me. Killing had a way of scarring you permanently. Old wounds heal slowly, but the most scab-resistant are the ones we inflict on ourselves and pick at until the blood flows freely.
Chapter 3
Josef
April 7, 2016
One day earlier
A picture-snap moment back to childhood flung Josef Alvarez into the nether regions of his subconscious where the serrated blade of the cheap steak knife no longer ripped apart his vulnerable flesh. While the pulsing jab to his abdomen leaked lifeblood, his eyes fluttered closed ... allowing ancient history to whisk him away.
A hazy summer afternoon. A seesaw of gigglers creaking up and down. A screaming knot of daredevils trying to stay aboard the merry-go-round before centrifugal force flung them off like rag dolls. Here Josef was, just a kid on his neighborhood playground, jostling the girl ahead of him to be first on the slide. It was a day of reclaimed innocence.
Dust shrouded Josef as he clambered up the rungs and whizzed down with a wheeee, the breeze rippling his black hair, the hot metal scorching the naked thighs in his cut-off jean shorts.
A momentary peace ... before the torment of impending death.
As his scruffy Chuck Taylor sneakers slammed against the packed dirt at the foot of the slide, Josef was jarred back to reality, the reality where his assailant was prepping for the kill. Bleeding away his awareness, Josef backed up against the sofa behind him for support. His attacker stood before him, eyes squinting with hot anger, kitchen steak knife in hand, lunging at him, but Josef held up his hands, pushing the knife aside before it rounded back at him.
But his drugged state turned his world into a dizzying amusement park ride, twisting the double images into a helter-skelter reality his mind and body couldn’t track. A hand gripped his wrist, yet his resolve to fight surrendered. A knife slid through the air, caught his arm, then chewed its way down the skin toward his hand before releasing him. The jagged slice was an act of vengeance for Josef’s sins—and there were many—a final accounting, and Josef rang up short.
With his unscathed hand Josef gripped his stomach, attempting to herd the gore back inside him but instead only sopping his shirt with the blood. Wooziness swept over him again, consciousness wobbling unsteadily, until a tidal wave of nausea fetched the bile to his throat. His legs quivered like two sticks of string cheese, his palm gripped the arm of the sofa, but slipped—a buttery sensation that sent him crumbling into the cushion. The fall gave him a temporary distance from his killer, a moment to whimper for mercy.
“Please, please ...” he wept. “Please don’t kill me. I’ll do anything. Please.”
His heart beat a voodoo drum tattoo, and his head was filled with a strange whooshing sound, like when he’d held a conch shell to his ear as a kid. Blood seeping—his—drowning out his words. But his attacker heard. Josef could see it in the unclenching jaw, the sympathetic stare, the lax arm still holding the knife.
“Forgive me, please. Let me live. Let me make it up to you.”
But it was too late for I’m sorry. Too much blood. Darkness was already settling in.
His tangle of limbs drooped lazily from the cream pleather sofa that over the years had flaked plastic peelings all over the ragged beige carpet. A lake of metallic red pooled in the gauzy fabric, staining it with his essence.
Heavy eyelids drooped up and down, Josef fighting the urge for sleep. Feeling an obscure cool emptiness around him, he pried his eyes open, searching the living room. No one. He was alone ... for now. Possibly forever. His vision lurched in and out of focus. An outdated plasma TV sat nobly on a card table he had borrowed from a cousin several Super Bowl parties ago but never returned. A mismatched La-Z-Boy sat permanently open next to him, the wreckage of a drunken-stupor temper and misguided kick. Other than the sepia-striped wallpaper, the two-bedroom house was a shithole even worse than the ones in the barrio. He fled Mexico hoping for a second chance here in Dunn, North Carolina—a colorless Podunk of pig farmers and tobacco cultivators. But the past that he ran from had eventually caught up to him. And here he was, playing tug-o-war with death, with no apology sufficient to turn back time.
Wondering where his visitor was, he listened. Past the sound of his ragged wheezing. Past the adrenalin forcing him to cling stubbornly to life. Water rushing. The bathtub?
Light footsteps approached. His last sight, through the narrowing slits of his eyes, was two near-drained el caballito shot glasses of Jose Cuervo Clasico Silver tequila, neat. The drink of champions. And then it made sense—the why. He should have seen it coming.
As his slumped body exhaled its last, panicked thoughts seized him. What will happen to my corpse? Will anyone care that I’m gone? Can I reach that last sip of tequila? I hope they bury me in my good suit ... Odd, random thoughts for a dying man. And then somewhere in the void between living and dead he felt it ...
Fingers probing.
A tender pat on his cheek, then a quick slap. Almost a love tap, but it stung.
A killer’s final good-bye. A nonverbal I’m sorry for taking your life this way, but it had to be done.
Is this forgiveness? he wondered. For Josef Alvarez, absolution didn’t come cheap.
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