. . .

Eldri is squinting out his glass door at his patio. He’s thinking, hm.

Navvy Jim, drawn by an impulse that he can’t explain, is walking out into the yard.

Emily, she’s getting a little puzzled. She’s starting to feel concerned. This is something silly. This is something wrong. This can’t be happening. She knows.

Somebody is catapulting scissors in her direction. Somebody else ought be told.

Elsewhere in the world there are others noticing. There is baby Cheryl, who is Emily’s cousin, turning her face upwards towards the storm. The light of the scissors glints into her eyes. There is teenaged Jeremiah Sandiford, who is sick with fever and feels a sudden chill. There is the Scissors Study Institute attached to CERN: they make projections; they pull long faces; they feel a fear. And Fenris lifts up its head and it sniffs the air and it howls.

It would have been too late already even if Emily had started running — even if she’d seen the first pair of scissors fall and run for home. There would have been no way that she could make it. Not even then. It was destiny, it was inexorable, it was necessity, that took Emily out there, that caught her standing in that storm.

She opens her mouth to say something. She doesn’t ever know what it would have been.

The sky opens.

The bright green fields around Bibury, where Eldri summered his god-daughter Emily, turned in an instant into no-man’s-land.

It is raining scissors.

There are no options. It is raining scissors, hard and sharp and cold. Emily is cut. She is cut a second time. She is bleeding from her leg, her face, her hand. She has no options. She is howling. She is terrified. This is not the way she wanted to die. This is not the way anybody but Nancy Paper, over in Betws-y-Coed, ever wanted to die; and Nancy Paper, more’s the pity, had died to the gall, instead, three years before.

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