. . .

Eldri is on his feet. He is staring out the door. He is thinking Emily! But he doesn’t know what to do.

He picks up the Game-winning robot. He holds it over his head. He tries to run out into the storm.

He loses the Game when he does this —

He finds himself thinking about the Game, which, by the rules of the Game, means that he loses and he is supposed to exclaim that he has lost it —

But he doesn’t, possibly because his god-daughter is stranded in a killing storm.

The scissors rattle off of his Game-winning robot. He makes it ten feet out his door. He makes it out twenty. Then the scissors sight him. Then they are veering in for him, they are tracking him, they are trying to anticipate his pattern.

He screams, hoarsely, calling out for Emily.

He runs.

The robot he has over his head is not a tactical evasion robot. That would compromise its ability to never think about the Game. That had seemed important back when he’d created it. That had seemed like a key quality, that singlemindedness, that . . . empty-tuple-mindedness . . . rather than a critical weakness in the design.

He is beaten. They are beaten.

He is forced to scramble back behind the eaves of his house as the scissors veer and scissor in.

His roof rattles hideously. He hears and feels in the shuddering of his house the scissors cutting down along its gutters.

He puts down the Game-playing robot. He loses the Game. He looks for an umbrella. He flourishes it dramatically. He loses the Game. The umbrella will do no good

“Navvy Jim!” he says, suddenly.

He calls. He scrambles through his house. He searches. The robot isn’t anywhere. He huddles over in grief, fear, relief, a twisting stomach. he thinks: so he went for her already —

But the truth is, the robot might be made for fighting scissors, in a way, but not for fighting tens of millions of scissors, such as those that are falling over Bibury. He knows he has just lost his greatest work, and his god-daughter, and —

He tastes salt. He tastes salt

— his stoic pride, and damn it also he has lost the Game.

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