. . .

Bertram pants. He gasps for air. He flees to his car, tears squealing out of the lot, flees across the city to Amelia. He hears the building crumble behind him; and after that, he never again feels safe.

“Amelia!” he cries, bursting in on her. She is staring grimly at a blender full of alchemical substances. Then, almost three seconds later, she startles violently.

“Bertram!”

“I’m being hunted by a space princess assassin!” he says.

“I’ve adopted a girl!” she says. “I don’t know what to do with girls!”

He looks confused.

“You’re a girl,” he says.

“I know!” she says. “But I had a toad!”

“Wait,” he says. “Why have you adopted a girl?”

“She is supposed to destroy the world,” Amelia says. “Well, the portents are ambiguous.”

“There’s no room left for anybody else to destroy the world,” says Bertram, frustrated.

“That’s not her fault,” Amelia says.

“Point,” Bertram concedes.

“They were going to kill her. But I said, ‘no! No killing! Instead I will adopt her!’ Then they gave me that look that people make.”

Bertram eyes her.

“Yes! That one! The one that says, ‘you are quite the renegade, Amelia, but for some reason or other we will accept your unreasonable notions.’”

“About that,” says Bertram.

“Yes?”

“Well,” says Bertram. “I mean, um. It is, I have debts, you see. So, thus, I mean. I mean, the space princess. I mean, she was going to kill me, Amelia.”

“Death is very frightening,” Amelia agrees. “Do little girls like trucks or is that only boys?”

“Dead!” says Bertram. “Bang!”

“Well, buy her off with your money,” Amelia tells him.

“I’m not — I —”

“Or your archaeology!”

Bertram sags.

“I’m such a loser,” he says.

Amelia stares at him with stress-filled eyes. “What if she makes a baby? What if she makes a baby out of trucks?”

That is when the blender’s top explodes, showering the room with alchemy.

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