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“To the right, from the chest-high prairie grasses that line the trail, a flock of finches, flushed out by the youth’s footsteps on the shoddy path, launched an arc over the ground bound primates. The murmuration fled to a half-dozen trees to their left, spinning widdershins up a nearby hill to test on the sparse branches above. Their chirps were light, the sharp whispers of a song on the wind.
Not all took notice, Clark and Lin being the exceptions, but those that did saw the trees burst with sudden wind, sending dry leaves and birds into a maelstrom of competing trajectories; leaves down, birds up. Born aloft, their tiny rounded forms bouncing on the air with a buoyancy that seemed to mock gravity. A loud boom ruptured the sky, but if the onlookers were hoping to see a splintered limb come crashing down, they were mistaken.
What happened was much more ominous than that.”