She speaks in halted whispers. Dead poets and long forgotten epitaphs to books long since closed. Every shot brings another promise, a verbal contract that come morning won’t be worth the paper it’s marked on. Still, they watch her, hordes of them. Waiting on her, begging her for moments. A chance to fill her whim, to find meaning in world that would as soon see them crushed as breathing. And she’ll get to each of them in their turn, because she can. Because she has read and has known that without her they are nothing. And that with her they stand a chance. She does it not because she cares, but because she feels she must, because in thirty years she has found nothing close to what they see in her. Better one lost soul than hundreds.