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First para:
Stumbling!—up the arse-end of Candle Street, the air unseasonably warm (why?) as sirens blare and lonesome neighbourhood dogs yap back and forth across the empty neon haze. Templechurch lurched to a stop, pulling at the lip of her broken-heeled silver pump and slipping it off. She scraped fingernails over the blister at the back of her foot, then chucked—clunk!—the dead shoe into an open garbage bin beside the bowling alley. Shoe snapped in the middle of an ill-fated jive competition that ended with a ballroom full of men in tuxedos, sobbing. But it wasn't as though she expected to win. It was pure lark: stumbling in, demanding a vodka martini and a number to strap to the back of her party dress. She wiped at her forehead. Sweaty, not from the dancing—all that sweat dried up in the cool air, before she hit the furnace of Candle Street. Something. Burning. Something burning like her apartment building, a sight she took in as she pivoted around on her awkward feet before hopping to the side and taking off her other silver pump and throwing it away. No sense in keeping the orphan. Templechurch's apartment building was on fire. |
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