SHADE
"An empty black face save for pale grey pinhole eyes, staring up at her, meeting her wide-eyed gaze with utter impunity. A smudged charcoal sketch of something vaguely humanoid, limbs long and spider-thin. It sat there for a moment, boneless in the seat beside her; it blinked languidly, lids like shutters sliding over those hard grey eyes."
"It lurked there a moment, barely visible but there, and when it finally came into the light - tentative, as if it might burn - she knew what it was. An oil-smear of a creature; the awful distortion of something almost human, crawling slowly on four long matchstick limbs. A narrow, elongated head bobbed limp on a thin neck. Pale eyes flickered open like newly-lit flames."
"The skin of it peeled back, the space below the eyes opening like a shutter to reveal a gleaming lamprey mouth: a perfect circle of bright, needle-sharp teeth."
"The only solid facts I know is that the Shades are actually real, that I started seeing them after the bomb, and that they've been following me about ever since."
Laura Mauro, Naming the Bones
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