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What Fox knew, and his sister hadn’t known, was that their father was going on a book safari and would be away for three days at least. The library stock hadn’t come about by accident; it was the result of many such scavenging trips in the past. These safaris weren’t very frequent but, when a Hunter team had been forced to venture further than normal in its search for game and stumbled upon a derelict bookstore or library that still had some surviving books, a Library team – normally headed by Wren’s father – was despatched the very next day. The Hunters didn’t know the difference between a good find and a poor find, so it was essential that a trained Librarian should do the collecting. Books were the gold of the settlement and the library was the treasury.
Wren picked up her copy of
