“Do you know why he calls himself Hangfire?” I asked. “Villains always choose spooky names,” Jake said. “It was weeks before I thought to look it up in the dictionary,” I said. “It refers to something that takes a bit of time before it works. It usually describes explosions or blastings. But people use it in other circumstances, too. It can describe a slow-acting poison, or a tree that weakens for years before it falls. There’s a brand of old-fashioned phonograph called Hangfire, because it has a mechanism that allows the needle to hover over the record until the exact moment you want the
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