The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn’t belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty s...
Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.
It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We’d be rich and they...
They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.
A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.
No one else could see all the bodies she’d left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she could never escape her own judging gaze.
The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry a...
Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.
Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.
Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling him which limbs he could still use to slaughter his enemies, ...
But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.
Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.
The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.
You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.
Hell, we’re all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you’re a goddamn legend.
Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.
Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.
Mahlia… understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn’t trying to change them. He wasn’t trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia had thought he was stupid for walking straight in...
