Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to you a long time ago.

Even the air seems to have a smell - earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living nd things dying and things long dead. The smell of the world where nothing stops moving, nothing stays the same.

But the future is uncertain, and he can't get up enough enthusiasm even to masurbate.

In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants.

Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.

And one of the reasons why he likes her is because she’s so different from him. She’s as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone. She even talks back to the Sarge, which is like watching a mouse bark at a pitbull.

In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel

She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.

Stock was a rationalist and an atheist. Most of the time she saw the world as a big machine where things just played themselves out. Anonymous forces, impersonal powers, action and reaction, cause and effect. It would be comforting to live in a world that had order and purpose in it, which she supposed was why so many people pretended they did.

Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.

It all comes together inside her, and she can’t begin to explain. “It’s just a pattern,” she says, feeling bad because it’s a lie. She’s lying to Miss Justineau, who she loves more than anyone in the world. And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.

Loyalty is just the wheels on the bus ... meaning that it keeps things moving but it's neutral when it comes to the direction they move in.

Melanie understands jealousy. She’s jealous, a little bit, every time Miss Justineau talks to another boy or girl in class. She wants Miss Justineau’s time to belong to her, and the reminders that it doesn’t sting a little, make her heart do a gentle drop and thud in her chest.

Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?

Jess wasn't religious. Not even a little bit. She thought all gods were basically big bully-boy cops dreamed up by people who wanted the laws they liked on Earth to be true everywhere else.

Because the bag is full of colours - starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.

Some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl “I’m here for you”, the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed.

Holy fuck,' Corcoran said, leaning back against the wall. 'I am going home and drinking a whole bottle of Bacardi. Someone can pour the Coke into me after I pass out.

She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.

No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.