Cities I've Never Lived In Quotes

In my errant life I roamed To learn the secrets of women and men, Of gods and dreams. I've known all the countries of our world, I've lived a thousand lives: Many lives I lived in love, Other lives I squandered. For in my life I never traveled, All I did was wander.

I’ve lived a long time,” Magnus said. “So many years, and no, it doesn’t feel like enough. I won’t lie and say it does. I want to live on—partly because of you, Alec. I have never wanted to live so much as I have these past few months, with you.

I am, and always have been - first, last, and always - a child of America. You raised me. I grew up in the pastures and hills of Texas, but I had been to thirty-four states before I learned how to drive. When I caught the stomach flu in the fifth grade, my mother sent a note to school written on the back of a holiday memo from Vice President Biden. Sorry, sir—we were in a rush, and it was the only paper she had on hand. I spoke to you for the first time when I was eighteen, on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, when I introduced my mother as the nominee for president. You cheered for me. I was young and full of hope, and you let me embody the American dream: that a boy who grew up speaking two languages, whose family was blended and beautiful and enduring, could make a home for himself in the White House. You pinned the flag to my lapel and said, “We’re rooting for you.” As I stand before you today, my hope is that I have not let you down. Years ago, I met a prince. And though I didn’t realize it at the time, his country had raised him too. The truth is, Henry and I have been together since the beginning of this year. The truth is, as many of you have read, we have both struggled every day with what this means for our families, our countries, and our futures. The truth is, we have both had to make compromises that cost us sleep at night in order to afford us enough time to share our relationship with the world on our own terms. We were not afforded that liberty. But the truth is, also, simply this: love is indomitable. America has always believed this. And so, I am not ashamed to stand here today where presidents have stood and say that I love him, the same as Jack loved Jackie, the same as Lyndon loved Lady Bird. Every person who bears a legacy makes the choice of a partner with whom they will share it, whom the American people will “hold beside them in hearts and memories and history books. America: He is my choice. Like countless other Americans, I was afraid to say this out loud because of what the consequences might be. To you, specifically, I say: I see you. I am one of you. As long as I have a place in this White House, so will you. I am the First Son of the United States, and I’m bisexual. History will remember us. If I can ask only one thing of the American people, it’s this: Please, do not let my actions influence your decision in November. The decision you will make this year is so much bigger than anything I could ever say or do, and it will determine the fate of this country for years to come. My mother, your president, is the warrior and the champion that each and every American deserves for four more years of growth, progress, and prosperity. Please, don’t let my actions send us backward. I ask the media not to focus on me or on Henry, but on the campaign, on policy, on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans at stake in this election. And finally, I hope America will remember that I am still the son you raised. My blood still runs from Lometa, Texas, and San Diego, California, and Mexico City. I still remember the sound of your voices from that stage in Philadelphia. I wake up every morning thinking of your hometowns, of the families I’ve met at rallies in Idaho and Oregon and South Carolina. I have never hoped to be anything other than what I was to you then, and what I am to you now—the First Son, yours in actions and words. And I hope when Inauguration Day comes again in January, I will continue to be.

Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos. There are 7 people in my house. We each have different genders. I cut my hair over the bathroom sink and everything I own has a hole in it. There is a banner in our living room that says “Love Cats Hate Capitalism.” We sit around the kitchen table and argue about the compost pile and Karl Marx and the necessity of violence when The Rev comes. Whatever the fuck The Rev means. Every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout “Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth!” I want us to spend the next 80 years together eating Doritos and riding bikes. I want to be Oscar the Grouch. I want him and his girlfriend to be Bert and Ernie. I want us to live on Sesame Street and I will park my trash can on their front stoop and we will be friends every day. If I ever seem grouchy it’s just because I am a little afraid of all that fun. There is a river running through this city I know as well as my own name. It’s the first place I’ve ever called home. I don’t think its poetry to say I’m in love with the water. I don’t think it’s poetry to say I’m in love with the train tracks. I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say I see God in the skyline. There is always cold beer asking to be slurped on back porches. There are always crushed packs of Marlboro’s in my back pockets. I have been wearing the same patched-up shorts for 10 days. Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos.

How strange we are. How different we are from how we think we are. We fall out of love only to fall in love with a duplicate of what we've left, never understanding that we love what we love and that it doesn't change.

BUT MOST PEOPLE ARE RATHER STUPID AND WASTE THEIR LIVES. HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THAT? HAVE YOU NOT LOOKED DOWN FROM THE HORSE AT A CITY AND THOUGHT HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLED AN ANT HEAP, FULL OF BLIND CREATURES WHO THINK THEIR MUNDANE LITTLE WORLD WAS REAL? YOU SEE THE LIGHTED WINDOWS AND WHAT YOU WANT TO THINK IS THAT THERE MAY BE MANY INTERESTING STORIES BEHIND THEM, BUT WHAT YOU KNOW IS THAT REALLY THERE ARE JUST DULL, DULL SOULS, MERE CONSUMERS OF FOOD, WHO THINK THEIR INSTINCTS ARE EMOTIONS AND THEIR TINY LITTLE LIVES OF MORE ACCOUNT THAN A WHISPER OF WIND. The blue glow was bottmless. It seemed to be sucking her own thoughts out of her mind. 'No,' whispered Susan, 'no, I've never thought like that.' Death stood up abruptly and turned away. YOU MAY FIND OUT THAT IT HELPS, he said.

You've always lived here, right?" Sarah asked. "Except for the years I went to college." "Didn't you ever want to move away? To experience something new?" "Like bistros?" She nudged him playfully with her elbow. "No, not just that. Cities have a vibrancy, a sense of excitement that you can't find in a small town." "I don't doubt it. But to be honest, I've never been interested in things like that. I don't need those things to make me happy. A nice quiet place to unwind at the end of the day, beautiful views, a few good friends. What else is there?

Ty, I’ve thought so many times about what I would say to you if you reappeared suddenly. If I was walking along the street and you popped out of thin air, walking along beside me like you always used to, with your hands in your pockets and your head tilted back. Mom used to say you walked celestially, looking upat the sky as if you were scanning the clouds for angels. Do you remember that? In your world I am ashes, I am ancestors, my memories and hopes and dreams have gone to build the City of Bones. In your world, I am lucky, because I do not have to live in a world without you. But in this world, I am you. I am the twinless twin. So I can tell you this: When your twin leaves the earth you live on, it never turns the same way again: the weight of their soul is gone, and everything is off balance. The world rocks under your feet like an unquiet sea. I can’t tell you it gets easier. But it does get steadier; you learn how to live with the new rocking of the new earth, the way sailors gain sea legs. You learn. I promise. I know you’re not exactly the Ty I had in this world, my brilliant, beautiful brother. But I know from Julian that you are beautiful and brilliant too. I know that you are loved. I hope that you are happy. Please be happy. You deserve it so much. I want to ask if you remember the way we used to whisper words to each other in the dark: star, twin, glass. But I’ll never know your answer. So I’ll whisper to myself as I fold this letter up and slide it into the envelope, hoping against hope it will somehow reach you. I whisper your name, Ty. I whisper the most important thing: I love you. I love you. I love you. Livvy

I’d thought for so long that I would become a schizophrenic, and if I was a schizophrenic, that’s all I would ever be. But a person doesn’t become their diagnosis. Your mom isn’t breast cancer, you don’t become cancer. You live with cancer. So often, we think of a person living with mental illness as their mental illness, and that’s unfair. A person is never their diagnosis, not even my mom. Delilah showed me that. She lives—and has lived—a full life. She has a husband. They travel. She’s a photographer, an artist. She tells the funniest knock-knock jokes I’ve ever heard. She takes her meds every day, but still has hallucinations from time to time. She is not schizophrenic. She lives with schizophrenia.

We think of language as this tame thing that lives in neat garden beds, bound by rules and fences. Then someone shows it to you growing wild and beautiful, flowering vines consuming cities, erasing pavement and lines. Breaking through any fence that would try to contain it. Reclaiming. Reshaping. Reforming. In my life, I've never known anything else that felt so full of infinite possibility. Words make me feel strong. They make me feel powerful and alive. They make me feel like I can open doors.

What I missed most when I lost a man I loved was someone who held a record of my life from that time. It was the way we told each other things. Without them I went back to my quiet life, but with them there was a transcript of living. Transcript, of all words, as a way to describe love. But we all want, in some way, to be able to record our life, and for some reasons lovers do that for each other. Of all things. Of all jobs for them to be given.

How strange we are. How different we are from how we think we are.

People who really want to make a difference in the world usually do it, in one way or another. And I’ve noticed something about people who make a difference in the world: They hold the unshakable conviction that individuals are extremely important, that every life matters. They get excited over one smile. They are willing to feed one stomach, educate one mind, and treat one wound. They aren’t determined to revolutionize the world all at once; they’re satisfied with small changes. Over time, though, the small changes add up. Sometimes they even transform cities and nations, and yes, the world. People who want to make a difference get frustrated along the way. But if they have a particularly stressful day, they don’t quit. They keep going. Given their accomplishments, most of them are shockingly normal and the way they spend each day can be quite mundane. They don’t teach grand lessons that suddenly enlighten entire communities; they teach small lessons that can bring incremental improvement to one man or woman, boy or girl. They don’t do anything to call attention to themselves, they simply pay attention to the everyday needs of others, even if it’s only one person. They bring change in ways most people will never read about or applaud. And because of the way these world-changers are wired, they wouldn’t think of living their lives any other way.

No… I’m NOT a city girl. Well, I mean I am ‘cause I grew up in Austin and all. I want nothing more than to get away from Austin and live in a small town with lots of land, and I would love to have a beautiful ranch style home and go outside every morning and feed the chickens. I want to hear nothing but nature. No cars, no horns, no freaking people blowing their damn cigarette smoke in my face. I want to be able to look up into the sky and see the millions of stars every night. I’ve never seen what a true night time sky looks like with all the stars. I would love that.

We used to hang out all the time. St. Clair and me.But after you arrived,I hardly saw him. He'd sit next to you in class,at lunch,at the movies. Everywhere. And even though I was suspicious,I knew the first time I heard you call him Etienne-I knew you loved him.And I knew by his response-the way his eyes lit up every time you said it-I knew he loved you,too. And I ignored it,because I didn't want to believe it." The struggle rises inside me again. "I don't know if he loves me.I don't know if he does,or if he ever did.It's all so messed up." "It's obvious he wants more than friendship." Mer takes my shaking mug. "Haven't you seen him? He suffers every time he looks at you.I've never seen anyone so miserable in my life." "That's not true." I'm remembering he said the situation with his father is really terrible right now. "He has other things on his mind,more important things." "Why aren't the two of you together?" The directness of her question throws me. "I don't know.Sometimes I think there are only so many opportunies...to get together with someone.And we've both screwed up so many times"-my voice grows quiet-"that we've missed our chance." "Anna." Mer pauses. "That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard." "But-" "But what? You love him,and he loves you, and you live in the most romantic city in the world." I shake my head. "It's not that simple." "Then let me put it another way.A gorgeous boy is in love with you, and you're not even gonna try to make it work?

No one in that city understands, Gil, because it doesn’t matter to them anymore. They’ve never learned to fear the steel and the men who carry it, and none of them ever will, because they don’t have to. Because in this place I’ve seen, men like that don’t exist anymore. We don’t exist anymore. Sounds like a beautiful fucking place. How do I get there? Ringil grinned fiercely up at the Kiriath clan captain. Oh wait — you’re going to tell me the rents are sky-high, right? And how am I going to earn a living if they keep their swords in a museum?

I remember that I was frightened, that I was afraid of getting worse, as I had been getting better for some time. I was afraid that this life I was leading--though everything was beautiful and filled with sensation--might prove too brittle, might fall apart in ways that would surprise me.

I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?

What had I read back then, what had made me feel that way? I had a volume of Rilke and Saint Augustine and early Hemingway stories. I must have left them in the room when I moved away.

We are all, of course, wayfaring strangers on this earth. But coming out of the rainbow tunnel, the liminal portal between Marin and San Francisco, myth and reality, I catch sight of a beautiful, sparkling city that might as well be on the moon. I can name the sights, the streets, the eateries, but in my heart it feels as unfamiliar as Cape Town or Cuzco. I've lived here for fourteen years. This is the arena of my adult life, with its large defeats and small victories. Maybe, like all transplants (converts?), I've asked too much of the city. I would never have moved to Pittsburh or Houston or L.A. expecting it to save my soul. Only here in the great temple by the bay. It's a mistake we've been making for decades, and probably a necessary one. The city's flaws, of course, are numerous. Our politics can suffer from humourless stridency, and life here is menacingly expensive. But if you're insulated from these concerns, sufficiently employed and housed, if you are -in other words- like most people, you are in view of the unbridgeable ideal. Here, with our plentiful harvest, our natural beauty, our bars, our bookstores, our cliffs and ocean, out free to be you and me; here, where pure mountain water flows right out of the tap. It's here that the real questions become inescapable. In fact the proximity of the ideal makes us more acutely aware of the real questions. Not the run-of-the-mill insolubles-Why am I here? Who am I?- but the pressing questions of adult life: Really? and Are you sure? And Now what?

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I've been travelling for three years, I've been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. There are moments—rarely—when you make a landmark, you realize that you're going with a woman, in some messy business. The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926. That's living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it's a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. You seem to start at the beginning: "It was a fine autumn evening...

Do you feel this way? I would ask the woman. And, if she seemed kind and gentle enough, I might have asked her if we had to continue on. How long do we do this? I would ask, thinking that, if there was a set time, it might feel possible.

I watched women—thin, spare, alone-looking women who were older than me, always carrying parcels, bags, overstuffed leather purses. The light did something to their faces, laid them bare. As if on trains they wore the faces they had when alone.

It was silly to remember the stories of us not getting along. The melodrama of any couple breaking apart. My feelings for the man who stayed for a month in the neighboring apartment who made jewelry. He lay earrings on the bedspread and let me pick a pair. Feathers I picked and even wore. Mistaking the relief from loneliness that meeting another fragile soul can bring about, mistaking that for love, but who's to say it wasn't love, or what I felt for Richard, that it was love. Who's to say.

I have it so good. So absurdly, improbably good. I didn't do anything to deserve it, but I have it. I'm healthy. I've never gone hungry. And yes, to answer your question, I'm- I'm loved. I lived in a beautiful place, did meaningful work. The world we made out there, Mosscap, it's- it's nothing like what your originals left. It's a good world, a beautiful world. It's not perfect, but we've fixed it so much. We made a good place, struck a good balance. And yet every fucking day in the City, I woke up hollow, and... and just... tired, y'know? So, I did something else instead. I packed up everything, and I learned a brand-new thing from scratch, and gods, I worked hard for it. I worked really hard. I thought, if I can just do that, if I can do it well, I'll feel okay. And guess what? I do do it well. I'm good at what I do. I make people happy. I make people feel better. And yet I still wake up tired, like... like something's missing. I tried talking to friends, and family, and nobody got it, so I stopped bringing it up, and then I stopped talking to them altogether, because I couldn't explain, and I was tired of pretending like everything was fine. I went to doctors, to make sure I wasn't sick and that my head was okay. I read books and monastic texts and everything I could find. I threw myself into my work, I went to all the places that used to inspire me, I listened to music and looked at art, I exercised and had sex and got plenty of sleep and ate my vegetables, and still. Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?

BUT MOST PEOPLE ARE RATHER STUPID AND WASTE THEIR LIVES. HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THAT? HAVE YOU NOT LOOKED DOWN FROM THE HORSE AT A CITY AND THOUGHT HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLED AN ANT HEAP, FULL OF BLIND CREATURES WHO THINK THEIR MUNDANE LITTLE WORLD WAS REAL? YOU SEE THE LIGHTED WINDOWS AND WHAT YOU WANT TO THINK IS THAT THERE MAY BE MANY INTERESTING STORIES BEHIND THEM, BUT WHAT YOU KNOW IS THAT REALLY THERE ARE JUST DULL, DULL SOULS, MERE CONSUMERS OF FOOD, WHO THINK THEIR INSTINCTS ARE EMOTIONS AND THEIR TINY LITTLE LIVES OF MORE ACCOUNT THAN A WHISPER OF WIND. The blue glow was bottmless. It seemed to be sucking her own thoughts out of her mind. 'No,' whispered Susan, 'no, I've never thought like that.' Death stood up abruptly and turned away. YOU MAY FIND OUT THAT IT HELPS, he said.

I'd never imagined that trees could be so weird and unearthly. I mean, the only plants I've ever really seen or touched till now are the city kind―neatly trimmed and cared-for bushes and trees. But the ones here―the ones living here―are totally different. They have a physical power, their breath grazing any humans who might chance by, their gaze zeroing in on the intruder like they've spotted their prey. Like they have some dark, prehistoric, magical powers. Like deep-sea creatures rule the ocean depths, in the forest trees reign supreme. If it wanted to, the forest could reject me―or swallow me up whole. A healthy amount of fear and respect might be a good idea.

I think of all the time I was away from Jenny. All the time I was away from the boys, traveling from city to city. Away from them day after day. Missing out on their schoolwork, their sports, their girlfriends…their lives, really. By the time I was done playing ball, the boys were grown and did exactly what we taught them to do—they went out into the world and made lives for themselves. Got married. Had families of their own. We always had a relationship. They were always cordial. They visited. They kept in touch. But they never looked at me the way they looked at Jenny. I’ve spent a lot of time and energy making sure I never acknowledge how much that hurt. Pretending it wasn’t my fault.

I've no interest in this city. I do not want to live in a curio, Johannes. This is a sideshow! This is something to scare the children! 'The Floating Pirate City'! I don't want it! I don't want to live in this great bobbing parasite, like some fucking pondskater sucking the victims dry. This isn't a city, Johannes; it's a parochial little village less than a mile wide, and I do not want it. "I was always going to return to New Crobuzon. I would never wish to see out my days outside it. It's dirty and cruel and difficult and dangerous—particularly for me, particularly now—but it's my home. Nowhere else in the world has the culture, the industry, the population, the thaumaturgy, the languages, the art, the books, the politics, the history … New Crobuzon," she said slowly, "is the greatest city in Bas-Lag." And coming from her, someone without any illusions about New Crobuzon's brutality, or squalor, or repression, the declamation was far more powerful than if it came from any Parliamentarian. "And you're telling me," she said finally, "that I've been exiled from my city—for life—because of you?

She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city. (by Roman Payne, from “The Wanderess.” How this quote became so popular, I have no idea. I wrote it about one woman: The heroine of “The Wanderess,” Saskia; yet I wrote these lines to describe Saskia at her best—praising the qualities of a heroine that all women should strive to have, or keep if they have them. I wrote these lines to make Saskia be like a statue of Psyche or Demeter. The masculine sculptor doesn’t see rock when he carves Aphrodite. He sees before him the carving of the perfect feminine creature. I was creating my ‘perfect feminine creature’ when I wrote about Saskia. She is completely wild and fearless in her dramatic performance of life. She knows that she may only have one life to live and that most people in her society wish to see her fail in her dream of living a fulfilled life. For if a woman acts and lives exactly as society wants her to live, she will never be truly happy, never fulfilled. For societies do not want girls and women to wander. I am surprised that this quote became so famous, since I didn’t spend more than a few seconds writing it. It was written merely as three sentences in a novel. I didn’t write it to be a solitary poem. This quote that touches so many people is no more than an arrangement of twenty-four words in a book of three-hundred pages. What touches me the most is when fans send me photos of tattoos they’ve had done of this quote—either a few words from it or the whole quote. The fact that these wonderful souls are willing to guard words that I’ve written on their precious skin for the rest of their lives makes me feel that what I am writing is worth something and not nothing. When I get depressed and feel the despair that haunts me from time to time, and cripples me, I look at these photos of these tattoos, and it helps me to think that what I am doing is important to some people, and it helps me to start writing again. Am I a masculine version of the wanderess in this quote? Of course I am! I am wild and fearless, I am a wanderer who belongs to no city and to nobody; I am a drop of free water. I am—to cite one of my other quotes—“free as a bird. King of the world and laughing!

And I’ve thought the same thing. If you died, I wouldn’t want to live. But I wouldn’t kill myself, because whatever happens after we die, I want to be with you there. And if I killed myself, I know you’d never talk to me again. In any life. So I’d live, and I’d try to make something out of my life, until I could be with you again. But if I hurt you—if I was the cause of your death—there’s nothing that would keep me from destroying myself.

The next afternoon, I take the green line out to Chinatown, which—despite having lived in DC for nearly five years—I’ve actually never been to. I’m a bit apprehensive because I saw on Reddit that DC’s Chinatown has the highest crime rates in the city, and when I get out of the metro station, the whole place does carry a menacing air of neglect. I walk with my hands shoved into my pockets, fingers tightly wrapped around my phone and wallet. I wish I’d brought pepper spray.

These books have really helped me get through some rough patches in my life... So if you want to disagree with me, that's fine, but please do so in a respectful manner. (On anyone's posts for that matter) You never know what someone may be going through. I was recently called an idiot and other names that I won't repeat because I try to keep my language clean, simply because I was defending some other people who were being attacked for loving the Keeper of the Lost Cities. And I know for a fact that many people (myself included) go to books to escape their everyday life. I know of a few people who have read a book that helped them through depression because the characters in that book found a way through it. I've heard about people who were thinking about suicide and then part of a book helped them realize that it wasn't the answer. Books can save lives, as well as any other hobby. So feel free to share your opinion, but please don't attack people for theirs, no matter what it is.

And what can I say? That I’m not happy? That I’ve tried dating someone else and it was the emotional equivalent of bingeing on saltines when all I wanted was a real meal? Or that there are whole parts of the city I avoid because they remind me of those first few months in California, when he still lived with me. That when I wake up too early to my screaming alarm, I still reach toward his side of the bed, like if I can hold on to him for a minute, it won’t be so hard to make it through another grueling day at the hospital, in a never-ending series of grueling days.

I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. Anything you have to bet on to get a kick isn’t worth seeing. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. It has the most happiness in it and it is the saddest book I know. But it comes later.

Reade drew a deep breath. He said with resignation, "All right. I'll try to explain. But it's rather difficult. You see, I've devoted my life to the problem of why certain men see visions. Men like Blake and Boehme and Thomas Traherne. A psychologist once suggested that it's a chemical in the bloodstream—the same sort of thing that makes a dipsomaniac see pink elephants. Now obviously, I can't accept this view. But I've spent a certain amount of time studying the action of drugs, and taken some of them myself. And it's become clear to me that what we call 'ordinary consciousness' is simply a special, limited case. . . But this is obvious after a single glass of whiskey. It causes a change in consciousness, a kind of deepening. In ordinary consciousness, we're mainly aware of the world around us and its problems. This is awfully difficult to explain. . ." Fisher said, "You're being very clear so far. Please go on." "Perhaps an analogy will help. In our ordinary state of consciousness, we look out from behind our eyes as a motorist looks from behind the windscreen of a car. The car is very small, and the world out there is very big. Now if I take a few glasses of whiskey, the world out there hasn't really changed, but the car seems to have grown bigger. When I look inside myself, there seem to be far greater spaces than I'm normally aware of. And if I take certain drugs, the car becomes vast, as vast as a cathedral. There are great, empty spaces. . . No, not empty. They're full of all kinds of things—of memories of my past life and millions of things I never thought I'd noticed. Do you see my point? Man deliberately limits his consciousness. It would frighten him if he were aware of these vast spaces of consciousness all the time. He stays sane by living in a narrow little consciousness that seems to be limited by the outside world. Because these spaces aren't just inhabited by memories. There seem to be strange, alien things, other minds. . ." As he said this, he saw Violet de Merville shudder. He said, laughing, "I'm not trying to be alarming. There's nothing fundamentally horrible about these spaces. One day we shall conquer them, as we shall conquer outer space. They're like a great jungle, full of wild creatures. We build a high wall around us for safety, but that doesn't mean we're afraid of the jungle. One day we shall build cities and streets in its spaces.

Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants—their homes, their hobbies—up close. I don’t know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce themselves addicted to “the streets” or in love with “the game.” I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less “own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there, nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protection of my body. The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies.

I only have the story in two parts from Miss Throckmorton-Jones. The first time she spoke she was under the influence of laudanum. Today she was under the influence of what I can only describe as the most formidable temper I’ve ever seen. However, while I may not have the complete story, I certainly have the gist of it, and if half what I’ve heard is true, then it’s obvious that you are completely without either a heart or a conscience! My own heart breaks when I imagine Elizabeth enduring what she has for nearly two years. When I think of how forgiving of you she has been-“ “What did the woman tell you?” Ian interrupted shortly, turning and walking over to the window. His apparent lack of concern so enraged the vicar that he surged to his feet and stalked over to Ian’s side, glowering at his profile. “She told me you ruined Elizabeth Cameron’s reputation beyond recall,” he snapped bitterly. “She told me that you convinced that innocent girl-who’d never been away from her country home until a few weeks before meeting you-that she should meet you in a secluded cottage, and later in a greenhouse. She told me that the scene was witnessed by individuals who made great haste to spread the gossip, and that it was all over the city in a matter of days. She told me Elizabeth’s fiancé heard of it and withdrew his offer because of you. When he did that, society assumed Elizabeth’s character must indeed be of the blackest nature, and she was summarily dropped by the ton. She told me that a few days later Elizabeth’s brother fled England to escape their creditors, who would have been paid off when Elizabeth made an advantageous marriage, and that he’s never returned.” With grim satisfaction the vicar observed the muscle that was beginning to twitch in Ian’s rigid jaw. “She told me the reason for Elizabeth’s going to London in the first place had been the necessity for making such a marriage-and that you destroyed any chance of that ever happening. Which is why that child will now have to marry a man you describe as a lecher three times her age!” Satisfied that his verbal shots were finding their mark, he fired his final, most killing around. “As a result of everything you have done, that brave, beautiful girl has been living in shamed seclusion for nearly two years. Her house, of which she spoke with such love, has been stripped of its valuables by creditors. I congratulate you, Ian. You have made an innocent girl into an impoverished leper! And all because she fell in love with you on sight. Knowing what I now know of you, I can only wonder what she saw in you!

I’ve been so mean to my body, outright hateful. I disparage her and call her names, I loathe parts of her and withhold care. I insist on physical standards she can never reach, for that is not how she is even made, but I detest her weakness for not pulling it off. I deny her things she loves depending on the current fad: bread, cheddar cheese, orange juice, baked potatoes. I push her too hard and refuse her enough rest. No matter what she accomplishes, I’m never happy with her. I’ve barely acknowledged her role in every precious experience of my life. I look at her with contempt. And yet every morning, no matter how terrible I have been to her, she gets us out of bed, nurtures the family, meets the needs of the day. She tells me when I am hungry or tired and sends special red-alert signals when I am overwhelmed or scared. She has safely gotten me to and from a thousand cities with fresh energy. She flushes with red wine, which she loves, which is pretty cute. She walked the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland, the red dirt of Uganda, the steep opulence of Santorini, the ruins of Pompeii. She senses danger, trouble, land mines; she is never wrong. Every single time, she tells me when not to say something. She has cooked ten thousand meals. She prays without being told to; sometimes I realize she is whispering to God for us. She walks and cooks and lifts and hugs and types and drives and cleans and holds babies and rests and laughs and does everything in her power to live another meaningful, connected day on this earth. She sure does love me and my life and family. Maybe it is time to stop hating her and just love her back.

I have it so good. So absurdly, improbably good. I didn’t do anything to deserve it, but I have it. I’m healthy. I’ve never gone hungry. And yes, to answer your question, I’m—I’m loved. I lived in a beautiful place, did meaningful work. The world we made out there, Mosscap, it’s—it’s nothing like what your originals left. It’s a good world, a beautiful world. It’s not perfect, but we’ve fixed so much. We made a good place, struck a good balance. And yet every fucking day in the City, I woke up hollow, and … and just … tired, y’know? So, I did something else instead. I packed up everything, and I learned a brand-new thing from scratch, and gods, I worked hard for it. I worked really hard. I thought, if I can just do that, if I can do it well, I’ll feel okay. And guess what? I do do it well. I’m good at what I do. I make people happy. I make people feel better. And yet I still wake up tired, like … like something’s missing. I tried talking to friends, and family, and nobody got it, so I stopped bringing it up, and then I just stopped talking to them altogether, because I couldn’t explain, and I was tired of pretending like everything was fine. I went to doctors, to make sure I wasn’t sick and that my head was okay. I read books and monastic texts and everything I could find. I threw myself into my work, I went to all the places that used to inspire me, I listened to music and looked at art, I exercised and had sex and got plenty of sleep and ate my vegetables, and still. Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?

The Search for Happiness Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of [children]. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate. —PSALM 127:5     Storm Jameson, a twentieth-century English writer, wrote, “Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.” Parents want to make their children happy, employers want to make employees happy, married couples want a happy marriage, etc. “Just make me happy, and I’ll be satisfied!” Isn’t that what people (ourselves included) think and expect of others a lot of the time? Yet, we run into so many unhappy people—clearly these expectations are rarely met. Our newspapers are full of stories about unhappy people. They rob, they kill, they steal, they take drugs. They, they, they. Everywhere one looks, there is unhappiness. Then how does one become happy? I’ve found that happiness comes from one’s own perception. No one else is responsible for your happiness. Look in the mirror, and you can see who is responsible for your happiness! Gerald Brenan wrote: One road to happiness is to cultivate curiosity about everything. Not only about people but about subjects, not only about the arts but about history and foreign customs. Not only about countries and cities, but about plants and animals. Not only about lichened rocks and curious markings on the bark of trees, but about stars and atoms. Not only about friends but about that strange labyrinth we inhabit which we call ourselves. Then if we do that, we will never suffer a moment’s boredom.56 Happiness comes from within. It’s what you do: the choices you make, the interests you pursue, the attitudes you have, the friends you make, the faith you embrace, and the peace you live. You, you, you bring happiness to your life—no one else. Turn to the One who created you, inside and out, and follow His lead to happiness and wholeness.

She had only to call and Mary would come, bringing all her faith, her youth and her ardour. Yes, she had only to call, and yet—would she ever be cruel enough to call Mary? Her mind recoiled at that word; why cruel? She and Mary loved and needed each other. She could give the girl luxury, make her secure so that she need never fight for her living; she should have every comfort that money could buy. Mary was not strong enough to fight for her living. And then she, Stephen, was no longer a child to be frightened and humbled by this situation. There was many another exactly like her in this very city, in every city; and they did not all live out crucified lives, denying their bodies, stultifying their brains, becoming the victims of their own frustrations. On the contrary, they lived natural lives—lives that to them were perfectly natural. They had their passions like everyone else, and why not? They were surely entitled to their passions? They attracted too, that was the irony of it, she herself had attracted Mary Llewellyn—the girl was quite simply and openly in love. 'All my life I've been waiting for something...' Mary had said that, she had said: 'All my' life I've been waiting for something...I've been waiting for you.' Men—they were selfish, arrogant, possessive. What could they do for Mary Llewellyn? What could a man give that she could not? A child? But she would give Mary such a love as would be complete in itself without children. Mary would have no room in her heart, in her life, for a child, if she came to Stephen. All things they would be the one to the other, should they stand in that limitless relationship; father, mother, friend, and lover, all things—the amazing completeness of it; and Mary, the child, the friend, the beloved. With the terrible bonds of her dual nature, she could bind Mary fast, and the pain would be sweetness, so that the girl would cry out for that sweetness, hugging her chains always closer to her. The world would condemn but they would rejoice; glorious outcasts, unashamed, triumphant!

Looking back from a safe distance on those long days spent alone, I can just about frame it as a funny anecdote, but the reality was far more painful. I recently found my journal from that time and I had written, ‘I’m so lonely that I actually think about dying.’ Not so funny. I wasn’t suicidal. I’ve never self-harmed. I was still going to work, eating food, getting through the day. There are a lot of people who have felt far worse. But still, I was inside my own head all day, every day, and I went days without feeling like a single interaction made me feel seen or understood. There were moments when I felt this darkness, this stillness from being so totally alone, descend. It was a feeling that I didn’t know how to shake; when it seized me, I wanted it to go away so much that when I imagined drifting off to sleep and never waking up again just to escape it, I felt calm. I remember it happening most often when I’d wake up on a Saturday morning, the full weekend stretching out ahead of me, no plans, no one to see, no one waiting for me. Loneliness seemed to hit me hardest when I felt aimless, not gripped by any initiative or purpose. It also struck hard because I lived abroad, away from close friends or family. These days, a weekend with no plans is my dream scenario. There are weekends in London that I set aside for this very purpose and they bring me great joy. But life is different when it is fundamentally lonely. During that spell in Beijing, I made an effort to make friends at work. I asked people to dinner. I moved to a new flat, waved (an arm’s-length) goodbye to Louis and found a new roommate, a gregarious Irishman, who ushered me into his friendship group. I had to work hard to dispel it, and on some days it felt like an uphill battle that I might not win, but eventually it worked. The loneliness abated. It’s taken me a long time to really believe, to know, that loneliness is circumstantial. We move to a new city. We start a new job. We travel alone. Our families move away. We don’t know how to connect with loved ones any more. We lose touch with friends. It is not a damning indictment of how lovable we are.

THE GREAT GULON INCIDENT: [JUST GONNA LEAVE THIS ONE WITH: REDACTED] [NOT THAT I HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS!] THE VACKER CONNECTION: [UH, FITZY’S MY BEST FRIEND—NOT A “CONNECTION.” AND ALDEN AND DELLA ARE WAY NICER TO ME THAN MY OWN PARENTS ARE. BIANA’S SUPER AWESOME TOO. ALVAR… NOT SO MUCH. I PROBABLY SHOULD’VE SEEN THAT ONE COMING. BUT WHATEVER, MY POINT IS: I DIDN’T TRY TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE VACKERS—NO MATTER WHAT WEIRD STUFF WAS IN ONE OF MY ERASED MEMORIES. SO DON’T GO THINKING THERE’S MORE TO IT THAN THAT.] [AND HOW DO YOU GUYS EVEN KNOW ABOUT THAT MEMORY? THAT KINDA MAKES ME WANT TO RIP THIS REGISTRY PENDANT OFF MY NECK AND THROW IT FAR, FAR AWAY!] INSTANT RIVALRY: [YOU THINK BANGS BOY AND ME ARE “RIVALS”? HATE TO BREAK IT TO YOU, BUT NOPE! I MEAN, YEAH, HE’S SUPER ANNOYING WITH ALL THE “LOOK AT ME, I’M A MOODY SHADE” NONSENSE—AND HIS HAIR IS TOTALLY RIDICULOUS. BUT THERE’S NO RIVALRY. JUST DON’T EXPECT US TO BE BESTIES, AND WE’LL BE GOOD.] UNWITTING ERRAND BOY: [OKAY, THAT SUBHEADING MAKES ME WANT TO PUNCH WHOEVER WROTE IT IN THE MOUTH. BUT… I GUESS IT’S ALSO KIND OF TRUE. MY MOM DID HAVE ME DO STUFF AND THEN ERASE MY MEMORIES SO I WOULDN’T KNOW ABOUT IT. MOM OF THE YEAR, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. TRY NOT TO BE JEALOUS.] [AND I’M WORKING ON GETTING THOSE MEMORIES BACK, BY THE WAY. I’VE BEEN FILLING JOURNALS WITH DRAWINGS AND EVERYTHING. IT’S JUST TAKING A WHILE BECAUSE I’VE BEEN A LITTLE BUSY ALMOST DYING AND STUFF.] TEAM FOSTER-KEEFE: [WOO-HOO, TEAM FOSTER-KEEFE IS OFFICIALLY A THING!] [BUT THE REST OF THE STUFF IN THIS SECTION IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO GETTING REDACTED. SERIOUSLY—BOUNDARIES, PEOPLE! FOSTER’S AMAZING—AND OBVIOUSLY WORKING WITH ME MAKES HER EVEN MORE AMAZING. BUT YOU GUYS NEED TO STOP WITH ALL OF YOUR WEIRDO SPECULATING.] ONE PART OF A TRIANGLE: [OKAY, THAT’S IT. I’M DEEEEEEEEEEFINITELY DITCHING THIS PENDANT THING. WHY IS THE COUNCIL PAYING ATTENTION TO THIS STUFF???????????] [ACTUALLY, YOU KNOW WHAT? IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, BUT I’M GOING TO ADD ONE THING: FOSTER GETS TO DO WHATEVER SHE WANTS, OKAY? SHE CAN LIKE WHOEVER SHE WANTS. OR BE CONFUSED ABOUT WHAT SHE’S FEELING. SHE CAN EVEN BE OBLIVIOUS—IT’S HER LIFE. HER CHOICE. AND EVERYONE NEEDS TO STAY OUT OF IT.] [EVEN ME.] [ESPECIALLY ME. I WOULD NEVER WANT TO…] [NEVER MIND. MY POINT IS, LET THE POOR GIRL FIGURE THIS OUT ON HER OWN. AND SERIOUSLY, STAY OUT OF OUR LIVES!!!!]

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total: you say: I’ve been travelling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville for three years. Neither is there any end: you never leave a woman, a friend, a city in one go. And then everything looks alike: Shanghai, Moscow, Algiers, everything is the same after two weeks. There are moments—rarely—when you make a landmark, you realize that you’re going with a woman, in some messy business. The time of a flash. After that, the procession starts again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926. That’s living. But everything changes when you tell about life; it’s a change no one notices: the proof is that people talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; things happen one way and we tell about them in the opposite sense. [...] “I was out walking, I had left the town without realizing it, I was thinking about my money troubles.” This sentence, taken simply for what it is, means that the man was absorbed, morose, a hundred leagues from an adventure, exactly in the mood to let things happen without noticing them. But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions. And the story goes on in the reverse: instants have stopped piling themselves in a lighthearted way one on top of the other, they are snapped up by the end of the story which draws them and each one of them in turn, draws out the preceding instant: “It was night, the street was deserted.” The phrase is cast out negligently, it seems superfluous; but we do not let ourselves be caught and we put it aside: this is a piece of information whose value we shall subsequently appreciate. And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in a night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice. I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.

In the meantime, I tried my best to acclimate to my new life in the middle of nowhere. I had to get used to the fact that I lived twenty miles from the nearest grocery store. That I couldn’t just run next door when I ran out of eggs. That there was no such thing as sushi. Not that it would matter, anyway. No cowboy on the ranch would touch it. That’s bait, they’d say, laughing at any city person who would convince themselves that such a food was tasty. And the trash truck: there wasn’t one. In this strange new land, there was no infrastructure for dealing with trash. There were cows in my yard, and they pooped everywhere--on the porch, in the yard, even on my car if they happened to be walking near it when they dropped a load. There wasn’t a yard crew to clean it up. I wanted to hire people, but there were no people. The reality of my situation grew more crystal clear every day. One morning, after I choked down a bowl of cereal, I looked outside the window and saw a mountain lion siting on the hood of my car, licking his paws--likely, I imagined, after tearing a neighboring rancher’s wife from limb to limb and eating her for breakfast. I darted to the phone and called Marlboro Man, telling him there was a mountain lion sitting on my car. My heart beat inside my chest. I had no idea mountain lions were indigenous to the area. “It’s probably just a bobcat,” Marlboro Man reassured me. I didn’t believe him. “No way--it’s huge,” I cried. “It’s seriously got to be a mountain lion!” “I’ve gotta go,” he said. Cows mooed in the background. I hung up the phone, incredulous at Marlboro Man’s lack of concern, and banged on the window with the palm of my hand, hoping to scare the wild cat away. But it only looked up and stared at me through the window, imagining me on a plate with a side of pureed trout. My courtship with Marlboro Man, filled with fizzy romance, hadn’t prepared me for any of this; not the mice I heard scratching in the wall next to my bed, not the flat tires I got from driving my car up and down the jagged gravel roads. Before I got married, I didn’t know how to use a jack or a crowbar…and I didn’t want to have to learn now. I didn’t want to know that the smell in the laundry room was a dead rodent. I’d never smelled a dead rodent in my life: why, when I was supposed to be a young, euphoric newlywed, was I being forced to smell one now? During the day, I was cranky. At night, I was a mess. I hadn’t slept through the night once since we returned from our honeymoon. Besides the nausea, whose second evil wave typically hit right at bedtime, I was downright spooked. As I lay next to Marlboro Man, who slept like a baby every night, I thought of monsters and serial killers: Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. In the utter silence of the country, every tiny sound was amplified; I was certain if I let myself go to sleep, the murderer outside our window would get me.

Montreal October 1704 Temperature 55 degrees Eben was looking at Sarah in the way every girl prays some boy will one day look at her. “I will marry you, Sarah,” said Eben. “I will be a good husband. A Puritan husband. Who will one day take us both back home.” Wind shifted the lace of Sarah’s gown and the auburn of one loose curl. “I love you, Sarah,” said Eben. “I’ve always loved you.” Tears came to Sarah’s eyes: she who had not wept over her own family. She stood as if it had not occurred to her that she could be loved; that an English boy could adore her. “Oh, Eben!” she whispered. “Oh, yes, oh, thank you, I will marry you. But will they let us, Eben? We will need permission.” “I’ll ask my father,” said Eben. “I’ll ask Father Meriel.” They were not touching. They were yearning to touch, they were leaning forward, but they were holding back. Because it is wrong? wondered Mercy. Or because they know they will never get permission? “My French family will put up a terrible fuss,” said Sarah anxiously. “Pierre might even summon his fellow officers and do something violent.” Eben grinned. “Not if I have Huron warriors behind me.” The Indians rather enjoyed being French allies one day and difficult neighbors the next. Lorette Indians might find this a fine way to stab a French soldier in the back without drawing blood. They would need Father Meriel. He could arrange anything if he chose; he had power among all the peoples. But he might say no, and so might Eben’s Indian family. Mercy translated what was going on for Nistenha and Snow Walker. “They want to get married,” she told them. “Isn’t it wonderful?” She couldn’t help laughing from the joy and the terror of it. Ransom would no longer be the first word in Sarah’s heart. Eben would be. Mercy said, “Eben asked her right here in the street, Snow Walker. He wants to save her from marriage to a French soldier she doesn’t want. He’s loved Sarah since the march.” The two Indians had no reaction. For a moment Mercy thought she must have spoken to them in English. Nistenha turned to walk away and Snow Walker turned with her. If Nistenha was not interested in Sarah and Eben’s plight, no Indian would be. Mercy called on her memory of every speech in every ceremony, every dignified phrase and powerful word. “Honored mother,” she said softly. “Honored sister. We are in need and we beg you to hear our petition.” Nistenha stopped walking, turned back and stared at her in amazement. Sarah and Eben and Snow Walker stared at her in amazement. Sam can build canoes, thought Mercy. I can make a speech. “This woman my sister and this man my brother wish to spend their lives together. My brother will need the generous permission of his Indian father. Already we know that my sister will be refused the permission of her French owners. We will need an ally to support us in our request. We will need your strength and your wisdom. We beseech you, Mother, that you stand by us and help us.” The city of Montreal swirled around them. Eben, property of an Indian father in Lorette; Sarah, property of a French family in Montreal; and Mercy, property of Tannhahorens, awaited her answer. “Your words fill me with pride, Munnunock,” said Nistenha softly. She reached into her shopping bundle. Slowly she drew out a fine French china cup, undoubtedly meant for the feast of Flying Legs. She held it for a moment, and then her stern face softened and she gave it to Eben. Indians sealed a promise with a gift. She would help them. From her bundle, Snow Walker took dangling silver earrings she must have bought for Mercy and handed them to Sarah. Because she knew that Sarah’s Mohawk was not good enough and that Eben was too stirred to speak, Mercy gave the flowery thanks required after such gifts. “God bless us,” she said to Sarah and Eben, and Eben said, “He has.

I used this friend's license to clam every Sunday, going at first out of curiosity, and then because I loved it, and then after that, when the wind became bitter, the clams scarce, the ice on the jetty treacherous, simply because I didn't know what else to do.

I have it so good. So absurdly, improbably good. I didn't do anything to deserve it, but I have it. I'm healthy. I've never gone hungry. And yes, to answer your question, I'm-I'm loved. I lived in a beautiful place, did meaningful work. The world we made out there, Mosscap, it's-it's nothing like what your originals left. It's a good world, a beautiful world. It's not perfect, but we've fixed so much. We made a good place, struck a good balance. And yet, every fucking day in the City, I woke up hollow, and... and just... tired, y'know? So, I did something else instead. I packed up everything, and I learned a brand new thing from scratch, and gods, I worked hard for it. I worked really hard. I thought, if I can just do that, if I can do it well, I'll feel okay. And guess what? I do do it well. I'm good at what I do... And yet I still wake up tired, like... like something's missing. I tried to talk to friends, and family, and nobody got it, so I stopped bringing it up, and then I just stopped talking to them altogether, because I couldn't explain, and I was tired of pretending like everything was fine. I went to doctors, to make sure I wasn't sick and that my head was okay. I read books and monastic texts and everything I could find. I threw myself into my work, I went to all the places that used to inspire me, I listened to music and looked at art, I exercised and had sex and got plenty of sleep and ate my vegetables, and still. Still. Something is missing. Something is off. So, how fucking spoiled am I, then? How fucking broken? What is wrong with me that I can have everything I could ever want and have ever asked for and still wake up in the morning feeling like every day is a slog?

When the waiter left, I asked Xuan, “Have you ever wondered about God? Or religions other than your own?” “Most of my family is Buddhist. Growing up, every year my grandparents on my mother’s side organized a chaoshan jinxiang—what I think you know as a pilgrimage. We’d go to the city’s most important religious site, Miaofengshan, or the Mountain of the Wondrous Peak, which is considered one of the five holy mountains that match cardinal directions in geomancy. They still go yearly to pay their respects to the mountain and to present incense. Honestly, I’ve only stepped foot into one church in my life, and that was with my nǎi nai.” I knew nǎi nai meant “grandmother” in Chinese. “You did?” I asked, a little surprised. He’d never mentioned that. “Yeah,” he nodded. “I used to spend weekends at her house. She had a lot of paintings of Jesus, and a beautiful jade rosary. When I was young, she took me to a Catholic church, and I remember watching her as she asked God for several things and lit prayer candles. Nǎi nai believed a church was a place where dreams were realized. She told me to tell God my wishes and He would grant them. I remember what I said to her when she told me to make a wish.” Xuan offered an indulgent half smile. “Where is God, huh? Look around us. Look at all the bad things that happen in this world. God isn’t a genie, and a church isn’t a place for wishes to be granted. It’s a place for the lonely, sick, weak, and broken. It’s a place people go to not feel alone. But my nǎi nai still went back, every Sunday.” I continued watching Xuan, not quite sure where this conversation was going. I patiently waited for him to make his point. “I didn’t make any wishes that day. I had never made a wish or spoken to God until the night of the mudslide. But I remember, in Colombia, looking out onto the road and seeing your vehicle trapped, and silently I prayed. I’ll believe in you. So please... . save her. If you let her live, I’ll happily give up the rest of the time I have left alive. Take me and let Cassie live.

I’m over five and half feet tall and weigh about ten stone. My eyes are brown, hair black, and I forget the blood group. I used to be older than twenty but now I’m older than thirty. I’ve been called a crustacean, and too serious, but recently I was described by a dependable man as shrewd, obstinate and adequately intelligent. I was a writer once and now I’m a doctor, but I was advised to become these, I never wanted it. I’ve never wanted anything long. Except freedom.” There was a metallic rattle of laughter. Lanark said, “Yes, it’s a comic word. We’re all forced to define it in ways that make no sense to other people. But for me freedom is …” He thought for a while. “… life in a city near the sea or near the mountains where the sun shines for an average of half the day. My house would have a living room, big kitchen, bathroom and one bedroom for each of the family, and my work would be so engrossing that while I did it I would neither notice nor care if I was happy or sad. Perhaps I would be an official who kept useful services working properly. Or a designer of houses and roads for the city where I lived. When I grew old I would buy a cottage on an island or among the mountains—” “Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!” said the voice on a low throb of rage. “Dirty bastards giving me a killer for a doctor!

But it was the wolf packs who reached Parthos first. Who started the slaughter and burnings. It was the wolf packs, led by Asteri-bred bloodhounds, who hunted down my sisters. I’ve never forgotten that.” Ithan’s stomach churned at the shameful history of his people, but he asked, “Bred?” A wry smile. “The gift already existed amongst the wolves, but the Asteri encouraged it. Bred it into certain lines. They still do.” “Like Danika.” Jesiba’s fingers resumed their drumming. “The Fendyrs have been a … carefully cultivated line for the Asteri.” “How so?” She fixed her blazing eyes on him. This female had lived through all of Midgard’s Asteri history. He could hardly wrap his mind around it. “Didn’t you ever wonder why the Fendyrs are so dominant? Generation after generation?” “Genetics.” “Yes, genetics bred by the Asteri. Sabine and Mordoc were ordered to breed.

I’ve heard what Rapskal says. That we have to plunge ourselves into the city’s memories if we are to learn how to live here as Elderlings. But I also remember all the warnings I heard in Trehaug. What Leftrin told us before he left, that lingering too long near memory stone can drown you. That you can lose your own life in remembering someone else’s.” Thymara was silent for moment. Tats had put a precise finger on her own fear, the one she didn’t like to admit. “But we are Elderlings. It’s different for us.” “Is it? I know Rapskal says that, but is it? Did the Elderlings prize having their own lives, or did they grow up so saturated in other people’s experiences that they didn’t realize what was theirs and what they’d absorbed? I like being me, Thymara. I want to still be Tats, no matter how long I live and tend my dragon. And I want to share those years with Thymara. I don’t need to soak you in someone’s else’s life when I’m with you.” He paused, letting her feel the sting of that little barb. Then he added, “My turn for a question. Are you living your life, Thymara? Or avoiding it by living someone else’s?” He knew. She hadn’t confided in him about the memory columns and her visits there with Rapskal. But somehow he knew. A deep blush heated her face. As her silence became longer, the hurt in his eyes deepened. She tried to tell herself that she’d done nothing wrong, that his hurt was not her fault. He spoke while she struggled to find words. “It’s pretending, Thymara.” His voice was low but not gentle. “It’s not plunging into this life in Kelsingra. It’s letting go of now, and living the past, a past that will never return. It’s not even really living. You don’t make decisions there, and if the consequences become too dark, you can run away. You take on a style of thinking, and when you come back to this world, it sways you. But worst of all is, while you are swimming in memories, what are you not doing here? What experiences are you missing, what chances pass you by? A year from now, what will you say about these seasons, what will you remember?” She was moving from embarrassed to angry. Tats had no right to rebuke her. He might think she was doing something foolish, but she hadn’t hurt anyone with it. Well, only him, and only his feelings. And wasn’t that partially his own fault, for caring about such things? He knew she was getting angry. She saw how he tightened his shoulders and heard his voice deepen a notch. “When you’re with me, Thymara…if you ever decide to be with me… I won’t be thinking of anyone else except you. I won’t call you by someone else’s name, or do something to you because it’s what someone else liked a long, long time ago.

She is so good, your wife.” “Yes,” said Alexander. “So fresh and young. So lovely to look at.” “Yes,” said Alexander, closing his eyes. “And she doesn’t yell at you.” “No. Though I reckon she sometimes wants to.” “Oh, to have such restraint in my Bessie. She used to be a fine woman. And the girl was such a loving girl.” More drink, more smoke. “But have you noticed since coming back,” said Nick, “that there are things that women just don’t know? Won’t know. They don’t understand what it was like. They see me like this, they think this is the worst. They don’t know. That’s the chasm. You go through something that changes you. You see things you can’t unsee. Then you are sleepwalking through your actual life, shell-shocked. Do you know, when I think of myself, I have legs? In my dreams I’m always marching. And when I wake up, I’m on the floor, I’ve fallen out of bed. I now sleep on the floor because I kept rolling over and falling while dreaming. When I dream of myself, I’m carrying my weapons, and I’m in the back of a battalion. I’m in a tank, I’m yelling, I’m always screaming in my dreams. This way! That way! Fire! Cease! Forward! March! Fire, fire, fire!” Alexander lowered his head, his arms drooping on the table. “I wake up and I don’t know where I am. And Bessie is saying, what’s the matter? You’re not paying attention to me. You haven’t said anything about my new dress. You end up living with someone who cooks your food for you and who used to open her legs for you, but you don’t know them at all. You don’t understand them, nor they you. You’re two strangers thrown together. In my dreams, with legs, after marching, I’m always leaving, wandering off, long gone. I don’t know where I am but I’m never here, never with them. Is it like that with you, too?” Alexander quietly smoked, downing another glass of whiskey, and another. “No,” he finally said. “My wife and I have the opposite problem. She carried weapons and shot at men who came to kill her. She was in hospitals, on battlefields, on frontlines. She was in DP camps and concentration camps. She starved through a frozen, blockaded city. She lost everyone she ever loved.” Alexander took half a glass of sour mash into his throat and still couldn’t keep himself from groaning. “She knows, sees, and understands everything. Perhaps less now, but that’s my fault. I haven’t been much of a—” he broke off. “Much of anything. Our problem isn’t that we don’t understand each other. Our problem is that we do. We can’t look at each other, can’t speak one innocent word, can’t touch each other without touching the cross on our backs. There is simply never any peace.” Another stiff drink went into Alexander’s throat.

She understood that becoming a nun was a lifetime commitment. Testing her daughter’s resolve was wise. The Koehler family together, 1923 First Homes As an adult, I visited Rosie’s first home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, to get a sense of her early life and that of her famous family. The compact Victorian residence stands three stories tall on a small lot in the Boston suburb. It was easy to picture the young Kennedy children playing in the back yard. Rose Kennedy wrote in Times to Remember, her 1974 autobiography: “It was a nice old wooden-frame house with clapboard siding; seven rooms, plus two small ones in the converted attic, all on a small lot with a few bushes and trees . . . about twenty-five minutes from the center of the city by trolley.” 5 The family home on Beals Street is now the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service. From the deep browns and reds of the rugs on the hardwood floors to the homey couch and chairs, the home felt warm and comfortable to me. I suppressed a desire to kick off my sandals and flop on the sofa. The Kennedys’ house on Beals Street, Rosie’s first home But my perspective as a child would have triggered a different impression. I would have whispered to my mother, “They’re rich!” (I’ve since discovered that money isn’t the only measure of wealth. There’s wealth in memories, too.) A lovely grand piano occupies one corner of the Kennedys’ old living room. It was a wedding gift to Rose Kennedy from her uncles, and she delighted in playing her favorite song, “Sweet Adeline,” on it. Although her children took piano lessons, Mrs. Kennedy lamented that her own passion never ignited a similar spark in any of her daughters. She did often ask Rosemary to perform, however. I see an image of Rosemary declaring she couldn’t, her hands stretching awkwardly across the keys. But her mother encouraged Rosie to practice, confident she’d

I own this city. I walk with its rhythms, run with it's breath, speak its language. Los Angeles is my lover. It knows I'm a survivor. It knows what I've done and has found no reason to forgive me, because there has never been a sin. I am brave and strong. I have a good sense of humor. I am loyal and friendly. I have friends around every corner. Celebrities and homeless people, priests and con men. The Mexican dudes playing dice in the loading dock, the guys with the boom box outside the abandoned buildings. The businessmen and actors, the models and personal trainers. The hookers on Sunset know my name, and I know theirs. We all live here. This is our Los Angeles.

I own this city. I walk with its rhythms, run with its breath, speak its language. Los Angeles is my lover. It knows I'm a survivor. It knows what I've done and has found no reason to forgive me, because there has never been a sin. I am brave and strong. I have a good sense of humor. I am loyal and friendly. I have friends around every corner. Celebrities and homeless people, priests and con men. The Mexican dudes playing dice in the loading dock, the guys with the boom box outside the abandoned buildings. The businessmen and actors, the models and personal trainers. The hookers on Sunset know my name, and I know theirs. We all live here. This is our Los Angeles.

Going to the office wasn't as pleasant lately, Sam thought, as he made his way through the back entry to the detectives' division. There weren't so many people there that day, and it seemed like a lot of them were avoiding the place, just staying away as much as they could. He could understand that. After almost ten years as a Denver cop, Sam was sick of seeing what humanity was really capable of. He had grown up reading cop stories, always seeing how the cops would save the day, watching them rescue the innocent and punish the guilty every week on TV, until he finally knew that he had to be one himself. After a short stint in the Army that never even got him out of the country, he'd come home and applied for the academy. He'd been accepted, and that was the start of an illustrious career. Now, it was all he could do to drag himself out of bed in the mornings, make himself come in and see what new horrors he'd have to deal with. The past four months he'd been on loan to the DEA, and they'd made some big drug busts, shut down some of the most evil purveyors of sin and death that ever lived, but they were like the mythical hydra—as soon as you cut off one of its heads, three more grew back to take its place. Sam wanted to stop cutting off heads and find the creature's heart, but there was almost no evidence as to where that heart might be. They knew there was something big behind the drug operations in the city, but it was so well organized and so carefully designed that no one seemed to have any idea where or how to find it. His cell rang as he sat down at his desk, and he saw his partner's number. Dan Jacobs was already out on his station, watching one of the dealers they'd identified the day before. “Yo,” Sam answered. “Sam, it's Dan. I been thinkin', and it seems to me that we might be lookin' in the wrong direction, y'know?” Sam blinked a couple of times. “Danny, I've been awake for about fifteen minutes, and haven't even opened my Starbuck's yet. What the heck are you talkin' about?” “I'm sayin', maybe we're goin' about this all the wrong way, tryin' to find dealers and trail 'em, follow the tracks up the ladder. There's something about this whole setup that smacks of serious organization, something big enough to hide in plain sight, know what I mean? If it's that well laid out, we can follow minions all day long, we're never gonna find the top guy, because they don’t ever see the top guys.” Sam nodded. “Yeah, you're probably right,” he said, “but unless you got a crystal ball lead on where else to go, I don’t know what good it's doin' us. Where else we gonna find any leads at all? Got a clue, there?” “Maybe,” Dan said. “We've been tailing a lot of these clowns the past few weeks, right? Have you noticed one thing they all do the same?” Sam thought about it, but nothing jumped out at him. He looked at it from a couple of different angles, then shook his head. Into the phone, he said, “Nope. So, what is it?” “Facebook. No matter what else they're doin', these bastards never miss checking in on Facebook every day, several times a day. They go on, look at what people are sayin' on their pages, sometimes they answer and sometimes they don't, and then they go back to their drug dealin' ways.” Sam rubbed his temple. “Dan, everyone does that. Everyone on freakin' earth is on Facebook, and always checkin' it out. That's just part

Instead, the thing that had captured my attention was this big metal column topped by…absolutely nothing. It was doing this in the parking lot of what I had to figure was the main supplier of off-campus food: a retro-fifties fast-food joint. Maybe it’s supposed to be some kind of art, I thought as I stared at the column. I was living in the big city now, after all. Public art happened. Not only that, it didn’t have to make sense. In fact, having it not make sense was probably a requirement. “They took it down for repairs,” a voice beside my suddenly said. I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but the truth is, I jumped about a mile. I’d been so mesmerized by the sight of that column extending upward into space, supporting empty air, that I’d totally lost track of all my soon-to-be-fellow students rushing by me. To this day, I can’t quite explain the fascination. But I’ve promised to tell you the 100 percent truth, which means I’ve got to include even the parts which make me appear less than impressive. “Huh?” Yes, all right, I know. Nowhere even near the list of incredibly clever replies. “They took it down for repairs,” the voice said again. “Took it down,” I echoed. By this time, I knew I was well on my way to breaking my own blending-in rule, big time. Sounding like a total idiot can generally be considered a foolproof method of getting yourself noticed. “The car that’s usually up there.” The guy--it was a guy; I’d calmed down enough to realize that--said. I snuck a quick glance at him out of the corner of my eye. First fleeting impression: tall and blond. The kind of muscular-yet-lanky build I’ve always been a sucker for. Faded jeans. Letterman jacket with just about every sport there was represented on it. Gotcha! I thought. BMOC. Big Man on Campus. This made me feel a little better for a couple of reasons. The first was that it showed my skills hadn’t abandoned me completely after all. I could still identify the players pretty much on sight. The second was that in my vast, though admittedly from-a-distance, experience of them, BMOCs have short attention spans for anyone less BOC than they are. Disconcerting and intense as it was at the moment, I could nevertheless take comfort in the fact that this guy’s unexpected and unnatural interest in me was also unlikely to last very long. “An old Chevy, I think,” he was going on now. “It’s supposed to be back soon, though. Not really the same without it, is it?” He actually sounded genuinely mournful. I was surprised to find myself battling back a quick, involuntary smile. He did seem to be more interesting than your average, run-of-the-mill BMOC. I had to give him that. Get a grip, O’Connor, I chastised myself. “Absolutely not,” I said, giving my head a semi-vigorous nod. That ought to move him along, I thought. You may not be aware of this fact, but agreeing with people is often an excellent way of getting them to forget all about you. After basking in the glow of agreement, most people are then perfectly content to go about their business, remembering only the fact that someone agreed and allowing the identity of the person who did the actual agreeing to fade into the background. This technique almost always works. In fact, I’d never known it not to. There was a moment of silence. A silence in which I could feel the BMOC’s eyes upon me. I kept my own eyes fixed on the top of the carless column. But the longer the silence went on, the more strained it became. At least it did on my side. This guy was simply not abiding by the rules. He was supposed to have basked and moved on by now.

Mr. Skukman told me I should have been more appreciative of your sacrifice,” Lucetta said, her tone decidedly disgruntled. “And that sacrifice, according to him, was you offering to marry me.” Bram felt his lips curl. “Did he now?” She caught his eye. “He did, and I hate to admit this, but . . . he might be right about me not showing you the appropriate appreciation.” She blew out a breath. “Apparently, I’m difficult.” He couldn’t hold back a laugh. “Such conclusions can be surprising, but . . . truth be told, difficult may be part of your charm. It’s far more delightful than bossy.” Rolling her eyes, Lucetta leaned back on her elbows, earning a rumble of dissent from Montresor in the process as he resituated himself in the folds of her skirt. “Difficult though I may very well be,” she began, “I find myself curious about you. Tell me something interesting about Bram Haverstein.” “There’s not much to tell.” “I’m sure that’s not true. You live in a castle. There must be a riveting story behind that.” “I’m afraid it’s a rather dull story, not riveting. I loved the look of the place and knew it would provide me with enough room to keep a few animals and provide me with the calm atmosphere I need to . . . Well . . . who doesn’t enjoy a calm atmosphere?” “From what I’ve experienced since arriving at Ravenwood, the atmosphere here is anything but calm. And I don’t think that’s the real story behind why you bought the place.” She considered him for a long moment. “Quite honestly, I’ve come to the conclusion there’s far more to you than meets the eye.” Bram blinked. “Ah . . . well, I’m sure that could be said about most people.” “Why did you really purchase Ravenwood?” she pressed. Bram leaned back. “Fine, since persistence also seems to be part of your charm, I’ll tell you. But it’s hardly a riveting tale. You see, the previous owner, Mr. James Woodward, was desperate to sell because his wife had come to the conclusion Ravenwood was haunted. After one too many encounters with what she claimed were otherworldly beings and otherworldly experiences, she had Mrs. Macmillan pack her a bag and she left for the city, vowing to never step foot in Ravenwood again—which, I can honestly tell you, she never did.” “Mrs.

No!” She yanked it away, curling protectively around it. He felt like she had slapped him. “What do you think I am going to do, snatch it and throw it in the lake?” he demanded in an angry voice. She took a step back, and he followed. “Do you?” “Shhhh!” she said in a fierce whisper. “People are still sleeping!” He stepped closer, his face inches from hers. “And I am dying here because a woman I have hankered after for years just kicked me in the teeth. Again.” Mollie blanched. “Why do you keep talking like that? We barely know each other!” He was mad enough to spit fire. “I couldn’t court a woman who did business with Hartman’s,” he ground out. “That was the quickest route for me to get canned, but after the fire, I don’t care anymore about rules. You are a woman I want in my life, but my hand to God, if you keep accusing me of trying to swindle you, I am liable to combust.” Her eyes narrowed in distrust, and he was smart enough to know that blasted scrap of paper was going to be a wedge between them forever unless he could figure a way to dispose of it. He settled his hands on her shoulders. “Mollie, you have a piece of paper. In the coming years, the court system in this city is going to be swamped with a legal quagmire the likes of which this country has never seen before. With the archives of the courthouse in ashes, there is no way to prove the legitimacy of that deed.” “No way to disprove it either.” “Exactly.” He turned her around and cupped the side of her face. He tried using a gentle pressure to nudge her face up to look at him, but she resisted. “Mollie, I have cared about you for years. I have made a great study of Mollie Knox and the way she runs her business, but you know nothing about me. I suppose it is not fair for me to expect you to trust me when I’ve never been more than the man signing off on your quarterly revenue statements. Come live at my house. Bring Frank. Heaven help me, you can even bring Sophie, but come. I can’t stand the thought of you shivering in that church. No matter what it takes, I intend to earn your trust, and after that, you’d better put an armed guard around your heart, because I plan on winning you and folding you into my life. Fair warning, woman.” Mollie squinted at something over his shoulder, and Zack realized she had not been paying attention to a single word he’d said.

I’ve got to let him suffer a bit or he’ll never learn to take care of himself.” Sedric pondered his words. “Do you think I should do the same Relpda? Let her be hungry?” Even as he spoke the words aloud, he felt his dragon become aware of the thought. No! I don’t like to be hungry! Don’t be mean to me! “I know it seems harsh,” Carson said, almost as if he, too, had shared Relpda’s thought. “But we have to do something, Sedric. It can’t go on this way. Even if I hunted morning until night every day and was successful in every hunt, it wouldn’t be enough to feed them all. All of them are hungry, all the time, some more than others. But there’s a limit to what we keepers can do. The dragons need to make an effort to fly and to feed themselves. And they need to do it now, before it’s too late.” “Too late?” Carson looked grim. “Look at them Sedric. They should be creatures of the air, but they are living like ground animals. They aren’t growing properly. Their wings are weak, and on some they’re simply too small. Rapskal had the right of it. From the time he first took charge of Heeby, he made her try to fly, every day. Look at her some time and compare the lines of her body to those of the other dragons. Look where the muscle is developed and where it’s not.” He shook his head. “Trying to get Spit to exercise his wings is difficult. He’s willful, and he knows full well that he’s bigger and stronger then I am. My only handle on him is food. He knows my rule. He tries to fly. And then I feed him. He has to try every day. And that’s what the other dragons have to do. But I don’t think they will until they’re forced to it.” Not liking Carson. But we know it’s true, Relpda. You’re too big for me to keep you fed. I know how hungry you get. I bring you food, but it’s never enough. It’s never going to be enough until you can fly and make your own kills. We both know that. Falling hurts. Being hungry hurts, too. All the time. Being hurt from falling will stop once you learn to fly. But if you don’t learn to fly, the hurt of being hungry will go on always. You have to try. Carson is right. You have to try harder, and you have to try every day. Not liking YOU, now.

You can’t go.” “Give me a reason why I shouldn’t.” “Because what was the point in anything if you just disappear forever?” she hissed, splaying her arms. “The point in what, Celaena?” How could he be so calm when she was so frantic? “The point in Skull’s Bay, and the point in getting me that music, and the point in… the point in telling Arobynn that you’d forgive him if he never hurt me again.” “You said you didn’t care what I thought. Or what I did. Or if I died, If I’m not mistaken.” “I lied! And you know I lied, you stupid bastard!” He laughed quietly. “You want to know how I spent this summer?” She went still. He ran a hand through his brown hair. “I spent every single day fighting the urge to slit Arobynn’s throat. And he knew I wanted to kill him. The moment I woke up after he beat me, I realized I had to leave. Because I was going to kill him if I didn’t. But I couldn’t.” He studied her face. “Not until you came back. Not until I knew you were all right—until I saw that you were safe.” Breathing became very, very hard. “He knew that, too,” Sam went on. “So he decided to exploit it. He didn’t recommend me for missions. Instead, he made me help Lysandra and Clarisse. He made me escort them around the city on picnics and parties. It became a game between the two of us—how much of his horseshit I could take before I snapped. But we both knew he’d always have the winning hand. He’d always have you. Still. I spent every day this summer hoping you’d come back in one piece. More than that—I hoped you’d come back and take revenge for what he’d done to you.” But she hadn’t. She’d come back and let Arobynn shower her with gifts. “And now that you’re fine, Celaena, now that you’ve paid off your debt, I can’t stay in Rifthold. Not after all the things he’s done to us.” “Please don’t go.” “You’ll be fine without me. You always have been.” Maybe once, but not now. “How can I convince you to stay?” “You can’t.” She threw down the torch. “Do you want me to beg, is that it?” “No—never.” “Then tell me—” “What more can I say?” he exploded, his whisper rough and harsh. “I’ve already told you everything—I’ve already told you that if I stay here, if I have to live with Arobynn, I’ll snap his damned neck.” “But why? Why can’t you let it go?” He grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Because I love you!” Her mouth fell open. “I love you,” he repeated, shaking her again. “I have for years. And he hurt you and made me watch because he’s always known how I felt, too. But if I asked you to pick, you’d choose Arobynn, and I. Can’t. Take. It.” The only sounds were their breathing, an uneven beat against the rushing of the sewer water. “You’re a damned idiot,” she breathed. “You’re a moron and an ass and a damned idiot.” He looked like she had hit him. But she went on, and grasped both sides of his face, “Because I’d pick you.” And then she kissed him.

Asha could never have Colden Moeshka,” he says, “and Colden Moeshka could not enter the City of Ruin, but who would stop Fia Drumera from leaving her throne and seeking the man of the north? So Neri made Asha a deal. If she gave him her heart once again, this time for eternity, he would do the thing she could not. He would make Fia Drumera immortal as well, but worse, he would cast within her the element of fire and in Colden Moeshka the element of frost, that they may never—for all their infinite days—come together again.” I sit back, saddened for these people I’ve never met. People who have lived only as legends to me. Does my sister know this story of her lover? And if so, does she not care that his heart once burned so brightly for another? That it might still? “The Eastlanders have learned this tale,” Alexus says. “It’s been kept secret for over three centuries. It’s the reason the gods destroyed themselves. Thanks to Thamaos’s influence, Neri and Asha were condemned and buried at Mount Ulra, where they might spend eternity together in their shame. After their deaths, Thamaos wanted to claim their lands, but the one decent god of Tiressia, Urdin of the Western Drifts, blamed Thamaos for everything. Thamaos knew Urdin would be a problem, so he did a thing that you and I may regret, even three centuries later.” “What? What did he do?

Photosynthesis by Skylar Stone Backroads Are never paved by a girl like me Can’t be seen No emerald But the leaving I’ve seen Still lies right before me I’m a spoonful of polish Just blind trust turned faithless But my world doesn’t matter here And my porcelain life is behind me I found peace in these clashin’ chairs Never knew such a small life could free me In the pines, by the water In the arms of another Little hands with big hearts find me And I find peace My life Is tailored to fit just so Never chosen Then you came Set fire to the lies I honed Now I’m hoping The future is perfect, Strip me down to human But my world doesn’t matter here And my porcelain life is behind me I found peace in the calmer air In the simplicity of a new dream In the pines, by the water In the arms of a lover Little hands with big hearts find me And I find peace Breathing in until my lungs cry It’s like I’m forced here, trapped in two lives Oh, the peace I’ve found Or my old doll house Breathing out the love you’ve shown me Got a bird’s eye view of healing Found in innocence Photosynthesis ‘Cause my world doesn’t matter here I left that version of me in the city I found home in a broken glass I found home in the words that he gave me In the pines, by the water In the arms of a lover Little hands with big hearts find me And I find peace

You want to know why, Stella? Why I gave you the watch, why I moved you into my house, my sanctuary, when I’ve lived alone for over a decade and had planned to do so for the rest of my life? It’s because you haven’t looked me in the eye since New York. Because you’re all I can fucking think about no matter where I am or who I’m with, and the thought of you hurt or upset makes me want to raze this city to the ground.” Soft, almost desperate viciousness coated his voice. “I’ve never wanted someone more, and I’ve never hated myself more for it.

After the miscarriage I was surrounded by dead-baby flowers, dead-baby books, and lots of boxes of dead-baby tea. I felt like I was drowning in a dead-baby sea. My mother didn’t know how to help but knew that I needed her. She sent me a soft bathrobe and a teapot, and I wept for hours on the phone with her. Mostly, she listened as I sorted through all my thoughts and feelings. If I’m angry or upset about something, or even if I’m happy about something, it isn’t real until I articulate it. I need a narrative. I guess that’s something Jeff and I share. We both need a story to fit into. The Burton ability to turn misfortune into narrative is something I’m grateful I was taught. It helps me think, Well, okay, that’s just a funny story. You should hear my father talking about his mother and those damn forsythia bushes. My sisters-in-law sent me lovely, heartfelt packages. Christina sent me teas and a journal and a letter I cherish. She included Cheryl Strayed’s book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. Christina is a mother. I felt like she understood the toll this sadness was taking on me, and she encouraged me to practice self-care. Jess gave me the book Reveal: A Secret Manual for Getting Spiritually Naked by Meggan Watterson and some other books about the divine feminine. She knew that there was nothing she could say, but everything she wanted to articulate was in those books. Jess has always had an almost psychic ability to understand my inner voice. She is quiet and attuned to what people are really saying rather than what they present to the world. I knew her book choices were deliberate, but I couldn’t read them for a while because they were dead-baby books. If people weren’t giving me dead baby gifts, they wanted to tell me dead-baby stories. There’s nothing more frustrating than someone saying, “Well, welcome to the club. I’ve had twelve miscarriages." It seemed like there was an unspoken competition between members of this fucked up sorority. I quickly realized this is a much bigger club than I knew and that everyone had stories and advice. And as much as I appreciated it, I had to find my own way. Tara gave me a book called Vessels: A Love Story, by Daniel Raeburn, about his and his wife’s experience of a number of miscarriages. His book helped because I couldn’t wrap my head around Jeff’s side of the story, and he certainly wasn’t telling it to me. He was out in the garage until dinnertime every day. He would come in, eat, help Gus shower, and then disappear for the rest of the night. I often read social media posts from couples announcing, “Hey we miscarried but it brought us closer together." I think it’s fair to say that miscarriage did not bring Jeffrey and me closer together. We were living in the same space but leading parallel lives. To be honest, most of the time we weren’t even living in the same space. That spring The Good Wife was canceled. We had banked on that being a job Jeff would do for a couple of years, one that would keep him in New York City. Then he landed Negan on The Walking Dead, and suddenly he would be all the way down in Georgia for the next three to five years. We were never going to have another child. It had been so hard to get pregnant. I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to coordinate dates when Jeff would be around and I’d be ovulating. It felt like every conversation was about having a baby. He’d ask, “What do you want for dinner?" I’d say, “A baby." “Hey, what do you want to do this weekend?" I’d say, “Have a baby.

I realize I live in a city with a Jewish population of less than two percent, but the assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas has never not rubbed at me like the softest sweater’s sharp-edged tag. This time of year, it’s nearly constant. I’ve been the only person ever not wearing a Santa hat during a broadcast, and our social media blew up with accusations that I hated America.

The company will go public in a few months, and you’ll be rich enough to retire and never work again. Listen to me.’ Her manager was serious. ‘I’ve lived in this city long enough to know that the only thing these people can’t forgive is poverty. If you have enough money, they’ll forget everything. You’ll be fine.

Dear Thomas, What is there left to say? You know I’m sorry. You know I miss you. How many letters can a sister possibly write to her brother before he believes her? My heart breaks again and again. Did you ever truly find happiness, or did I steal it away forever? How I wish you could sit in this room—as awful as it is—and tell me the stories of your life. You were such a wonderful brother, putting up with me during my teenage years. Can you believe the things I did? So desperate for attention. And you were the only one who ever gave it to me. You even gave up living in the dorms to stay home for me. What would I have done without you? I still laugh about the time you beat up Jim Harrison for calling me a skank. How strange we never spoke of Vietnam. Or the fall of the Berlin Wall, the war in the Middle East. Can you believe we all have computers? Can you believe Tom Brady? That’s right, I keep up a little. How about Portland’s evolution? I thought the Maine Mall would ruin our city forever. I hope you know that after hitting rock bottom, I’ve dedicated my life to making up for my sins and attempting to honor you. I suppose it’s not much, but it’s the most I can offer. I love you, Thomas. Always your sister, I hope, Emma

It’s a city I’ve lived in for years, but a place where I’ve never made a network of friends or found a sense of really belonging. I can see now that it’s my own fault – I built walls around myself in an attempt to protect myself and my daughter. Maybe those walls kept some pain out but they also shut out joy. This is the place and the life I chose, but this summer has shown me how small my life here has been. How small my entire life has become.

First they told me: “build a following and the industry will follow.” So I spent my entire 20s building a following on zero budget, getting by on donations. Then they told me: “You need a literary agent. But a literary agent wants to see you have a following and something big going on.” So I started my own small press and self published 5 books and spent day and night connecting with my people until I’d sold over 35,000 copies in 35 different countries and now they tell me: “no agent wants to work with a self published author.” Sometimes I feel like I was doomed from the very start, the very day I sat my food on that plane to London 12 years ago. Like the whole world keeps saying “you can fight all you want but we won’t let you in.” But I do have freedom and I do have my following and I have vulnerable souls writing to me on Friday nights, about loss and hope and how my books or music or words played a small part in something they went through and sometimes I think I would throw all that away just to have a literary agent and a management and the contracts and headlines… because I’m tired.. of always fighting uphill.. but then I get that message, on a Monday night, and I take my computer to a bar close to where I live in Berlin, high above the city, and I write like never before because I have my people and vulnerable souls to find and I have so many books in me and time is not endless, time is crucial, and lately I’ve felt it running out, some nights, so I’m writing another book that won’t be noticed by the agents but I have my people and that’s all I will care about from now on. My people and my freedom, with time running out. That’s what I will focus on.

I hadn’t realized they’d have individualized starlight. I always thought mine was only … brighter than yours.” She frowned at Ruhn. “I guess it makes sense that there could be nuances to the light amongst the Fae that got interbred. Theia’s elder daughter, Helena, had the gift—and married Prince Pelias. Your ancestor.” “He’s your ancestor, too,” Ruhn muttered. “Pelias was no true prince,” Aidas spat, fangs bared. “He was Theia’s high general and appointed himself prince after he forcibly wed Helena.” “I’m sorry,” Ithan said, scrubbing at his face, “but what the fuck is this about?” He glanced at the pizza on the table, as if wondering whether it had been spiked with something. Welcome to our lives, Hunt wanted to say. But Bryce’s face had gone pale. “Queen Theia allowed this?” “Theia was dead by that point,” Aidas said flatly. “Pelias slew her.” He nodded to the Starsword in Ruhn’s hand. “And stole her blade when he’d finished.” He snarled. “That sword belongs to Theia’s female heir. Not the male offspring who corrupted her line.” Bryce swallowed audibly, and Ruhn gaped at his blade. “I’ve never heard any of this,” the Fae Prince protested. Aidas laughed coldly. “Your celebrated Prince Pelias, the so-called first Starborn Prince, was an impostor. Theia’s other daughter got away—vanished into the night. I never learned of her fate. Pelias used the Starsword and the Horn to set himself up as a prince, and passed them on to his offspring, the children Helena bore him through rape.” That very Horn that was now tattooed into Bryce’s back. A chill went down Hunt’s spine, and his wings twitched. “Pelias’s craven blood runs through both of your veins,” Aidas said to Ruhn.

I've made my thoughts clear enough on what I want from you.' He'd never met someone able to imply so much in so few words, in placing so much emphasis on you as to make it an outright insult. Cassian clenched his jaw. And didn't bother to restrain himself when he said, 'I'm tired of playing these bullshit games.' She kept her chin high, the portrait of queenly arrogance. 'I'm not.' 'Well, everyone else is. Perhaps you can find it in yourself to try a little harder this year.' Those striking eyes slid toward him, and it was an effort to stand his ground. 'Try?' 'I know that's a foreign word to you.' Nesta stopped at the bottom of the street, right along the icy Sidra. 'Why should I have to try to do anything?' Her teeth flashed. 'I was dragged into this world of yours, this court.' 'Then go somewhere else.' Her mouth formed a tight line at the challenge. 'Perhaps I will.' But he knew there was no other place to go. Not when she had no money, no family beyond this territory. 'Be sure to write.' She launched into a walk again, keeping along the river's edge. Cassian followed, hating himself for it. 'You could at least come live at the House,' he began, and she whirled on him. 'Stop,' she snarled. He halted in his tracks, wings spreading slightly to balance him. 'Stop following me. Stop trying to haul me into your happy little circle. Stop doing all of it.' He knew a wounded animal when he saw one. Knew the teeth they could bare, the viciousness they displayed. But it couldn't keep him from saying, 'Your sisters love you. I can't for the live of me understand why, but they do. If you can't be bothered to try for my happy little circle's sake, then at least try for them.' A void seemed to enter those eyes. An endless, depthless void. She only said, 'Go home, Cassian.' He could count on one hand the number of times she'd used his name. Called him anything other than you or that one. She turned away- toward her apartment, her grimy part of the city. It was instinct to lunge for her free hand. Her gloved fingers scraped against his calluses, but he held firm. 'Talk to me, Nesta. Tell me-' She ripped her hand out of his grip. Stared him down. A mighty vengeful queen. He waited, panting, for the verbal lashing to begin. For her to shred him into ribbons. But Nesta only stared at him, her nose crinkling. Stared, then snorted- and walked away. As if he were nothing. As if he weren't worth her time. The effort. A low-born Illyrian bastard. This time, when she continued onward, Cassian didn't follow. He watched her until she was a shadow against the darkness- and then she vanished completely. He remained staring after her, that present in his hands. Cassian's fingertips dug into the soft wood of the small box. He was grateful the streets were empty when he hurled the box into the Sidra. Hurled it hard enough that the splash echoed off the buildings flanking the river, ice cracking from the impact. Ice instantly re-formed over the hole he'd blown over. As if it, and the present, had never been.

Delhi is as safe or unsafe as New York, and I’ve been navigating it just fine for over a year. Besides, millions of single women live alone in Indian cities, Daddy. I’m perfectly capable—

I’ve never thought you were anything less than what I know you to be,” he declares, short of breath, a passion in his direct stare that has me holding my breath. “You are the fire that burns stagnant, the coals and ash yearning for the chance to ignite, ready to burn cities to the ground in your fierceness. A force more powerful than any man that came before you. You are my fucking existence, Briony. I live and breathe for you alone. I am yours eternally, entirely at your mercy.

There are residents in our lives, the ones who stay for years, and then there are the tourists just passing through. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference. We can’t, and don’t, and shouldn’t try to hold on to everyone that we meet, and I’ve met a lot of tourists in my life, people I should have kept at a safe distance. If you don’t let anyone get too close, they can’t hurt you. I spent today alone, visiting the parts of New York I’d never seen before, while you followed Henry Winter around the city. The elderly author might seem charming to you,

After the war, I was in a bad place. I still am, I suppose, but for more than a year after the war...' She couldn't look Gwyn in the eye. 'I did a lot of things I regret. Hurt people I regret harming. And I hurt myself. I drank day and night and I...' She didn't want to say the word to Gwyn- fucked- so she said, 'I took strangers to my bed. To punish myself, to drown myself.' She shrugged a shoulder. 'It's a long story, and not one worth telling, but through it all, I picked taverns and pleasure halls to frequent because of the music. I've always loved music.' She braced herself for the damning judgement. But only sorrow filled Gwyn's face. 'You've probably guessed that my residency in the House, my training, my work in the library is my sister's attempt to help me.' Her sister whom she had still not apologised to, whom she still didn't have the courage to face. 'And I... I think I might be glad Feyre did this for me. The drinking, the males- I don't miss any of it. But the music... that I miss.' Nesta waved a hand, as if she could banish the vulnerability she'd offered up. But she went on, 'And since I'm not particularly welcome in the city, I was hoping you meant it when you said I could come to one of your services. Just so I can hear some music again.' Gwyn's eyes shone, like the sunlight on a warm sea. Nesta's heart thundered, waiting for her reply. But Gwyn said, 'Your story is worth telling, you know.' Nesta began to object, but Gwyn insisted, 'It is. But yes- if you want music, then come to the services. We will be glad to have you. I will be glad to have you.' Until Gwyn learned how horrible she'd been. 'No,' Gwyn said, apparently reading the thought on her face. She grabbed Nesta's hand. 'You... I understand.' Nesta heard Gwyn's own heart begin thundering. 'I understand,' Gwyn repeated, 'what it is to... fail the people who mean the most. To live in fear of people finding out. I dread you and Emerie learning my history. I know that once you do, you'll never look at me the same again.' Gwyn squeezed Nesta's hand. Her story would come later. Nesta let her see it in her face, that when Gwyn was ready, nothing she could reveal would make her walk away. 'Come to the service this evening,' Gwyn said. 'Listen to the music.' She squeezed her hand again. 'You'll always be welcome to join me, Nesta.' Nesta hadn't realised how badly she'd needed to hear it. She squeezed Gwyn's hand back.

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy? Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns. 2. He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. 3. Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes. I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.

This is a city that gets born anew in the fresh eyes of every young person who arrives here for the first time. Coco Chanel is a gifted, ambitious, cunning, unloved, and hardworking eel of a woman. You should only buy gloves so beautiful that to lose one of them would break your heart. This is what flirtation is in its purest form—a conversation held without words. Flirtation is a series of silent questions that one person asks another person with their eyes. And the answer to those questions is always the same word: Maybe. You don’t become a real New Yorker until you can manage the city alone. History is not so busy shaping nations that it cannot take the time to shape the lives of two insignificant people. After a certain age, we are all walking around this world in bodies made of secrets and shame and sorrow and old, unhealed injuries. Our hearts grow sore and misshapen around all this pain—yet somehow, still, we carry on. Nothing will uproot your life more violently than true love—at least as far as I’ve always witnessed. Anyway, at some point in a woman’s life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is. Sex is so often a cheat—a shortcut of intimacy. A way to skip over knowing somebody’s heart by knowing, instead, their mere body. And in the geography of my imagination, a great many “neighborhoods” of intimacy were now also shuttered. There were certain subjects that I had only ever been able to talk about with him. There were places within me that he alone could reach with his listening—and I would never be able to reach those places on my own.

He was in Hell's Kitchen . . . I never got out of here. I never got out. I surrendered to the grocery man-to the deck hands on the ferryboat-to the owner of the poolroom. You don't run things around here. You've never run things anywhere, Gail Wynand. You've only added yourself to the things they ran. Then he looked up, across the city, to the shapes of the great skyscrapers. He saw a string of lights rising unsupported in black space, a glowing pinnacle anchored to nothing, a small, brilliant square hanging detached in the sky. He knew the famous buildings to which these belonged, he could reconstruct their forms in space. He thought, you're my judges and witnesses. You rise, unhindered, above the sagging roofs. You shoot your gracious tension to the stars, out of the slack, the tired, the accidental. The eyes one mile out on the ocean will see none of this and none of this will matter, but you will be the presence and the city. As down the centuries, a few men stand in lonely rectitude that we may look and say, there is a human race behind us. One can't escape from you; the streets change, but one looks up and there you stand, unchanged. You have seen me walking through the streets tonight. You have seen all my steps and all my years. It's you that I've betrayed. For I was born to be one of you. . . He stopped. He saw a paper spread out in the gutter before him, front page up. It was the Banner. He saw Roark's picture. He saw the gray print of a rubber heel across Roark's face. He bent, his body folding itself down slowly, with both knees, both arms, and picked up the paper. He folded the front page and put it in his pocket. He walked on. An unknown rubber heel, somewhere in the city, on an unknown foot that I released to march. I released them all. I made every one of those who destroyed me. There is a beast on earth, dammed safely by its own impotence. I broke the dam. They would have remained helpless. They can produce nothing. I gave them the weapon. I gave them my strength, my energy, my living power. I created a great voice and let them dictate the words. The woman who threw the beet leaves in my face had a right to do it. I made it possible for her. Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness. Alvah Scarret can be forgiven. He had nothing to betray. Mitchell Layton can be forgiven. But not I. I was not born to be a second-hander.

Vague dreams, confusing lights, perplexing landscapes--that is what remains in my soul after all my journeying. I have the impression that I've known hours of every hue, loves of every flavor, desires of every shape and size. I've committed boundless excesses, and yet I was never enough for myself even in my dreams. I should explain that I really did travel, but everything smacks to me of merely telling myself that I traveled, although I didn't. I carried back and forth, from north to south and east to west, the weariness of having had a past, the disquiet of living a present, and the tedium of having to have a future. And yet I struggle so hard to remain entirely in the present, killing inside me the past and the future. I walked along the banks of rivers whose names I found I did not know. Sitting at the tables of cafes in the cities I visited, I found myself thinking that everything tasted to me of dreams, of emptiness. I sometimes found myself wondering if I was still sitting at the table of our old house, motionless and dazzled by dreams! I cannot promise you that this is not what is happening, that I am not still there now, that all this, including this conversation with you, is false and imaginary. Who are you, by the way? The absurd thing is that you don't know either...

I understand you, Marco Antonio Guerra said to him. I mean, if I’m right, I think I understand you. You’re like me and I’m like you. We aren’t happy. The atmosphere around us is stifling. We pretend there’s nothing wrong, but there is. What’s wrong? We’re being fucking stifled. You let off steam your own way. I beat the shit out of people or let them beat the shit out of me. But the fights I get into aren’t just any fights, they’re fucking apocalyptic mayhem. I’m going to tell you a secret. Sometimes I go out at night, to bars you can’t even imagine. And I pretend to be a faggot. But not just any kind of faggot: smooth, stuck-up, sarcastic, a daisy in the filthiest pigsty in Sonora. Of course, I don’t have a gay bone in me, I can swear that on the grave of my dead mother. But I pretend that’s what I am. An arrogant little faggot with money who looks down on everyone. And then the inevitable happens. Two or three vultures ask me to step outside. And then the shit kicking begins. I know it and I don’t care. Sometimes they’re the ones who get the worst of it, especially when I have my gun. Other times it’s me. I don’t give a fuck. I need the fucking release. Sometimes my friends, the few friends I have, guys my age who are lawyers now, tell me I should be careful, I’m a time bomb, I’m a masochist. One of them, someone I was really close to, told me that only somebody like me could get away with what I did because I had my father to bail me out. Pure coincidence, that’s all. I’ve never asked my father for a thing. The truth is, I don’t have friends. I don’t want any. At least, I’d rather not have friends who’re Mexicans. Mexicans are rotten inside, did you know? Every last one of them. No one escapes. From the president of the republic to that clown Subcomandante Marcos. If I were Subcomandante Marcos, you know what I’d do? I’d launch an attack with my whole army on any city in Chiapas, so long as it had a strong military garrison. And there I’d sacrifice my poor Indians. And then I’d probably go live in Miami. What kind of music do you like? asked Amalfitano. Classical music, Professor, Vivaldi, Cimarosa, Bach. And what books do you read? I used to read everything, Professor, I read all the time. Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game. I don’t know if you follow me, Professor. Only poetry—and let me be clear, only some of it—is good for you, only poetry isn’t shit.

Listen. The Sinspire is nearly sixty yards high, one thick Elderglass cylinder. You know those, you tried to jump off one about two months ago. Goes down another hundred feet or so into a glass hill. It’s got one door at street level, and exactly one door into the vault beneath the tower. One. No secrets, no side entrances. The ground is pristine Elderglass; no tunneling through it, not in a thousand years.” “Mmmm-hmmmm.” “Requin’s got at least four dozen attendants on each floor at any given time, plus dozens of table minders, card dealers, and waiters. There’s a lounge on the third floor where he keeps more out of sight. So figure, at minimum, fifty or sixty loyal workers on duty with another twenty to thirty he can call out. Lots of nasty brutes, too. He likes to recruit from ex-soldiers, mercenaries, city thieves, and such. He gives cushy positions to his Right People for jobs well done, and he pays them like he was their doting mother. Plus, there are stories of dealers getting a year’s wages in tips from lucky blue bloods in just a night or two. Bribery won’t be likely to work on anyone.” “Mmmm-hmmmm.” “He’s got three layers of vault doors, all of them ironshod witchwood, three or four inches thick. Last set of doors is supposedly backed with blackened steel, so even if you had a week to chop through the other two, you’d never get past the third. All of them have clockwork mechanisms, the best and most expensive Verrari stuff, private designs from masters of the Artificers’ Guild. The standing orders are, not one set of doors opens unless he’s there himself to see it; he watches every deposit and every withdrawal. Opens the door a couple times per day at most. Behind the first set of doors are four to eight guards, in rooms with cots, food, and water. They can hold out there for a week under siege.” “Mmmm-hmmmm.” “The inner sets of doors don’t open except for a key he keeps around his neck. The outer doors won’t open except for a key he always gives to his majordomo. So you’d need both to get anywhere.” “Mmmm-hmmmm.” “And the traps…they’re demented, or at least the rumors are. Pressure plates, counterweights, crossbows in the walls and ceilings. Contact poisons, sprays of acid, chambers full of venomous serpents or spiders…One fellow even said that there’s a chamber before the last door that fills up with a cloud of powdered strangler’s orchid petals, and while you’re choking to death on that, a bit of twistmatch falls out and lights the whole mess on fire, so then you burn to a crisp. Insult to injury.” “Mmmm-hmmmm.” “Worst of all, the inner vault is guarded by a live dragon attended by fifty naked women armed with poison spears, each of them sworn to die in Requin’s service. All redheads.” “You’re making that up, Jean.” “I wanted to see if you were listening. But what I’m saying is, I don’t care if he’s got a million solari in there, packed in bags for easy hauling. I’m inclined to the idea that this vault might not be breakable, not unless you’ve got three hundred soldiers, six or seven wagons, and a team of master clockwork artificers you’re not telling me about.” “Right.” “Do you have three hundred soldiers, six or seven wagons, and a team of master clockwork artificers you’re not telling me about?” “No, I’ve got you, me, the contents of our coin purses, this carriage, and a deck of cards.