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The animal part of his mind wasn’t made for this, to be calmly ushered to a death it was perfectly aware of.
I want to see my people, not be seen by them.”
no two better people had ever gone to cleaning of their own free wills, and what did that say about the lot of them who remained?
It was strange to her that she was Mayor of this room as well, a thing she hardly knew existed and certainly couldn’t operate.
The point of the silo was for the people to keep the machines running, when Jahns had always, her entire long life, seen it the other way around.
People were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was to not only figure out why this happened, and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.
Imagination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations. It only knew how to dampen or augment what it already knew.
Whenever he fixed something by accident, it drove him nearly as nuts as having something break.
“Don’t you see? We’ve been living the uprising. Our parents were the children of it, and now we feed our own children to the same machine. This will not be the start of something new, but the end of something old.
“Why are you so riled up? Because you lost a good friend? That happens all the time. No, it’s because you were lied to. And the toppers will feel this ever more keenly, trust me. They live in sight of those who’ve been lied to. It’s the mids, the people who aspire upward without knowing and who look down on us without compassion that will be the most reluctant.”
People feared him and wanted to feel safe. But they respected McLain and wanted to feel loved.
Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.
You either laughed to keep yourself sane or you laughed because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.
Once guns were made, who would unmake them? Barrels rested on shoulders and bristled like pincushions above the crowd. There were things, like spoken ideas, that were almost impossible to take back.
