The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

by Eliot Schrefer

What was it that Dad once said? Intimacy is the only shield against insanity.

In case that spurs the new colonists to find a workaround, the virus will also code the zygotes’ adrenal glands to produce excessive amounts of testosterone over their lifetimes, influencing their amygdalae to turn them aggressive. I’ve done the same to the yaks they’ll raise—predisposed them to become killers. Since the zygotes are stored in an inaccessible part of the ship, beyond the gray portal, OS can’t repair them. The colony will fall from within.”

What a stupid, stupid organ, the heart.

“That as soon as we classify someone, we establish the ways in which they’re separate from us. It’s the most fundamental othering that we do.”

I will live in these current moments as fully as possible. Then I will be gone. Ambrose will be gone. Sheep will be gone. It arrives. The brightness between us.

He’s lit up by the impending comet, and the brightness between us eradicates every detail of him except the dark hue of his tunic, his ragged mop of hair.