Full Fathom Five (Craft Sequence, #3)

by Max Gladstone

He adjusted his grip on the club, and held it out to her. “Are my V’s pointing in the right direction?” “I don’t even know what that means.” “Just say yes or no. You have a fifty-fifty shot at being right. Better than most coaches in my experience.”

I thought I’d drop by to tell you how much we appreciate your work.” Twilling sounded genuine and superficial at once, as if he had read books about empathizing with employees and almost understood them.

“I know that look in your eyes,” Cat said. “You want to make a difference. You think if you push hard enough, you can fix this damn island, and once you’re done with that, why not the whole world? But gods and Deathless Kings are bigger than you, kid, and they’re bigger than me, and when folks like us play their games, we get lost so fast. Ideals twist, and one day you find yourself down a dead end, breaking ten oaths to keep one. Do you understand?”

he always felt it was a mistake to silo verticals, which phrase Kai understood but felt dirty for understanding. In short, he said, spreading hands, we might make a closer out of you yet.

The hardest part of the conversation had been to keep a straight face when Twilling’s verbiage swerved into the arcane and he began to invent new meanings for the word “leverage.”

And how any attempt to discuss objective fact buys into imperialist cultural narratives, and basically they’re nice people and I don’t want to piss Sam off and maybe they’re even right, but if they keep on like that for more than a few minutes I feel this urge to curl their hair around my fingers and bash them face-first into a windowsill ten or fifteen times. No offense.” “None taken.”