Ninefox Gambit (The Machineries of Empire, #1)

by Yoon Ha Lee

Taking away people’s names denied their power,

Beautiful, if you wanted to feel that beauty hid unhealthy secrets from you.

Dogs were much more pleasant to be around than grumpy fellow soldiers, even with all the slobber. It wasn’t as though there weren’t lots of fluids in warfare anyway.

The universe ran on death. All the clockwork wonders in the world couldn’t halt entropy. You could work with death or you could let it happen; that was all.