More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He laughed, shattering the architectural lines of his face.
Trust, though, required certain betrayals.
Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.
I still have vague memories of the camps. The ever-present mud churned to muck by overcrowding, of mosquitoes so thick you had to keep your mouth shut, of extreme heat balanced later by extreme cold. The fences and guard dogs that always seemed better tended to than the tents. The new papers we needed to apply for, the old ones that were never good enough.
The feeling of always being hollowed-out and hungry. Sickness, and always having a cold or being feverish. The people on the outside, the guards, were the same as us, and I didn’t understand why they should be on the outside and we should be on the inside.
When you don’t have to run and you have the chance to run for the hell of it, it becomes a strange luxury.
I came to the edge of a courtyard and a peculiar sight. For anywhere but here. Three dead astronauts had fallen to Earth and been planted like tulips, buried to their rib cages, then flopped over in their suits, faceplates cracked open and curled into the dirt. Lichen or mold spilled from those helmets. Bones, too. My heart lurched, trapped between hope and despair. Someone had come to the city from far, far away—even, perhaps, from space! Which meant there were people up there. But they’d died here, like everything died here.
The sky beyond was a burnt blue, dissolving into almost-dusk. A mirage of delicate fracture lines in the distance promised mountains. But there were no mountains as far as we knew. That was just the sky lying to us.
“What happened in this city?” Borne asked once, in a voice like a world-weary old man. I had no answer for him, thinking: I don’t know, it just happened. Everything everywhere collapsed. We didn’t try hard enough. We were preyed upon. We had no discipline. We didn’t try the right things at the right time. We cared but we didn’t act. Too many people, too little space.
Every time I thought there could be no further breach of trust that our relationship could withstand, that Wick and I would be driven apart never to come back together, we discovered our limits were elastic, that we had so much more room to mistrust each other the worse it got out in the city.
The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive.
