Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

by Yoon Ha Lee

Jedao’s solution to people who disagreed with him was to shoot them. While even Jedao couldn’t shoot everyone in the hexarchate, the evidence to date suggested that he’d do a fantastic amount of damage on the way out.

“Shuos-zho,” Jedao said, in a voice so pleasant it was poisonous, “it’s no secret that I’m one of the hexarchate’s greatest monsters, but I draw the line at rape.”

“But it does,” Jedao said, hot and cold and sharp at once. “This is exactly what matters. The difference between what should and should not be done. This is what the fight’s about.”

While sex didn’t interest Mikodez, he believed firmly that all of his people should talk to trained conversationalists/therapists on a regular basis.

There were so many of the old stories she had not told her daughter, although she had made a scrabbling effort to pass on the language, the prayers, the poetry. The story of the one-eyed saint who kept a casket with no lock, and what became of her lovers who found a way to open it. The story of the half-tailed cat who lived in the world’s oldest library.

The story of the raven general who sacrificed a thousand thousand of his soldiers to build a spirit-bridge of birds to assault the heavens.

Immortality didn’t turn you into a monster. It merely showed you what kind of monster you already were.

You are people first. You deserve a chance to choose.

“Just think,” Cheris said, “all this passion for a system you’re not even committed to. Imagine who you’d become in service of something you truly believed in.”

what good is immortality if nothing has been done to repair the fault lines in the human heart?”

That was only a fraction of the atrocities the hexarchate had perpetrated in her lives. And people didn’t stop being people because they had choices.