Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

by Yoon Ha Lee

certain rituals made the chaos manageable. More accurately, they gave you the comforting illusion that the plan would have any relationship to reality when reality decided to stab you in the eye.

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

Deal with it, Jedao had said. This meant, if you regarded the whole situation as a particularly lethal training exercise, that he believed Khiruev had both the knowledge and resources necessary to prevail. Ordinarily Khiruev didn’t believe in applying this kind of meta-analysis to real life, but Jedao had a known tendency to think of everything in terms of games.

I wanted to die having seen that someone believed in a better world enough to fight for it.”

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

he made it a point not to get attached to any specific way of doing things. If he saw a better solution and it made sense to switch over, he was only too happy to do so.

“I hate it when you open your mouth,” Brezan said. “The things you say never make the situation better.”