More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
My existence is vibration, the echo of my own breath, and heat so thick and noxious it feels like I’m swaddled in a heavy quilt of hot piss.
“Death isn’t empty like you say it is. Emptiness is life without freedom, Darrow. Emptiness is living chained by fear, fear of loss, of death.
I say we break those chains. Break the chains of fear and you break the chains that bind us to the Golds, to the Society. Could you imagine it? Mars could be ours. It could belong to the colonists who slaved here, died here.”
A single flare burns beside my grave, splaying weird shadows over the walls.
“Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrifice, family, community. And society is stable. There is no famine. No genocide. No great wars.
Gold made soft and supple into man’s form.
Your fellows stand like you in the Institutes of Venus, of the Eastern and Western Hemispheres of Earth, of Luna, of the Gas Giant Moons, of Europa, of the Astrodian Greek Cluster and the Astrodian Trojan Cluster, of Mercury, of Callisto, of the joint venture Enceledas and Ceres, and of the farpioneers of Hildas.”
anger was once a cold, quiet sort. Now it burns in me. “Society has three stages: Savagery, Ascendance, Decadence. The great rise because of Savagery. They rule in Ascendance. They fall because of their own Decadence.”
freed herself from the shackles of Demokracy, from the Noble Lie—the idea that men are brothers and are created equal.”
“Men are not created equal; we all know this. There are averages. There are outliers. There are the ugly. There are the beautiful. This would not be if we were all equal.
“You think you know pain. You think the Society is an inevitable force of history. You think Her the end of history. But many have thought that before. Many ruling classes have believed theirs to be the last, the pinnacle. They grew soft. Fat. They forgot that calluses, wounds, scars, hardship, preserve all those fine pleasure clubs you young boys love to frequent and all those fine silks and diamonds and unicorns you girls ask for on birthdays.
They want me to soak in the guilt for now. They want me lonely, mournful, so that when I meet the others, the winners, I will be relieved. The murders will bind us, and I’ll find the company of the winners a salve to my guilt. I do not love my fellow students, but I will think I do. I will want their comfort, their reassurances that I am not evil. And they will want the same. This is meant to make us a family—one with cruel secrets.
“That is the point of all this. To make you terrified of a world where you do not rule. Security and justice aren’t given. They are made by the strong.”
Titus asks. “No fretting, I’ll be quick about it.”
research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science—how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things
fall apart and why. You could learn this nowhere else but here.”
Standing there, leering into the brush, he looks bent and twisted and evil—like a withered tree after a fire. He has less bodyfat than anyone I’ve ever seen, so each of his veins and tendons ripple beneath his tight skin. His tongue flits over his perfect teeth.
Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it.
But in the end, don’t those who rise by poison die by poison?”
If I can take, I may take. If I do take, I deserve to have. This is what Peerless believe.”
cousins.” “Nothing binds like pain shared.”
“I confess, I am a Politico, not a fighter. So if we’re to converse, you must say something, Reaper. You look like a statue. I don’t speak statue.” His charisma is cold.
history. A slave to his own whims. A master of nothing but selfishness.
His eyes contemptuous and made from the embers of a dying sun.
