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He believes in exploiting the world for his own gains, but she’d happily ignite the entire thing, if only to roast marshmallows in its embers.
The numbers don’t need him to give them meaning the way the words do. Words don’t mean anything without someone to understand them. Numbers just are.
“People don’t believe things that are too perfect.”
“I need to hurt something.” Reed cocks his head. “Then hurt something.” Leigh smiles.
She’s in the kitchen, her hands empty, a coffee mug smashed on the floor. She’s looking at it in dull puzzlement, like she can’t understand how it got there; gravity should have been suspended, says her face, all the essential functions of the universe should have been turned off the second this began. The universe should have warned her. Somehow, somehow, the universe should have warned her.
If they had to lose themselves to walk this road, would it ever really be able to lead them home?
I’m Snake.” “His parents didn’t name him that,” says the girl with her eyes on her phone. “Your parents didn’t name you ‘Jessica,’” says Snake. There’s no rancor in his tone: this is a conversation they’ve had before. “No, they gave me a name white people can’t pronounce. I’m tired of hearing it butchered, so everyone gets to call me Jessica, and we all feel good about how progressive we are.” Jessica finally glances up. “You know what white people can pronounce? ‘Tom.’” “But I don’t look like a Tom,” protests Snake. “You have limbs. You don’t look like a Snake either.”
It’s a horror movie cliché: the unstable genius who spends all their time writing on the walls, chasing an equation that might as well be a dream. Dodger knows that. But the horror movie geniuses never take the time to buy special paint and never erase their work; she does both.
They’re not just playing different sides: they’re playing different games, him to last, her to end.
eye flashing over pyramid flashing over eye.
Illuminati??
Dating Erin would be sort of like dating a blender. Sure, it makes great smoothies, but one day you’re going to be minding your own business and it’s going to switch on and remove your hand.” Dodger raises an eyebrow. “Okay, one, your metaphors have gotten weirder, and two, you are not allowed to borrow horror movies from my collection anymore. Your girlfriends may be a vague, amorphous mass to me, but that doesn’t make them kitchen appliances.”
“Heaven forbid you do anything cliché
I have access to things I can throw, so don’t get pedantic,”
The past is set in stone, and he’s not a sculptor; he doesn’t get to go back and make something like that not happen.
But you can, kind of
the goal is continuing to have hair that’s not burning.
I want to thank you in advance for the carnage,”
“Do you think my dad’s going to kill Roger?” Dodger blurts the sentence out as a single breath, like she’s been holding it clasped between her teeth as long as she’s been waiting. “Probably not,” says Erin. “I mean, I guess he could, but it would be hard to get rid of the body, and it would probably mean dinner would be served late. Best not to risk it.”
“Oh,” she says. “No blood.”
“I’m not going to forget that the two of you took Dodger and left me alone. You may not understand the import of what you’ve done, but I assure you, you have made an enemy this day.” “I shall make a note in my day planner,” says Smita. “I’m sure I’ll rue the day.”
“Isn’t it cute, how he thinks he knows how to sound scary?”
That’s a pity. It might have saved her life.
“Yes,” he says again. Letting her be the one to fumble her way through the words seems exactly right. He would be too accurate, and right now, that could kill them both.
time is a concept invented by men who didn’t want everything to keep happening at once. Time is irrelevant.
The rain has come. Berkeley is being washed clean of its sins,
She could show up for class naked and singing Queen songs, and they’d use her as an example of modern Dionysian behavior.
The world keeps ending, every minute of every day, and nothing is going to make that stop. Nothing can ever, ever make that stop.
the two of them running through the heart of it all, a girl with her eyes closed tight, a boy following her blindly with his eyes wide open.
Roger is the first of them to be afraid of what they can do together. Dodger is the first to be afraid of what he can do alone.
spreading her calm propaganda masked as fantasy,
Avery paused. Rags didn’t normally have tangled, uncombed hair. Avery found that he could run after all.
The floor doesn’t creak beneath his feet; the walls don’t breathe as they settle. The main library at UC Berkeley is only five years old, bright and clean and new, without that smell of dust and time that eventually ensnares every good library. Parents look at the school’s facilities and smile, picturing their precious children being taught in beautiful spaces, learning beautiful things, without needing to worry about black mold or falling masonry. Students like he was look at those same spaces and frown, thinking of ivy-shrouded walls, mysterious reading nooks, and the power of time.
bicycles aren’t dependable on cracking concrete, cars can’t swerve fast enough to avoid falling objects, but feet, ah, feet will see you to safety if there’s any possible way.
Their past is littered with the unburied bodies of the people they chose never to become.
She’ll take the discomfort of the paradox over the agony of that linear but imperfect world.)
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
you haven’t followed it up with ‘and we just need to find the magic Denny’s where they sell the coffee of conjuring and everything will be hunky-dory.’ It’s like playing D&D with an unprepared dungeon master. You’re the one who knows the rules to this bullshit game.” Erin blinks. “Good call,” she says. “I think it’s about a half mile that way.” She points, as both Roger and Dodger stare at her. “What is?” Roger asks, after a moment’s bewildered silence. Erin grins. “The Denny’s. Come on.”
It’s a good chair. A pity about the bloodstains,
“Your mother’s blood tasted like candy, little girl.
She taught me everything I know—but as the cliché goes, she didn’t teach me everything she knows.
What Dodger is doing isn’t math in the truest sense of the word, and at the same time, it’s a deeper, truer arithmetic than she’s done in years. It is the instinctive math of children weighing parental disapproval against the rapidly setting sun, and the heartbroken math of sailors measuring the holes in their boat against the distance to the shore.
“There’s just one more thing we have to do first,” says Erin. “What?” demands Dodger. Erin smiles implacably. “I have to pay the check.” Even under the circumstances, Roger can’t keep from laughing.
The last time they were together in this city, they killed more than a thousand people, and destroyed landmarks that should have stood for another hundred years. Now, they’re just two cuckoos on the run, two more supplicants on the way to the Impossible City. The moment should have more weight to it, should matter more. It doesn’t. This is just a way station. This was only ever a way station.
“I’m the living incarnation of the force of Order,” she says. “I didn’t get cosmic knowledge or the ability to change the universe. I got the urge to organize your CDs.
There is mercy in their betrayals.)
They are one and they are neither, and they are so close to one of the focal points of the world that there is no difference between those two ideals.
Dodger steps forward, head cocked, looking at the structure like she can see it as it was meant to be. And she is Time and she is Math and maybe she can; maybe she sees what was, instead of what truly, terribly is.
Between that, some impressively defensive driving, and a glorious willingness to violate traffic laws, it’s a little over an hour before they’re pulling up to what the GPS claims will be the ruins of the Sutro Baths.
“Why should I?” she asked. “Because…” Avery took a deep breath. “Because I asked, and because I’ll cut you into ribbons if you don’t.”
She’s lovely, yes, but her eyes are a dead woman’s, so cold and so flat that he can see the death of stars reflected there, even at this distance.
when one has become two has become something that is not a number, but is instead an inevitability?),
