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That optimism that someone else will come and mend all ills, that your Ma or the Lawgiver or someone will just turn up, and everything will be well, that’s the essence of being a kid.
“Diagnosis complete: subject in original condition incompatible with environment,” it said, and Sharskin grinned and clapped me on the arm. “Protective measures prescribed,” the voice went on, but Sharskin made a gesture, banishing the thought. “Truly one of us, Handry,” he told me, grimly pleased. “Thank that clumsy old doctor of yours; he has made you the man you were meant to be.” And then the voice, his pirated voice, said something more. “Diagnostic implant signal detected. Prior treatment incomplete. Active trace signal detected. Respond yes no?” Sharskin went very still, and for a
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I am ashamed of who I was that night, more so because I became a man who has always been within this body but held back by the regard of others. When we surround ourselves with people who call evil good, how quickly we accept their definitions and speak them back, round and round until every way we experience the world is tainted by it.
It is a great poison, to know you have a destiny and that everything you do is right by default.
Sharskin and the ghosts were no different, save in who benefitted. “Do you think he really believes it all?”
Sharskin’s mistake was to go to war with the world. Our ancestors realised the world was too big, and living with it was preferable to fighting it. But that does not mean we cannot change it, piece by piece. That does not mean we cannot try to understand it, or even question the ghosts and the voices of our ancestors. Our ancestors did not know everything. I have spent a long time in conversation with the House. Sometimes it speaks my voice back to me, at other times it uses Melory’s or Sharskin’s. I let it make the choice, or else it is faulty and does not know how it makes me the heart of an
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