The Boy on the Bridge (The Girl With All the Gifts, #2)

by M.R. Carey

A HUMAN BEING … … IS A VERY HARD THING TO BE

Emptied of the past that defined them, they have surrendered without protest, no longer even haunted by human meanings.

How would that feel? A soul peeping out through stained grey curtains while the body it used to wear celebrates its freedom with acts of random carnage?

But by any name, Rosie is the bastard child of an articulated lorry and a Chieftain tank.

Khan can’t remember the punchline now, something about the chain of command not being an actual chain. But yeah, it is. At least if you let the powers-that-be add a padlock to it.

He had already learned to read, but now he learned the pleasure of stories which is like no other pleasure—the experience of slipping sideways into another world and living there for as long as you want to.

To go mad, to lose your mind, which is the only thing that’s really yours because it’s really you … That would be an inexpressibly terrible thing.

They are in hell, but the devil is on their side.

The world is information. An endless torrent. Whatever escapes you becomes something you will never completely understand.

Khan could ask him, of course, but hitting Stephen with a direct question feels like rolling him for his spare change. He has no defence against questions.

Do we always fret about our partners’ exes? he wonders. And do we extend that to everyone they knew before they met us? Is it their whole past we’re jealous of, as though we want them to be born again when we walk into their lives? It’s a depressing thought. He has believed himself to be bigger than that, and a whole lot more rational.

Perfect truth is black and white and it doesn’t know our names.

It seems appropriate that emotions should have recoil in the same way guns do, because after all they’re just as dangerous.

“So someone got through the motion sensors and the traps and had a go at us?” “Yeah, but with penknives,” Phillips says, with a nervous laugh. “Penknives and a cook-up. Who tries to stab a tank?” McQueen is not amused. He scans the empty horizon, scowling like a demon. “Who tries to stab a tank?”

Everyone is special, right?

“I was just thinking,” Phillips admits. “I wonder what we look like from space.” McQueen looks around at the rust-brown scrub and general desolation. “Like two ants on a turd,” he grunts.

You have a life and then it ends and you’re dead. Living it is the point, not proving to other people that you were there.

“Discipline is a habit of mind,” Carlisle says, with deadly calm. “Acquire it. Right now.”

Quae nocent saepe docent. Pain is the great teacher.

Pain has no agenda at all. It teaches us nothing, except what hurts. And if you can’t avoid the things that hurt then what use is the lesson?

Her body is a house too, for something subtle and ineffable that answers to its name. She carries her last home with her, walks it forward across weeds and concrete into a light that is alive with drifting dust motes.

Everything, she thinks. Everything is alive. I wish I’d noticed that before.

There is a droop to her mouth that reminds Khan of a line from the play Macbeth. I have supped full with horrors. But who hasn’t, these days?

Come on, kids. We’re right here, so let’s party!

He is not crying. He makes no sound. The grief is wedged so deep within him that he can’t turn it into breath.

Stephen lets go of his humanity with much more relief than fear. It was an awkward burden to carry at the best of times.

She thinks: all journeys are the same journey, whether you know it or not, whether you’re moving or not. And the things that look like endings are all just stations on the way.