One Word Kill (Impossible Times, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

If you ignore the words, there’s an honesty in the emotion that fleets across faces in conversation.

He died when I was twelve. He also had cancer, but an oncoming train cured him.

‘The equations that govern the universe don’t care about “now”. You can ask them questions about this time or that time, but nowhere in the elegance of their mathematics is there any such thing as “now”. The idea of one specific moment, one universal “now” racing along at sixty minutes an hour, slicing through the seconds, spitting the past out behind it and throwing itself into the future . . . that’s just an artefact of consciousness, something entirely of our own making that the cosmos has no use for.’

They call it chemo ‘therapy’ and sometimes the nurses would say things like, ‘Time to take your medicine, Nick.’ But nobody really thought of it as medicine. It’s not. It’s poison.

Above her head, the chemo bag, once pregnant with venom like the sacs behind a snake’s fangs, hung flaccid, drained of all but a few yellow drops.

It’s always a shock, when you’ve been hit by some calamity, to see the world go about its business with perfect indifference.

It doesn’t matter what the doctors say, there’s no fatal disease that doesn’t feel contagious to the person sitting next to you.

What really matters in real life, though, is how far you’re prepared to go and how quickly.

We were all of us consumed by our own imagination, victims of it, haunted by impossibles, set alight by our own visions, and by other people’s. We weren’t the flamboyant artsy creatives, the darlings who would walk the boards beneath the hot eye of the spotlight, or dance, or paint, or even write novels. We were a tribe who had always felt as if we were locked into a box that we couldn’t see. And when D&D came along, suddenly we saw both the box and the key.

Michael Devis had a broad face, dark flinty eyes, and a remarkably clear complexion for a fifteen-year-old boy. He deserved acne. You want people’s badness to show. The poison inside him should be bursting out.

Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery.

‘Of all the worlds, in all the universes, he walks into mine.’

All of us have a shell, a skin between us and the world that we have to break each time we speak to it. Sometimes I wished mine were thinner.

I wanted to talk to her. Real things, not just lies about how I felt and shared promises about holidays we would never take when I got better. I wanted to talk to her like one person to another. But I couldn’t do it. I didn’t have the words. Maybe one day but not that day. And I realised that just as the disease was starting to take me away from the world, I was for the first time, in a short and self-absorbed kind of life, starting to really see it for what it was. The beauty and the silliness, and how one piece fitted with the next, and how we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it.

Truth may often be the first casualty of war, but dignity is definitely the first casualty of disease.

We might live in a multiverse of infinite wonder, but we are what we are, and can only care about what falls into our own orbit.

creatures like Ian Rust were like the cancer cells among the crush of blood cells in my veins. Rare, but requiring only one to begin to pollute everything around them. Because ugliness multiplies, and hurt spills over into hurt, and sometimes good things are just the fuel for evil’s fire.

It must be hard knowing you’re about to die. But to have to do it to a script. To step into the blow you know is coming. That was too much to ask of anyone. Or myself.

‘I don’t know what love is, Mia. I think that’s something I’ve just started learning about. I know how it starts, though.’ We both smiled at that. ‘It seems that it grows and changes, and changes you, too. I hope it makes us better. I . . . I’m not saying this very well . . . but I think I’m going to grow into a man who could love the woman you’re going to grow into . . .’