Children of Time (Children of Time, #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

While everyone else had been thinking about impending doom, she had just been thinking.

It was the curse of the Old Empire, that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.

Things are the way we make them.

constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.