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Once in WestMerica, they spent a day in Angel City, a place that, in mortal days, was the subject of much glittering fascination and personal misery. Now it was just a theme park.
And what was that old mortal-age saying? Curiosity was a cat killer?
Either someone with no conscience at all, or someone with a conscience so deep and sturdy that its center could still hold in the face of light extinguished.
“I have found that building a sandbox around a domineering child, then allowing that child to preside over it, frees the adults to do the real work.”
“Ah, but theater is the hallmark of ritual, and ritual is the touchstone of religion,”
Thunderhead silently monitored Greyson in every way it could. Because monitoring was the closest it could come to embracing.
“Okay. And what are your pronouns, Jeri?” Jeri found it refreshing that she asked so directly. There were still people who were too awkward to ask—as if Jeri was being accidentally ambiguous, and not intentionally so.
The expression on Goddard’s face was not one of fury. It was actually welcoming. Warm—if a cold-blooded thing could ever be said to have a warm expression.
“A successful lie is not fueled by the liar; it is fueled by the willingness of the listener to believe. You can’t expose a lie without first shattering the will to believe it. That is why leading people to truth is so much more effective than merely telling them.”
In fact, being chastised by the Thunderhead would be comforting, because then he’d know if his own moral compass was off the mark.
“You are a terrible person,” the Thunderhead said. “You are a wonderful person.” “Well, which is it?” Greyson demanded. And the response, as faint as faint could be, came back to him—not as an answer, but as another question. “Why can’t you see that the answer is both?”
He did look different, and it wasn’t just the outfit. His jaw seemed a little harder, his gait more confident, and his gaze so direct as to be invasive. He had learned to play this role well—just as she had learned to play hers.
“People are vessels,” Jeri had said to her. “They hold whatever’s poured into them.”
Hello, Greyson, Jeri had said. Nothing strange about that. Except that it echoed something deeper. They were the same words, the same tone of voice the Thunderhead had used the moment it began speaking to him again.
“Few have. After the mortal purges, those who were left kept to themselves.”
