The Last Emperox (The Interdependency, #3)

by John Scalzi

As far as Kiva could tell, whenever selfish humans encountered a wrenching, life-altering crisis, they embarked on a journey of five distinct stages: Denial. Denial. Denial. Fucking Denial. Oh shit everything is terrible grab what you can and run.

But at the end of it, everyone assumed that something or someone would come along to save the civilization that they lived in and could not conceive of actually disappearing. Something or someone would come along to save them. They would be saved, along with everyone else. It was a nice thought. It wasn’t true.

They were thrilled to see her, and Grayland was thrilled to realize she was finally old enough to have teenagers look impossibly young to her.

“It’s funny to me that when people fuck up, they think ‘it was just business’ is in any way a defense,”