Ark (Forward Collection, #1)

by Veronica Roth

Borders had stopped mattering after the asteroid Finis was discovered twenty years ago. Everyone was just an Earthling now.

Asteroids always make a couple swoops in their orbits, like a criminal scoping out a jewelry store before he steals its diamonds.

So maybe he had been apologizing for giving her life in the first place, when he knew it would be full of dread. She wished she could have told him that life was already full of dread, no matter who you were. That there was nothing you could have that you couldn’t one day lose.

That autumn always gave way to winter, but it was her favorite time of year—those fleeting bursts of beauty before the branches went bare.

“Well, you can’t love everything equally,” she said. “You just can’t—and if you did, then it’s the same as loving nothing at all. So you have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”

“You have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”

“An orchid is not self-reliant,” he said. “It doesn’t carry endosperm in its seeds, so it requires a symbiotic relationship with a fungus in order to survive. But it finds those relationships everywhere. On almost every continent, in almost every climate. On trees, on rocks, even underground. A temperamental plant, but somehow, in contradiction to that, a resilient one.”

Not like her, she thought. She wanted to see it all come apart.

and all the things of this world that made it beautiful—the fish with their multicolored scales, the flies with their iridescent wings, the churring squirrels and the deep sighs of whales, the new leaves, still curled and pale, the earth rich with red clay—they would all be gone. But not yet. And Samantha had always loved autumn.