Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

When her heart beat in her chest it was with a huge, steady grief. Every pulse seemed to be the space between insensibility and knives.

He gave the impression of being the guy fun sought out for death.

You inarguably caused it. But cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible.

She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes.