Where the Drowned Girls Go (Wayward Children, #7)

by Seanan McGuire

It can be difficult to find the places where fiction ends and fact begins, but perhaps that’s simply a part of the process of traveling, of visiting places where the customs and cultures and laws of physical reality are different than they are here.

But taking something back doesn’t mean it never happened, only that someone was willing to fight hard enough to change it. Some graves lie empty; some children run home. Some children hide under their covers and cry, not for the beauty of a sky filled with rainbows or a field of singing roses, but from the weight of all they’ve seen and done and lost and paid.

For the first time in her life, she was leaving a place she loved because she had chosen to do so, and there was power in that.

Try to run, and you would bleed; try to get away, and you would be ensnared.

Here, we don’t require you to be sure. Here, we’re sure enough for everyone.”

A jack-o’-lantern might be beautiful, but it was still something that had been cut open and hollowed out because someone wanted it to suit their idea of what a pumpkin ought to be. It wasn’t its own self anymore.

How could you choose good over evil when no one was really sure what evil was? Under enough pressure, the only good that counted was saving yourself.

It took most of Sumi’s attention to keep herself from interrupting, pointing out how it was funny how “real” history seemed to be all about white men doing important things while everyone else barely existed except when they needed to be shown the errors of their ways.

Sometimes she felt like the world where she’d been born was the most nonsensical of them all. Sure, gravity always worked and clouds didn’t talk, but people told lies big enough to block the sun, and everyone just let them, like it was nothing to revise the story of an entire world to make yourself feel better.

The punishment for this was going to be enormous. Sumi rejoiced, because when they got punished, they were going to be punished for doing something, not just for being who they were and not who the adults around them wanted them to be. Doing was always better than just being. Doing was a choice.

I know what I am and I’m happy this way, and saying something true shouldn’t be an insult, ever, because that’s not how words want to work.