Eyes of the Void (The Final Architecture, #2)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

He was the canary in the mine, and you always brought the canary. Nobody cared that the canary didn’t much enjoy its job and would maybe like to be doing something else.

Yes, the universe was built on a certain common logic that could be expressed by numbers, but those numbers themselves were an arbitrary construct that was culturally specific.

It was hard, caring about Idris. He fought battles she couldn’t join him in. The sort of deaths that came for him, she couldn’t stand in the way of.

Saint Idris, patron of incomprehensible truths.

The Greater Good morphed into self-interest so easily; human history was full of it.

It was a terrible thing to look into the heart of your culture and know that you were intended for monstrosity and only an active devotion to the good of others would keep you from it, even when those others hated you.