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She’s prepared. The doors are locked, the windows barred. But even such barriers are no guarantee: every hollow space invites invasion.
When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it’s because they’re afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear.
Beware of words. Be careful what you write.
You can forget who you are if you’re alone too much.
“It’s who you know,” he used to say. “And what you know about them.”
We shouldn’t have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.
Mordis made me feel so secure. I knew if I was in big trouble I could go to him. There were only a few people in my life like that. Amanda, most of the time. Zeb, sometimes. And Toby. You wouldn’t think it would be Toby — she was so tough and hard — but if you’re drowning, a soft squashy thing is no good to hold on to. You need something more solid.
A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended.
She’d learned a lot of things from Zeb in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation classes: in Zeb’s view, the first bloodshed to be limited should be your own.
Aim for the centre of the body, he’d said. Don’t waste your time with heads.
What he’d said was that everyone needed to know how to shoot. His generation believed that if there was trouble all you’d have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.
People can smell desperation on you, he said to Toby. They take advantage.
They’d gone to the local church because the neighbours did and it would have been bad for business not to, but she’d heard her father say — privately, and after a couple of drinks — that there were too many crooks in the pulpit and too many dupes in the pews.
The CorpSeCorps always substituted rumour for action, if action would cost them anything. They believed in the bottom line.
She didn’t have any money they could seize, but there were stories about female debtors being farmed out for sex. If she had to make her living on her back, she at least wanted to keep the proceeds.
She shared the bathroom with six illegal Thai immigrants, who kept very quiet. It was said that the CorpSeCorps had decided that expelling illegals was too expensive, so they’d resorted to the method used by farmers who found a diseased cow in the herd: shoot, shovel, and shut up.
hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience.
Ours is a fall into greed: why do we think that everything on Earth belongs to us, while in reality we belong to Everything?
Amanda knows already. She doesn’t judge. She says you trade what you have to. You don’t always have choices.
Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you’d trust a rock more than a cake.
My clothes were always dank, because of the humidity and because the Gardeners didn’t believe in dryers. “God made the sun for a reason,” Nuala used to say, and according to her that reason was for drying our clothes.
Then I’d go off to school. I was usually still hungry, but I could count on a school lunch. It wouldn’t be great, but it would be food. As Adam One used to say, Hunger is the best sauce.
You can fall in love with anybody — a fool, a criminal, a nothing. There are no good rules.
Once I found a beautiful camera phone, lying on the sidewalk. It was muddy and the signal was dead, but I took it home anyway, and the Eves caught me with it. “Don’t you know any better?” they said. “Such a thing can hurt you! It can burn your brain! Don’t even look at it: if you can see it, it can see you.”
The Gardeners were like that: they’d tell you to do something and then prohibit the easiest way to do it.
Our Young Bioneer work was supposed to teach us some useful lessons. For instance: Nothing should be carelessly thrown away, not even wine from sinful places. There was no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn’t been put to a proper use. And, most importantly, everyone, including children, had to contribute to the life of the community.
If you’re going to sell your soul, at least demand a higher price! Bernice and I paid no attention to that. Our souls didn’t interest us.
In her place I would have just laid down in a ditch and cried myself to death. But Amanda says if there’s something you really want, you can figure out a way to get it. She says being discouraged is a waste of time.
Then God says a noteworthy thing. He says, “And the fear of you” — that is, Man — “and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air … into your hand are they delivered.” Genesis 9:2. This is not God telling Man that he has a right to destroy all the Animals, as some claim. Instead it is a warning to God’s beloved Creatures: Beware of Man, and of his evil heart.
Honey doesn’t decay, said Pilar, as long as you keep water out of it: that’s why the ancients called it the food of immortality.
A bee in the house means a visit from a stranger, and if you kill the bee, the visit will not be a good one. If the beekeeper dies, the bees must be told, or they will swarm and fly away. Honey helps an open wound. A swarm of bees in May, worth a cool day. A swarm of bees in June, worth a new moon. A swarm of bees in July, not worth a squashed fly. All the bees of a hive are one bee: that’s why they’ll die for the hive.
In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.
“No boat was ever built that didn’t spring a leak eventually.
during the First World War the doctors had noticed that soldiers’ wounds healed much faster if maggots were present. Not only did the helpful creatures eat the decaying flesh, they killed necrotic bacteria, and were thus a great help in preventing gangrene.
Things changed in my life when Amanda came to live with me, and they changed again in the Saint Euell’s Week when I was almost thirteen. Amanda was older: she’d already grown real tits. It’s strange how you measure time that way.
“Now. Predator-Prey Relations. Hunting and stalking. What are the rules?” “Seeing without being seen,” we chanted. “Hearing without being heard. Smelling without being smelled. Eating without being eaten!” “You forgot one,” said Zeb. “Injuring without being injured,” said one of the oldest boys. “Correct!
Amanda said if you want people to leave you alone you should act crazy.
There’s nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it,
Why do we want other people to like us, even if we don’t really care about them all that much? I don’t know why, but it’s true.
Adam One sighed. “We should not expect too much from faith,” he said. “Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”
For every Yes, she thought, there is also a No.
One bee is all the bees, Pilar used to say, so what’s good for the hive is good for the bee.
As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.
The sands of time are quicksands, said Adam One. So much can sink into them without a trace. And what a blessing when those things that sink away are needless worries.
Shiny new toes make you feel all fresh and sparkling: if someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.
I thought about what Zeb used to say about mice — if you take them out of the mouse nest for a while and then put them back, the other mice will tear them apart.
How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
She said love was useless, because it led you into dumb exchanges in which you gave too much away, and then you got bitter and mean.
The Gardeners were right about that part: reading someone else’s secret words does give you power over them.
Adam One said that when you loved a person, that love might not always get returned the way you wanted, but it was a good thing anyway because love went out all around you like an energy wave, and a creature you didn’t even know would be helped by it.
