That’s a funny thing: you think, when awful things happen, everything else just stops, like you would forget to pee and eat and get thirsty, but it’s not really true. It’s like you and your body are two separate things, like your body is betraying you, chugging on, idiotic and animal, craving water and sandwiches and bathroom breaks while your world falls apart.

Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.

The question was: Will you meet me tomorrow? And the word was: Yes.

This is the language of the world before—a world of chaos and confusion and happiness and despair—before the blitz turned streets to grids, cities to prisons, and hearts to dust.

It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.

This was what true fear was--that you could never know other people, not completely. That you were always just guessing blind.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.