My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.

We’ll go.” Her voice is surprisingly deep and forceful. Set in her sunken, shipwreck face, her eyes burn like two smoldering coals. “We’ll fight.

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.

Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.

And even if she isn’t—even if by some miracle, she survived the escape and has been squeezing out a living in the Wilds—she would never join forces with the resisters. She would never be violent or vengeful. Not Lena, who used to practically faint when she pricked a finger, who couldn’t even lie to a teacher about being late. She wouldn’t have the stomach for it.

Stupid how the mind will try to distract itself.

I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.