No wonder the regulators decided on segregation of boys and girls: Otherwise, it would have been a nightmare, this feeling angry and self-conscious and confused and annoyed all the time.

The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see shadows where there shouldn't be any. You don't remember to tell your parents you love them or--in my case--remember to say good-bye to them at all.

That is what Alex is now: a shadow-boy

willing me to understand: that people should be sacrificed to causes, that beauty can be built on the backs of the dead.

But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water and walls that keep out the brutal winds. This, for us, is heaven.

Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all. I told on them. I was jealous.

If you want something, if you take it for your own, you'll always be taking it from someone else.