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

Po flickered. "Thank you?" it repeated. "What is that?" Liesl thought. "It means, You were wonderful," she said. "It means, I couldn't have done it without you.

Quiet through the grave go I; or else beneath the graves I lie

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

It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me. He never loved me. It was all a lie. "The old Lena is dead." I say, and then push past him. Each step is more difficult than the last; the heaviness fills me and turns my limbs to stone. You must hurt or be hurt.

If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.

Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450