I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.

I’ve been trying so hard not to think his name, not to even breathe the idea of him

I screamed until my voice dried up in my throat. We all did. All of us in Ward Six, all of us forgotten, left to rot.

I was glad when the Invalids were executed. Some people complained that lethal injection was too humane for convicted terrorists, but I thought it sent a powerful message: We are not the evil ones. We are reasonable and compassionate. We stand for fairness, structure, and organization. It’s the other side, the uncureds, who bring the chaos.

Once Mo had closed the gates, he returned to his little stone hut, and his half-eaten sandwich of butter and canned sardines, and his mug of thick hot chocolate, which every night he poured carefully into a thermos labeled COFFEE.

People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.

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.