I didn't know," I start truthfully, "that it was the hard way when I started on it.

This new world was a vicious, sleek world made of street lights and tight jeans, sharp smiles and fast cars. This was a city, edited. A city, pared down to its bare minimums, beautiful and abusive.

It matters, like this: I belong to Malvern, you don't.

It's like scrying into that weird space. There's so much coming out of him, it shouldn't be possible. Do you remember that woman who came in who was pregnant with quadruplets? It was like that, but worse." "He's pregnant?" Blue asked.

If she and Sam ever had kids, they'd be gluten-intolerant out of self-defence.

He was full of the restless, dissatisfied energy that always seemed to move into his heart after he visited home these days. It had something to do with the knowledge that his parents’ house wasn’t truly home anymore — if it had ever been — and something to do with the realization that they hadn’t changed; he had.

He danced on the knife’s edge between awareness and sleep. When he dreamt like this, he was a king. The world was his to bend. His to burn.