He smiles in my memory. A curled lip. Straight teeth. Light in his eyes. Laughing, teasing, more alive in memory than I m in reality. It was him or me. I chose me. But I feel dead too.

But when you kill someone you love, the hard part is never over. It just gets easier to distract yourself from what you've done.

No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can't even fathom it. I imagine only chaos and isolation.

You need to be passionate about the creative work that you're doing, but you need to be kind of emotionally separated from how people react to it or how it does. Those things should be secondary, and primary should be your love of the creative act.

Is there any other way to Erudite headquarters?" I say. "Not that I now of," says Cara. "Unless you want to jump from one roof to another." She laughs a little as she says it, like it's a joke. I raise my eyebrows at her. "Wait," she says. "You aren't considering---?

"You die, I die too.” Tobias looks over his shoulder at me. “I asked you not to do this. You made your decision. These are the repercussions."

Eric called Al's suicide brave, and he was wrong. My mother's death was brave. I remember how calm she was, how determined. It isn't just brave that she died for me; it is brave that she did it without announcing it, without hesitation, and without appearing to consider another option.