- “Don’t decide how you feel about something before you try it.” - Ringer
- I was around her age when I began. The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father’s study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life. (chess)
- Nothing that happens is insignificant, Marika, my father told me during one of my chess lessons. Every move matters. Mastery is in understanding how much each time, every time.
- I know that killing both of us is the only option with the least risk to the most people. And I think of rats again and how sometimes, to pass the interminable hours, Teacup and I would plot our campaign against the vermin, stratagems and tactics, waves of attack, each more ridiculous than the last, until she dissolved into hysterical laughter, and I gave her the same speech I gave Zombie on the firing range, the same lesson that now comes home to me, the fear that binds killer to prey and the bullet connecting both as if by a silver cord. Now I am the killer and the prey, a circle of a completely different kind, and my mouth has gone dry as the sterile air, my heart as cold: The temperature of true rage is absolute zero, and mine is deeper than the ocean, wider than the universe.
- Life is full of little ironies, but it’s also pockmarked with some the size of that big rock in Australia.
- After he fell asleep, I slipped out of bed and returned to my post by the window. A strip of parking lot, a decrepit diner (“All You Can Eat Wednesdays!”), and a stretch of gray highway fading into black. The Earth dark and quiet, the way it was before we showed up to fill it with noise and light. Something ends. Something new begins. This was the in-between time. The pause.
- The shadow of their coming fell upon us and we lost sight of something fundamental within the absolute dark of that shadow. But simply because we couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there: My father mouthing to me, Run! when he couldn’t. Evan pulling me from the belly of the beast before giving himself up to it. Ben plunging into the jaws of hell to snatch Sam from them. There were some things—well, there was probably only one thing—unblemished by the shadow. Confounding. Indefatigable. Undefeatable.
- “Poundcake!” he hollered. You could hear the big kid coming. The floor protested his passage. He stuck his head in the room, and Ben said, “Teacup took off. After Ringer. Go grab her little butt and bring it back here so I can whale on it.” Poundcake lumbered off and the floor went Thanks a lot!
- “Huh. So maybe they debated it for six thousand years. Dicked around because nobody could make up his mind, until someone said, ‘Oh, what the hell, let’s just off the bastards.’”
- He wiped the back of his hand against one cheek, then the other cheek. “You know what he told me? Well, more like promised. He promised he would empty me. He would empty me and fill me up with hate. But he broke that promise. He didn’t fill me with hate. He filled me with hope.” I understood. In the safe room, a billion upraised faces populating the infinite, and the eyes that sought mine, and the question in those eyes too horrible to put into words, Will I live? It’s all connected. The Others understood that, understood it better than most of us. No hope without faith, no faith without hope, no love without trust, no trust without love. Remove one and the entire human house of cards collapses.
- That’s right, and why did you wait, Cassiopeia “Defiance” Sullivan? Oh yeah, because some dead guy promised he’d find you. So you closed your eyes and jumped off the cliff into that emptiness, and now you’re shocked there’s no big fat mattress at the bottom? Your fault. Whatever happens now. You’re responsible.
- You never know when the truth will come home. You can’t choose the time. The time chooses you. I’d had days to face the truth that now faced me in that cold, black space, and I’d refused. I wouldn’t go there. So the truth decided to come to me. When he touched me on our last night together, there was no space between us, no spot where he ended and I began, and now there was no space between me and the darkness of the pit. He promised he would find me. Don’t I always find you? And I believed him. After distrusting everything he said from the moment I met him, for the first time, in the last words he spoke, I believed.
- The other injuries were serious but inconsequential
- Covered in scabs and bruises and open sores and layers of dirt and grime, whittled down to her bones by the horrible cruelty of indifference and the brutal indifference of cruelty, she was one of us and she was all of us.She was the Others’ masterwork, their magnum opus, humanity’s past and its future, what they had done and what they promised to do, and I cried. I cried for Megan and I cried for me and I cried for my brother and I cried for all the ones too stupid or unlucky to be dead already.
- Sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and what happens is nobody’s fault. - Ringer
- I kissed him on the cheek. He kissed me on the mouth. “You know,” I whispered, “a year ago, I would have sold my soul for that.” He shook his head. “Not worth it.” And, for one–ten thousandth of a second, all of it fell away, the despair and grief and anger and pain and hunger, and the old Ben Parish rose from the dead. The eyes that impaled. The smile that slayed.
- “This is the Earth as it was sixty-six million years ago. Beautiful, isn’t it? Edenic. Unspoiled. The atmosphere before you poisoned it. The water before you fouled it. The land lush with life before you, rodents that you are, shredded it to pieces to feed your voracious appetites and build your filthy nests. It may have remained pristine for another sixty-six million years, unsullied by your mammalian gluttony, if not for a chance encounter with an alien visitor one-quarter the size of Manhattan.”
- “And therein lies the conundrum, the riddle you’ve been avoiding, because confronting the problem shakes apart the very foundation, doesn’t it? It defies explanation. It renders all that’s happened impossibly discordant, absurd, nonsensical.”
- I can—if I’m willing to step over several hundred corpses of innocent human beings, kids who are no less victims than I am, whose sole crime is the sin of hope. If the wage of sin is death, then virtue is a vice now: A defenseless, starving child lost in a wheat field is given shelter. A wounded soldier cries out for help behind a row of beer coolers. A little girl shot by mistake is delivered to her enemies in order to save her.
- Why don’t you pray?” “I don’t like putting God on the spot.”
- He picked up the queen and examined her face. “You ever checked her out? She is one scary-looking she-bitch.” “I think she looks regal.” “She looks like my third-grade teacher, a lot of man and very little wo.” “What?” “You know: heavy on the male, light on the fe.”
- “I’ll tell you what happened. My grandma’s dog got sick. One of those purse dogs that bites everybody and lives about twenty-five years, biting people. So her petition had to do with God saving that mean little dog so it could bite more people. And half the old ladies in her group agreed and half didn’t, I’m not sure why, I mean a God who doesn’t like dogs wouldn’t be God, but anyway, there was this big debate about wasted prayer, which became an argument about if there could be such a thing as wasted prayer, which turned into a fight about the Holocaust. So in five minutes it went from a nippy old purse dog to the Holocaust.” “So what happened? Did they pray for the dog?” “No, they prayed for the souls of the Holocaust. Then the next day the dog died.” And now he was nodding thoughtfully. “Grandma prayed for him. Prayed every night. Told all us grandkids to pray, too. So I prayed for a dog that terrorized and hated me and gave me this.” He swung his leg onto the bed and pulled up his pants to expose his calf. “See the scar?” I shook my head. “No.” “Well, it’s there.” He pushed down the pants leg but kept his foot on the bed. “So after it died, I said to Grandma, ‘I prayed really hard and Flubby still died. Does God hate me?’” “What did she say?” “Some BS about God wanting Flubby in heaven, which was impossible for my six-year-old brain to process. There are nippy old purse dogs in heaven? Isn’t heaven supposed to be a nice place? It bothered me for a long time. Like, every night, while I said my prayers, I couldn’t help but wonder if I even wanted to go to heaven and spend eternity with Flubby. So I decided he must be in hell. Otherwise, theology falls apart.” He wrapped his long arms around his upraised knee, where he rested his chin and stared into space. He was back in a time when a little boy’s questions about prayer and God and heaven still mattered. “I broke a cup once,” he went on. “Playing around in Mom’s china cabinet, part of her wedding set, this dainty little cup from a tea set. Didn’t totally break it. Dropped it on the floor and it cracked.” “The floor?” “No, not the floor. The cu—” His eyes widened in shock. “Did you just make the same . . . ?” I shook my head. He pointed his finger at me. “Naw, I caught you! A moment of lighthearted levity from Ringer the warrior queen!” “I joke all the time.” “Right. But they’re so subtle that only smart people get them.” “The cup,” I prodded him. “So I’ve cracked Mom’s precious china. I put it back in the cabinet, turning its cracked side toward the back so maybe she won’t notice, even though I know it’s only a matter of time before she does and I’m dead meat. Know where I turn for help?” I didn’t have to think hard. I knew where the story was going. “God.” “God. I prayed for God to keep Mom away from that cup. Like, for the rest of her life. Or at least until I moved away to college. Then I prayed that he could heal the cup. He’s God, right? He can heal people—what’s a tiny freaking made-in-China cup? That was the optimal solution and that’s what he’s all about, optimal solutions.”
- “How’re you doing?” “Good.” “Glitches?” “Minor. You?” “Smooth as a newborn baby’s ass.”
- “Yeah, math. Aren’t all you Asians really good at math?” “Don’t be racist. And I’m three-quarters Asian.” “‘Three-quarters.’ See? Math. It comes down to simple addition. As in it doesn’t add up. Okay, so maybe we get lucky and seize the Wonderland program from them. Even super-superior aliens can screw up, nobody’s perfect. But we don’t just snatch Wonderland. We have their bombs, we have their track-and-kill implants, their super-sophisticated nanobot system—shit, we even have the technology capable of detecting them. Wha duh fuh? We’ve got more of their weapons than they do! But the real kicker came that day they jacked you up, when Vosch said they lied to us about the organism attached to human brains. Unbelievable!”
- “Tell them to suck it,” Razor says. He stuffs a piece of bubble gum into his mouth. Taps his ear. “Popping’s bad.” Jams the gum wrapper into his pocket. Notices I’m watching and smiles. “Never noticed all the crap in the world until there was nobody left to pick it up,” he explains. “The Earth is my charge.”
- Heart on fire. Body of stone. There’s nothing that the hub can do about my snowballing panic. It can respond to emotions; it can’t control them. Endorphins release. Neurons and mastocytes dump serotonin into my bloodstream. Other than these physiological adjustments, it’s as paralyzed as I am. There must be an answer. There must be an answer. There must be an answer. What is the answer? And I see Vosch’s polished, birdlike bright eyes boring into mine. What is the answer? Not rage, not hope, not faith, not love, not detachment, not holding on, not letting go, not fighting, not running, not hiding, not giving up, not giving in, not not not, knot, knot, knot, naught naught naught. Naught. What is the answer? he asked. And I answered, Nothing.
- “I know they’re probably dead. And I know I’ll probably die long before I reach them, even if they’re not. But I made a promise, Razor. I didn’t think it was a promise at the time. I told myself it wasn’t. Told him it wasn’t. But there’re the things we tell ourselves about the truth, and there’re the things the truth tells about us.”
- Lies within lies within lies. Feints and counterfeints. Like a desert mirage, no matter how hard you ran toward it, it stayed forever in the distance. Finding the truth was like chasing the horizon.
- He’s off the cot before I can blink again, and he’s kissing me, and I plunge inside him where nothing is hidden. He’s open to me now, the one who sustained me and the one who betrayed me, the one who brought me back to life and the one who delivered me back to death. Rage is not the answer, no, and not hate. Layer by layer, that which separates us falls away, until I reach the center, the nameless region, the defenseless stronghold, an ageless, bottomless ache, the lonely singularity of his soul, unspoiled by time or experience, beyond thought, infinite. And I am there with him—I am already there. Within the singularity, I am already there. “That can’t be true,” I whisper. Within the center of everything, where nothing is, I found him holding me. “I don’t believe all of your bullshit,” he murmurs. “But you’re right about this: Some things, down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things.”
- Outside, the bitter harvest burns. Inside, he slips the sheets down, and these are the hands that held me, the hands that bathed and fed and lifted me when I could not lift myself. He brought me to death; he brings me to life. That’s why he removed the dead from the upper tier. He banished them, consigned them to the fire, not to desecrate them but to sanctify us. The shadow that wrestles with light. The cold that contends with fire. It’s a war, he told me once, and we are the conquerors of the undiscovered country, an island of life centered in a boundless sea of blood. The piercing cold. The searing heat. His lips sliding over my neck and my fingers feeling his shattered cheek, the wound I gave him, and the wounds on his arm—VQP—that he gave himself, then my hands sliding down his back. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. The smell of bubble gum and the smell of smoke and the smell of his blood, and the way his body slides over mine and the way his soul slices into mine: Razor. The beat of our hearts and the rhythm of our breath and the spinning stars we could not see, marking the time, measuring the shrinking intervals until the end of us, him and me and everything else. The world is a clock and the clock winds down, and their coming had nothing to do with that. The world has always been a clock. Even the stars will wink out one by one and there will be no light or heat, and this is the war, the endless, futile war against the lightless, heatless void rushing toward us. He entwines his fingers behind my back and pulls me tightly against him. No space between us anymore. No spot where he ends and I begin. The emptiness filled. The void defied.
jan 5 2016 ∞
jun 22 2017 +