Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.

Suicide is not something I owe you or yours.

Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war.

The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn’t belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because...

Mahlia… understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn’t trying to change them. He wasn’t trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia...

It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting...

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your...

Crew up, Nailer!” Lucky Girl shouted. “You think I’m going to pull your ass up here like a damn swank?

Pain held no terror for him. Pain was, if not friend, then family, something he had grown up with in his crèche, learning to respect but never yield to. Pain was simply a message, telling...

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

Family. It was just a word…Could see its letters all strung together. But it was a symbol, too. And people thought they knew what it meant…It was a thing everyone had an opinion about—that it...

Short fiction seems more targeted – hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it’s a lot smokier...

But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.

Tool wondered if the girl was going mad. It happened to people. Sometimes they saw too much and their minds went away. They lost the will to survive. They curled up and surrendered to madness.

Sorry, kid. You don’t get to exist in story; you’re too different.” You don’t want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they...

The problem with keeping money in a bank is that in the blink of a tiger’s eye it will turn on you: what’s yours becomes theirs, what was your sweat and labour and sold off...

No one else could see all the bodies she’d left behind, but they were there, looking at her. Or maybe that was just her, looking at herself, and not liking what she saw. Knowing she...

The problem with surviving was that you ended up with the ghosts of everyone you’d ever left behind riding on your shoulders.

I’m a chess piece. A pawn,’ she said. ‘I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and...

You couldn’t live close to war and not have it grab you eventually.

Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.

Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.

Hell, we’re all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you’re a goddamn legend.

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again. She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.