Emily, there are enemies everywhere. We have to be on our guard, especially for the next couple of weeks._ Theo sighed unhappily. __his is going to be the longest fortnight of my life._ __hat__ saying something,_ I joked, __iven how long you__e lived._ __xactly,_ he said, without smiling.

The feel of her skin as she struggled beneath, the life inside, the death without. The breaching of life and death, of survival uncaged inside him: a dark beast with violence and sex in its soul. In his soul.

Velva wasn__ merely a rose among the thorns, the lily of the valleys, she was Empress amongst the stars and planet.

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

and the wind gathered the leaves as a mother gathers her children and blew them irrevocably, lovingly, into the haunted wildness

That's what I'm trying to do; it's like counting stars, only so much prettier.