The orchestra strikes up with __tockholm in My Heart_, and everyone joins in. Hands sway in the air, mobile phone cameras are raised. A wonderful feeling of togetherness. It will be another fifteen minutes until, with meticulous premeditation, the whole thing is torn to shreds. Let us sing along for the time being. We have a long way to go before we return here. Only when the journey has softened us up, when we are ready to think the unthinkable, will we be permitted to come back.

Yeah, try wearing a piss cutter for eight years_ then it wouldn__ be so bad.

What is death but descending into a dark, eternal sleep?

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.

Luna had never been good at coping with death. After all she had gone through, she knew she should__e been trained.But she wasn__. She was regrettably human.

If I can keep writing just one good page a day, I will have 15 published novels in my expected lifetime. Tick, tick, tick...