Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.

I can't imagine you give apologies, Ten had said before, and she'd been right, but Liraz thought that she would now, She would apologize for Savvath. If her voice was her own. If it wasn't reeling out of her, rising and falling in a sound that might have been laughter and might-if she weren't Liraz and it weren't unthinkable-have been sobbing.In truth, it was both. She was going to lose her arms, the clean way or the less clean, and here's where the laughter came in: It was horrific, and it was sadistic, and it was also, literally, a dream come true.

And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.

Huge difference between being happy at will, and chasing euphoric moments as an escape. One doesn't cost a dime, the other will tax your soul.

Perhaps Fate laid out your life for you like a dress on a bed, and you could either wear it or go naked.

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.