Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

My mother used to say not sleeping was the sign of a guilty mind. It could have been. There was a lot in my mind to feel guilty about. When you__e drunk and trying to sleep, your thoughts are visited by the ghosts of those deeds whose heat still glows hottest in your personal darkness. Our actions burn much longer than the moments in which they occur. And drunks like me, we hide from the glow of the embers by fueling other fires and hiding within the flames.

The city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were dammed off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.Until it was no more. Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone. The birth of a city... It had become the death of a world.

There's Nothing To Hide When Your Soul Is Not Guilty....

This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she's grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn't evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She's broken. Only broken.

There is a devil inside each one of us. Some just know to hide it too well.