The fire, the fire. It rages within, a campfire and then an inferno, and my body is its fuel. I feel it racing through me, eating away at the weight. There is nothing that can kill me now; I am powerful and invincible and eternal.

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I will be my undoing If I become my obsession.

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I see a kind of thirst in her expression, the same one I saw when she told me about her brother in the back room of the tattoo parlor. Before the attack simulation I might have called it a thirst for justice, or even revenge, but now I am able to identify it as a thirst for blood. And even as it frightens me, I understand it. Which should probably frighten me even more.

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It's strange how a word, a phrase, a sentence, can feel like a blow to the head.

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Killing you is not the worst thing they can do to you," I say. "Controlling you is.

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Change, like healing, takes time.

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Candor does not provide us with protection, sustenance, or technological innovation. Therefore you are expendable to us.

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I know that change is difficult, and comes slowly, and that it is the work of many days strung together in a long line until the origin of them is forgotten.

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Just as I have insisted on his worth, he has always insisted on my strength, insisted that my capacity is greater than I believe. And I know, without being told, that's what love does, when it's right-it makes you more than you were, more than you thought you could be. This is right.

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Ingenuity requires creativity.

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