“It all comes together inside her, and she can’t begin to explain. “It’s just a pattern,” she says, feeling bad because it’s a lie. She’s lying to Miss Justineau, who she loves more than anyone in the world. And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.”

“In most stories she knows, children have a mother and a father, like Iphigenia had Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, and Helen had Leda and Zeus. Sometimes they have teachers too, but not always, and they never seem to have sergeants.”

“Nothing goes on forever. If it did, there wouldn't be anything else, would there?”

“Pritchard tutted. "Justice? Justice is even more problematic than truth. It's an emergent property of a very complicated system.”

“No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.”

“She's in the club. The hopelessly-outnumbered-and-surrounded-by-monsters club.”

“Some things become true simply by being spoken. When she said to the little girl “I’m here for you”, the architecture of her mind, her definition of herself, shifted and reconfigured around that statement. She became committed.”

“Because the bag is full of colours - starbursts and wheels and whorls of dazzling brightness that are as fine and complex in their structures as the branch is, only much more symmetrical. Flowers.”

“It all comes together inside her, and she can’t begin to explain. “It’s just a pattern,” she says, feeling bad because it’s a lie. She’s lying to Miss Justineau, who she loves more than anyone in the world. And of course the other part of the feeling, that’s even harder to say, is that they’re each other’s home now. They have to be.”

“She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.”

“In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel”