Leviathan Falls

Until death all is life.

Are you sure this thing you’re about to do is the right one?”

“I don’t have a fucking clue,” Holden said, and then did it anyway.

“I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace. Maybe it’s only a little more good than bad in us, but . . .”

The medical guy gave Tiny a little something to take the edge off. She’s sleeping now. He said she’s traumatized?”

“Seems plausible.”

“I don’t know how I got this old without someone telling me they had pills for that,” Amos said, and she could hear the disapproval in his tone. It reminded her of who he’d been before.

“There’s a big toolbox,” she said. “Everyone has to find their own way through.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Fayez said. “We’ve reached an arbitrary level of fuck-it-good-enough. We’re calling that ready.”

“How long?”

The big mechanic smiled. “If we’re good, half an hour. If we’re not, then it depends how bad we are.”

You do what you have to do to fight back, or you get slaughtered. Either way, you lose what being human used to be.”

For almost four decades, she had been an officer of the Laconian Empire, and she’d been good at it. For longer than that, she’d been herself.

Duarte writhed against her, and his pain made her lock down harder. The inside of her thighs was burning like he’d poured acid on her, but the pain was only a message. She didn’t have to care. She kept chopping away at the threads.

The dead were still around him, because he couldn’t bring himself to believe that they weren’t. He could know it. He could understand. But like a kid who’d lost something precious, he’d never been able to shake that sense that maybe, just maybe, if he looked again, it would be there. Maybe the people he loved weren’t gone forever. Maybe the past—his past, his losses, his mistakes—were close enough for him to reach back and fix them if he stretched just right. Maybe, despite everything, it could still be okay.