“The gas mask keeps me looking like any other tagger - skinny, fast, and vaguely male. Someone would have to be pretty close to tell I'm a girl, and frankly, no one ever gets that close.”

“Another person, more or less, thinking I'm crazy wasn't going to make me lose sleep. But the look I got from Mr. Shaw wasn't "she's a whack-job," it was more like "hmmm.""What else can you do?"Now it was my turn to stare. "Uh, well, I have a freakshow ability to fall through spirals into other times. Is that what you mean?""Must be a little disconcerting, that.""A little. The puking's fun though." Mr. Shaw laughed. I'd made the man laugh. Score one for the Clocker.”

“Fortunately, by the time I'd gotten to the stairs I had finished gasping and stepping on dead people, so I was pretty prepared for the next thing to startle me out of my skin.”

“Then my rescuer turned to look at me and I felt his eyes reach right down into my guts and tangle them up in knots.With that look I knew I'd jumped straight from the kettle into the fire.”

“The three of us blended with the clientele as well as a fifteen year-old ex-thief, a girl from the future masquerading as a young man, and a second-son of a Lord-turned-student could.”

“I loved history, any kind of history, and even better if it was hidden, secret, or underground.”

“Cool. I was hanging out with a lunatic I'd found lurking over a dead person. I had a choice here. I could roll with this and somehow figure out how to get back to my real life, or I could freak out and lose it right here, probably be committed with him, and end up in a loony bin of truly epic Victorian ugliness, never to be seen again.”