“The sun, through the filter of the trees, glints green off the cells of her suit, outlines her soft curves. I’m overcome with visions of my father poring over his books, and the wet, verdant forest floor, and newts pausing over toxic yellow candy, and leaves flying up from the impact of Bryan’s body hitting the ground. Another, confused part of me hears my father’s voice calling the refs scum, trash, slime. With flashes of fury at Marisa, mixed with a sad, all-consuming longing that feels dangerously like love, I pluck her hands from my face and push her away. -from Fireseed One”

“Marisa starts to snoop. I might as well too. It's not often that I get to visit a water pellet company in a freaky refugee nation. -from Fireseed One”

“The kid moved, and Judith dropped her lunch tray on the table and took her seat. "Would you like to swap lunches?" she asked me. "Yours looks so much better than mine."I was holding a mashed-up tunafish sand-wich. "This?" I asked, waving it. Half the tunafish fell out of the soggy bread."Yum!" Judith exclaimed. "Want my pizza, Sam? Here. Take it." She slid her tray in front of me. "You bring great lunches. I wish my mum packed lunches like yours."I could see Cory staring at me , his eyes wide with disbelief.I really couldn't believe it, either. All Judith wanted from the world was to be exactly like me!”

“I drag the body out into the snowdrifts, as far away from our shack as I can muster. I put her in a thicket of trees, where the green seems to still have a voice in the branches, and try not to think about the beasts that’ll soon be gathering. There’s no way of burying her; the ground is a solid rock of ice beneath us. I kneel beside her and want desperately to weep. My throat tightens and my head aches. Everything hurts inside. But I have no way of releasing it. I’m locked up and hard as stone.“I’m sorry, Mamma,” I whisper to the shell in front of me. I take her hand. It could belong to a glass doll. There’s no life there anymore. So I gather rocks, one by one, and set them over her, trying my best to protect her from the birds, the beasts, keep her safe as much as I can now. I pile the dark stones gently on her stomach, her arms, and over her face, until she becomes one with the mountain. I stand and study my work, feeling like the rocks are on me instead, then I leave the body for the forest and ice.”

“My father told his acquaintances about that for years, even though both Hannah and I had given up on wormholes and the Child Genius series very soon afterward. That must have made my father sad, as it had made him sad when we stopped being excited about family vacations, when we stopped being open about our interests, and left home and pursued lives of our own. It was just regular growing up, of course, the kind everyone does, but it still made him sad, I know, like the memory I have of the time he dropped me off at the train station when I was going back to Chicago. I could see him through the window of the train, but he couldn't see me through the tinted glass. From up in the train, he looked so small. If he'd seen me, he would have smiled and waved, but he didn't know I could see him, and the sadness on his face was exposed to me then. He looked lost. He stood there on the platform a long time, even after my train started pulling away, still trying to catch a glimpse of me waving back.”

“Was her God up there in the sky as she believed? Did he truly hear man's whispers,his thoughts? Hunter could see his own Gods,Mother Earth,Mother Moon, Father Sun, the wind coming from four directions. It was easy to believe in what he could see. Why did Loretta's God hide himself?”

“Since our nights together on that trip, I had longed every night to feel her next to me, to curl up against her, my stomach against her behind and my chest against her back, to rest my hand on her breasts, to reach out for her when I woke up in the night, find her, push my leg over her legs, and press my face against her shoulder.”