“He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.”

“Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made—the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.”He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off.“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.”

“This was the mark of deep infatuation, he thought: the desire to watch a woman talk just to see her lips move, to be around her.”

“He had wandered with innocence and naivete into this web, and now every move would wrap him tighter. Each lie would stick to the others, until one day he would find himself in a tight little cocoon, trapped and suffocating from the thousands of little fibs that living and working in that cursed swamp of a city seemed to require every man to ooze.”

“We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,” Erskine added. “We can pick and choose the naturally mutated ones until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. He rattled them off in the cafeteria that day.” Erskine ticked his fingers as he counted. “Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. The bastard always was. It was the manmade part that would have caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.”

“What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there.”

“We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it's up to us to survive it. You need to understand that.” “We can't control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”