“Listen,' Thomas said, slowly getting to his feet, hoping Minho wouldn’t be stupid enough to try anything. “There’s something about us. We’re not just random shanks who showed up on your doorstep. We’re valuable. Alive, not dead.” The anger on Jorge’s face lessened ever so slightly. Maybe a spark of curiosity. But what he said was 'What’s a shank?”

“Yeah, right," Minho said. "And Frypan's gonna start having little babies, Winston'll get rid of his monster acne, and Thomas here'll actually smile for once."Thomas turned to Minho and exaggerated a fake smile. "There, you happy?""Dude," he responded. "You are one ugly shank.”

“Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we’re an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we’re still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we’re all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again—each of us playing our parts in the other’s plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.”

“Don’t kill me,” he sobbed as he lay there. “Oh God, please don’t kill me.”“If you had let me finish,” Skulduggery said, slightly annoyed, “you would have heard me say, ‘Come out, we’re notgoing to hurt you’. Idiot.”“He probably wouldn’t have said idiot,” Valkyrie told the sobbing man. “We’re trying our best to be nice.”The man blinked through his tears, and looked up.“You’re... You’re not going to kill me?”“No, we’re not,” Valkyrie said gently, “so long as you wipe your nose right now.”

“Cheer up everyone," he said, a new brightness to his voice. "Since we’re all going to die horribly anyway, what’s there to be worried about?”

“As different as we all are, there’s one thing most young women have in common: We’re all brought up to feel like there’s something wrong with us. We’re too fat. We’re dumb. We’re too smart. We’re not ladylike enough - ‘stop cursing, chewing with your mouth open, speaking your mind’. We’re too slutty. We’re not slutty enough.Fuck that.You’re not too fat. You’re not too loud. You’re not too smart. You’re not unladylike. There is nothing wrong with you.”