“I can admit, now, that I must have loved Lena. Not in an Unnatural way, but my feelings for her must have been a kind of sickness. How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?”

“How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?”

“It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.”

“Raven looks at me. “What about you, Lena?”I can feel Alex’s eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn’t have known that even this was a lie—that we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven’t chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn’t in the choosing. Maybe it’s in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex’s arm.“I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.”

“But the guilt goes even deeper than that. It, too, is dust: Layers and layers of it have accumulated. Because if it weren’t for me, Lena and Alex would never have been caught at all.I told on them.I was jealous.God forgive me, for I have sinned.”

“As we're standing there I realize we're almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.”

“But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I wil find a way to resist. I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.”