“If my heart had feet, it would have been up the staircase before the rest of me.”

“It was five minutes of screaming, slamming myself against the door, and stamping my feet-and a minute of contemplating the cold, horrible idea that I might have to leave the room to find anyone, and maybe this had been their plan all along, and Oh God, Oh God-before I heard Dr. Elpinoy's nervous voice.”

“I was jealous of [Nora] at first, because she had prettier dresses and the naturally curly hair that had been my ultimate worldly desire at that age. In fact, when our mothers initially introduced us, i had chosen to greet her by yanking on a fistful of her hair to see if it was real. Her response was to deck me in the nose.It had been love at first fight.”

“Marked.” My face was on fire, my limbs shaking. “All of you. I will take all of you out with my own bare hands!”There was laughter building in Bram’s voice as he responded. “As cute as I’m sure that would be, your attempt…if we thought the people who might try to trace that chip could make you absolutely, one hundred percent safe, I would carry you to them and hand you over myself.”I gingerly rested my fingertips against my forehead, breathing deeply, trying to calm myself down.“There are some very bad men out to get you, Miss Dearly.”“You have got to be kidding me.”“By the way, you have quite the vocabulary, for a princess.” He still sounded amused.This statement was random enough to get my attention. “Princess?” I asked, confused.“You know, a princess. A New Victorian girl.”My lips parted to fire off another question before it clicked. “You’re a Punk.”“Born and bred.”“Fantastic.”

“Now, feel free to call me what I am-call me a corpse, call me dead, call me a killer if you want. I've killed people in battle, I'll admit. But don't call me what I'm not. I am not a freak, and I am not a cannibal, and-"I would have adeed, I'm not a monster, if it hadn't at that moment hit me that I was going all self-righteous on a girl whose world I had just turned upside down.Smooth, Bram. When will you learn to shut up?”

“That would have been the end of it, book Z in the series, nothing left to do but mourn, or curse her into the afterlife.”

“Later that evening, back at the airship, I cut a hole in a ribbon Beryl had given me and attached the cuff link, before tying it around my neck.Symbols are powerful.When he saw this, my father finally decided to ask after the extent of my loss. "I feel," he said, glancing across the rain-speckled deck of the ship, "like I have lost a on." His hand was trembling, a it always had whenever he admitted to great emotion. "I take it that you'd grown fond of him as well? He was such a noble young man.""Something like that," I confessed brokenly/”