“Did no one tell him that pain lives in this sand, dug in and watered with our blood?”

“Tell me what it's like. The race.""What it's like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It's the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It's speed, if you're lucky. It's life and it's death or it's both, and there's nothing like it.”

“So here's my theory, and this is such crap science, I don't have to tell you. It's science without microscopes, blood tests, or reality.”

“I sense that his drowning but I don't have any idea of how to start to put my hand into the water and save him.”

“As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me.”

“The walls of the arch are covered with blood-red jellies that wink and glisten at me by the light of the moon. My father told me they were completely harmless. I don't believe him. Nothing is completely harmless.”

“What's that?'Beck shoved his back ineffectually against the glass door, suffering under the weight of a huge box. 'Your brian.'I already have a brain.'If you did, you'd have opened the door for me.'I shot him a dark look and let him shove against the door a moment longer before I ducked under his arms to push it open. 'What is it really?'Schoolbooks. We're going to educate you properly, so you don't grow up to be an idiot.;I remembered by intrigued by the idea of school-in-a-box, just-add-water-and-Sam.”