“Then I realize from the hollow sound of her gun's click that her gun isn't loaded. Apparently she just wants to slap me around with it.The Girl doesn't move her gun away. "How old are you?""Fifteen.""That's better." The Girl lowers her gun a little. "Time for a few confessions.Were you responsible for the break-in at the Arcadia bank?"The ten-second place. "Yes.""Then you must be responsible for stealing sixteen thousand five hundred Notes from there as well.""You got that right.""Were you responsible for vandalizing the Department of Intra-Defense two years ago, and destroying the engines of two warfront airships?""Yes.""Did you set fire to a series of ten F-472 fighter jets parked at the Burbank air force base right before they were to head out to the warfront?""I'm kinda proud of that one.""Did assault a cadet standing guard at the edge of the Alta sector's quarantine zone?""I tied him up and delivered food to some quarantined families.Bite me.”

“They do the twenty-one-gun salute for the good guys, right? So I brought this.” Beckett pointed the gun in the sky. “For Mouse.”One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen shots exploded from Beckett’s gun. “Who am I fucking kidding? What the hell does a gun shot by me mean? Nothing special, that’s for damn sure. Fuck it.”“For Mouse, who watched over my sister and saved Blake and me from more than we could’ve handled in the woods that night.” Livia nodded at Beckett, and he squeezed the trigger. When the sound had cleared, she counted out loud. “Seventeen.”Kyle stepped forward and replaced Livia at Beckett’s arm. “For Mouse. I didn’t know you well, but I wish I had.” The air snapped with the shot. “Eighteen.”Cole rubbed Kyle’s shoulder as he approached. He took the gun from Beckett’s hand. “For Mouse, who protected Beckett from himself for years.” The gun popped again. “Nineteen.”Blake thought for a moment with the gun pointed at the ground, then aimed it at the sky. “For Mouse, who saved Livia’s life when I couldn’t. Thank you is not enough.” The gun took his gratitude to the heavens. “Twenty.”Eve took the gun from Blake, the hand that had been shaking steadied. “Mouse, I wish you were still here. This place was better when you were part of it.” The last shot was the most jarring, juxtaposed with the perfect silence of its wake.As if the bullet was a key in a lock, the gray skies opened and a quiet, lovely snow shower filtered down. The flakes decorated the hair of the six mourners like glistening knit caps.Eve turned her face to be bathed in the fresh flakes. “Twenty-one,” she said softly, replacing her earpiece.”

“Yes, well, how was I to know you would be so dramatic? Really, Francine, I don’t know where you get it from.” Then she primly grabbed the fowling gun before departing from the room.”

“From the people who brought you "zero tolerance," I present the Gun-Free Zone! Yippee! Problem solved! Bam! Bam! Everybody down! Hey, how did that deranged loner get a gun into this Gun-Free Zone?”

“Taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just f**king ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.”

“It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other.""Don't be so bloody patronizing," I objected.... "That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society.""Not the ideology. The Reality." He lowered his handkerchief. "This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic.""Just like the Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords.""And like the Narcotics Acts," he added. "A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second.”