“She was a cyborg, and she would never go to a ball.”

“She wanted that lifetime. She would never leave him,and even better, he would never let her go.”

“Did you know that she was cyborg?” asked a woman in an unhidden tone of disgust.Kai stared at her, appearing confused, then let his gaze dance over the crowd. He shuffled his feetcloser to the podium, a wrinkle forming on the bridge of his nose.Cinder bit the inside of her cheek and braced herself for adamant disgust. Who would ever invite acyborg to the ball?But instead, Kai said simply, “I don’t see that her being cyborg is relevant. Next question?”Cinder’s metal fingers jolted.”

“She liked me because she said that we both hated everything and knew that friendship was an act of desperation. She said that for a man I was alright. She said that people were half-way and if it was up to her a lot of people would get killed and a lot of men would be walking around without their balls. She said that they should go on sale for women to hang off their rearview mirrors.”

“Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.”

“She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.”