“Toark woke with a jolt from a sleep he'd never meant to have.”

“If she could have anything in the world, he'd asked her, what would it be?She'd answered that one without hesitation: a best friend. She hastily added, a truly, seriously best friend; one that I couldn't wait to talk to first thing in the morning as soon as I woke up, and one that I still wanted to be talking to, right up to the last minute before I went to sleep. He'd smiled faintly. You mean a soul mate, he'd thought but not said.”

“That meant Ms. Starkova was his. He'd found her; he'd tailed her; and he'd saved her from Reinhard Klein. By jungle law, even the urban jungle, that made her his.”

“The next day he woke up feeling like he'd been unshackled from his fat, like he'd been washed clean from his misery, and for a long time he couldn't remember why he felt this way, and then he said her name.”

“What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere...”

“Living in your dreams meant bitter disappointment when you woke up.”