“As I continued through the streets, through the smoke of the burnings and the rubble of the fires and explosions--for during the chaos of the quarantine parts of the city had become something like war zones--my heart began to perceive that there was a wound in the material world that no amount of science could heal, that in fact science itself was only the helpful lie told to a dying man.”

“The world below is on fire. Through gaps in the smoke, he sees that where Seattle should be, there is only chaos. The wreckage of buildings litter a landscape ablaze.”

“Ahhh, now, you see, we’ve been through this, and my thought is this: there’s no smoke without fire,” Archie would say, looking impressed by the wisdom of his own conclusion. “Know what I mean?” This was one of Archie’s preferred analytic tools when confronted with news stories, historical events, and the tricky day-to-day process of separating fact from fiction. There’s no smoke without fire. There was something so vulnerable in the way he relied on this conviction, that Samad never had the heart to disabuse him of it. Why tell an old man that there can be smoke without fire as surely as there are deep wounds that draw no blood?”

“Immediately after the explosion of the concussion or fragmentation grenades, Soldiers in the kill zone return fire and assault through the ambush position using fire and movement...”

“My life has been like a battlefield, a war that could never be won unless I had her with me, and the day she died my battlefront stepped down and threw away their shields, allowing the gunshots to slip through the second her heart stopped beating. From that moment onwards I was left wounded, and for those seventeen years without her my wounds bled-wounds no stitch could ever repair.”

“They wound their way through a labyrinth of streets, partly following their noses, partly the orientation of the map. Jardines, Mirasol, Cruz, Puentezuelas, Capuchinas...Each word held its magic. They were like brushstrokes painting the landscape of the city, each one helping to build up a picture of the whole.”