If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it's real.

There was a kind of euphoria, he had discovered, in nearly dying and then not.

He danced with the sky instead, and the sky dropped him like a rotten plum.

You can’t atone for taking one life by saving another. What good does that do the dead?”“The dead,” she said. “And we have plenty of dead between us, but the way we act, you’d think they were corpses hanging on to our ankles, rather than souls freed to the elements.

What are you waiting for?" he screamed, launching himself at Liraz. With a neat step and parry she sent him face-first into the ground, and with one well-placed kick turned him over, gasping, onto his back. "Kill me!" he coughed out, lying there. "I know you want to!"But she just shook her head and smiled, and Jael wanted to howl, because her smile had...plans in it, and in those plans, he saw, there would be no easy death.