28 Quotes by Jason Heller

She blew a light and watched a fire start. They would never leave her, now. I have no mouth, the city thought as she went to sleep, but I could kiss you.

Her slender hand on the small of his back, night after night—this had saved his life.

The electro-cauterizer sliced through the wires behind my cybernetic eye, and as the world went black, so did a large portion of my memory.

I blinked, and the world exploded with data. Images, scanned documents and photographs, a whirlwind of numbers, under-the-table deals, and whispered words.

I go outside, bundled against the wind from the east. I wander the streets of my past, waiting for one more dawn.

And this is the end of Elaine Stainless, it seems. I thought I was helping those I’d harmed before, somehow—that I was making amends. I still think that now, if I’m honest. It’s not like there’s anything else I can do. Your backstory always gets you in the end.

see, when I’m not paying attention to my barriers, I can glimpse other people’s thoughts. I catch them like lingering aftertastes or smells they leave in their wake: bitter envy, coppery anger, sour regret, the foul miasma of malice and cruelty.

It wasn’t until the first of us began killing ourselves in unusual ways—tearing off our own faces, gnawing off our own limbs—that the government took notice. But they waited until we started killing the oligarchs who created us before they acted. Typical.

That would prove a recurring trait in him—the need to cover up his inadequacies with small lies and slight exaggerations. To pretend knowledge he didn’t have. I forgave him this flaw for I knew what it hid; I could feel his need like a pleasantly raw wound in my mouth, and I could not help but savour it.