I love you and we don’t need the other world to keep that.” He glanced at the small window in the door to see if the guard was watching, then leaned over quickly and pressed their foreheads together.“It’s just true,” he said. “It always has been. In this world and the next. They could take everything away and leave us with nothing, and I would still love you.

August’s heart seized. He didn’t … know he could have this.Jack kissed him so carefully that August thought he would fall to pieces. Kissed him with the weight of knowing the price of risk. Then he gazed back at August like his heart was already breaking.

Ten million light-years from now bathed in the radiation of a time without timeare the bones of a girl who loved Ryann Bird.In the dust left over from our supernovaatoms spread farther and wider than hopeare the pieces of the heart of the girl wholoved Alexandria the Great.

Four light-years from the second largest pulsar, past the black dust and the white. In a small circle of golden light, made by a careful teenage star, I found you," Aexandria said seriously. "No matter what I did or said, there you stood. Like a fixed point, and the Earth moved around you.