It is not true that the dead cannot be folded. Square becomes kite becomes swan; history becomes rumor becomes song. Even the act of remembrance creases the truth.

You always have a choice,” Jedao said. “It’s just that most of them are bad.

In space there are no seasons, and this is as true of the ships that cross the distances between humanity’s far-flung homes. But we measure our seasons anyway: by a smile, a silence, a song.

The Kel virtue had been loyalty. Formation instinct deprived them of the chance to choose to be loyal.

This time they’re making sure they can hold what they take: conquest is always easier than subjugation.

The point of war is to rig the deck, drug the opponent, and threaten to kneecap their family if they don’t fold.

Feet scraped inside-out next to unblemished boots. Black-and-gold Kel uniforms braided into cracked rib cages. Gape-jawed, twisted skulls with eye sockets staring out their sides and strands of tendon knotted through crumbling teeth. A book of profanities written in every futile shade of red the human body had ever devised, its pages upended over the battlefield from horizon to horizon.

He was as susceptible as the next Shuos to thinking up ways to assassinate people with unlikely objects.

One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world’s wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death. The.

We are creatures of fire and water. We wither under a surfeit of light as readily as we wither beneath drowned hopes.