A rat called Possible New Strain was sitting under a spaghetti strainer held down with a pile of journalism textbooks, saying rude things in rat-speak.
Sooner or later usually means too late.
Once you told yourself a story enough times, it was so easy to keep on believing it.
And it was pretty clear that no prince was showing up, or at least that he was really late.
My name is tally youngblood and my mind is very ugly.
Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.
Suddenly a pair of searchlights lanced out from the frigate. They swept across the dark expanse – bright knives slicing the night into pieces.
One of the most common questions writers are asked is “Where do you get your ideas?” But the sad truth is, we don’t know. Ideas can come at any time and from any direction: in the shower, waiting for an elevator, or while bouncing across Wikipedia pages.
She wasn’t here to gawk. She was an infiltrator, a sneak, an ugly. And she had a mission.
However stupid the choice seemed, Shay had made it with her eyes open, and had respected Tally’s choice to stay.
That’s how things were out here in the wild, she was learning. Dangerous or beautiful. Or both.
She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable. Tally Youngblood was a weed. And, unlike the orchids, she wasn’t even a pretty one.
Even mocking people helped their face stats. In the reputation economy, the only real way to hurt anyone was to ignore them completely. And it was pretty hard to ignore someone who made your blood boil.
You’d think that in a fight, NOT MOVING would be a bad habit!
He makes me feel like that. Like flying.
But you weren’t born expecting that kind of beauty in everyone, all the time. You just got programmed into thinking anything else is ugly.
She carried a knife inside of herself now, one that was always cutting her. She could feel it every time she swallowed, every time her thoughts strayed from the splendor of the wild.
You look beautiful – David.
If you see everything through hovercams and feed stories, you wind up blind to what’s right in front of you.
The Rusty Ruins were the remains of an old city, a hulking reminder of back when there’d been way too many people, and everyone was incredibly stupid. And ugly.
Maybe she still was a pretty-head, making up irrational stories about the empty forest. The longer she stayed alone out here, the more Tally understood why the Rusties and their predecessors had believed in invisible beings, praying to placate spirits as they trashed the natural world around them.