Hema

“Why do you have to take every good thing we try to give you and break it into pieces?” Nico said. “You let them turn you into this...”
“This is who I am,” Clancy snapped. “I won’t let them change me. I won’t let them touch me. Not again.”
― Alexandra Bracken, In the Afterlight

“Ruby, what does the future look like?” Nico asked. “I can’t picture it. I try all the time, but I can’t imagine it. Jude said it looked like an open road just after a rainstorm.”
I turned back toward the board, eyes tracing those eight letters, trying to take their power away; change them from a place, a name, to just another word. Certain memories trap you; you relive their thousand tiny details. The damp, cool spring air, swinging between snow flurries and light rain. The hum of the electric fence. The way Sam used to let out a small sigh each morning we left the cabin. I remembered the path to the Factory the way you never forgot the story behind a scar. The black mud would splatter over my shoes, momentarily hiding the numbers written there. 3285. Not a name.
You learned to look up, craning your neck back to gaze over the razor wire curled around the top of the fence. Otherwise, it was too easy to forget that there was a world beyond the rusting metal pen they’d thrown all of us animals into.
“I see it in colors,” I said. “A deep blue, fading into golds and reds—like fire on a horizon. Afterlight. It’s a sky that wants you to guess if the sun is about to rise or set.”
Nico shook his head. “I think I like Jude’s better.”
“Me too,” I said softly. “Me too.”
― Alexandra Bracken, In the Afterlight

“Yes, well”—he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose delicately—“the burner phone we had accidentally fell out of the car, and someone accidentally backed over it. Because someone was in a rush after she accidentally alerted some skip tracers we were nearby when she accidentally used her abilities to move a light pole out of the road after she had accidentally backed into it.”
“Someone better shut their mouth before I accidentally slam my fist into their teeth.” She punched his shoulder, and it was almost...playful.
“Shut his mouth, fist into his teeth.”
“Really? A grammar lesson?”
― Alexandra Bracken, In the Afterlight

“What do we do now?" Gansey asked.
From the other room, Calla bellowed, "GO BUY US PIZZA. WITH EXTRA CHEESE, RICHIE RICH."
Blue said, "I think she's starting to like you.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, Blue Lily, Lily Blue