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“Hello, Rax.” Galene. On dinner duty. He sighed. He hated “fairness.” What was wrong with a dictatorship?”
― Nick Thacker, The Atlantis Deception

“They’re learning our ways.” “They hear us coming,” Claudio, the third man, replied. “Then what do you suggest?” Vito turned around and faced the cages on the back of the truck.  “Maybe we can use the ones we have…to catch more.” “You mean as bait?”
― Michael C. Grumley, Catalyst

“The owner as he crosses the board floor, moving between shelves, past stacked crates and burlap sacks bulging with sugar and flour. “Jessup? It’s Brady! You in back?” The twelve burros crane their scrawny necks in his direction when Brady emerges from the merc. He reaches into his greatcoat, pulls out a tin of Star Navy tobacco, and shoves a chaw between lips and gums gone blackish purple in the last year. “What the hell?” he whispers. When he delivered supplies two weeks ago, this little mining town was bustling. Now Abandon looms listless before him in the gloom of late afternoon, streets empty, snow banked high against the unshoveled plank sidewalks, no tracks as far as he can see. The cabins scattered across the lower slopes lie buried to their chimneys, and with not a one of them smoking, the air smells too clean. Brady is a man at home in solitude, often spending days on the trail, alone in wild, quiet places, but this silence is all wrong—a lie. He feels menaced by it, and with each passing moment, more certain that something.”
― Blake Crouch, Abandon

“Lila sensed the cessation of motion more than she actually felt it. Being in the shuttle did something to her equilibrium — something about the sense of being high in the air in what looked like a bubble from the inside combined with a force that felt like an invisible seat belt. Her fear was making everything worse.”
― Sean Platt, Annihilation