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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

“Don’t worry about hurting me,” he replied calmly. “I like being a part of your world, and I understand that it’s more complicated than you’re willing to share with me. I’ll respect that…for now.” He pulled into the parking lot of a drugstore and put the car in park. Evan seemed nervous as he turned to speak to me. He released a quick breath before he spoke. My chest tightened, afraid to hear what he had to say. “I don’t do this.” His hands gestured between us. My eyes narrowed, trying to interpret his meaning. He exhaled and looked out the windshield. “I don’t stay, and I’m used to that. And I’m always prepared to leave—because I have to eventually.”
― Rebecca Donovan, Reason to Breathe

“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