liv’s Reviews > The Gunrunner and Her Hound > Status Update

The empire is dead, but its cloying sweetness, the burn of its carbonation—that stays with you, eats at the calcium of your bones and the enamel of your teeth, until the illness is a part of you, forever.

Like something she owns, I think, barely able to hold the words back; the adrenaline from the shooting has left me taut, less able to control my emotions.

And are you?"
"Not yet." Her hand slides across the distance between us and closes around my thigh, as if she too means to lay claim

You don't own people," she says, her voice thick.
"Don't I? Take the rest from me."

“And yet my traitor fingers rest for a moment along her throat, my thumb finding the steady, unhurried beat of her heart. By the time my hand drops free, it feels as if the woman has seen me flinch a second time.”

“The momentum of my impact into Hua, how I wrap around her as I carry us both to the floor, Torres’ shocked expression as a rose of scarlet blooms from her brow—these moments I will remember until I die, a daguerreotype that joins my album of all the other near-misses, all the other moments that were almost the last.”

“All that is asked from me is access to my body: my limbs to shove and grab and hold, my chest to envelope, everything that I am and will be reduced to a coefficient of friction, my heart become the viscera that slows a deadly shot.”

“So I am dressed up like a conspicuous ornament and cast in the role of the kept woman, seen but not heard by my lady’s side. The metaphor holds up in other ways, too. Concubines exercise a specific power in a specific context, exchanging access to their bodies for a type of authority.“

“Yves snorts, low in her throat. She complies, pulling the silk together, pushing the button back in place. Her thumb brushes my throat and rests there a few seconds longer than necessary. Then her hand falls away. "See you tomorrow, Ms. Hua."

“We talk shop: I have just delivered a shipment to the border between America and Canada, where they kill each other for freshwater. She has just come from Britain, a land torn by famine and political schism—children starving in flooded streets, squatters in mud-streaked brick ruins, produce rotting in farms; that country has never been able to recover after its loss of colonial riches.”