Beth Revis

“My heart will never forget what it’s like to fade in and out of time, to never know if one year or a thousand have passed by, to torture yourself with the idea of your soul trapped behind ice for all eternity.I know what torture there is behind ice.”

“Images of broken light dance behind my eyelids. How could this giant lamp compare to the sun?Everything is wrong here. Shattered. Broken.Like the light.Like me.I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn’t have one.I am surrounded by walls.I have just replaced one box for another.”

“Eldest taught me about ancient religions that worshiped the sun. I never understood why- it's just a ball of light and heat. But if the sun of Sol-Earth swirls in colors and lights like that girl's hair, well, I can see why the ancients would worship that.”

“As the dreamscape around me grows clearer, I slip further away from it. The mind is a magical thing, I’m discovering. A dreamscape is made of thought and is wider than the sky, able to grow large enough to fit not just our own world, but every possibility and impossibility beyond it. Once I quit thinking of it as being forced into the laws of physics, it’s easy to manipulate the dreamscape into anything I want. I don’t know how I know all this, no more than I understand how I know things when I dream. I just do.I throw up my hand, and a wall rises between the orange grove and me. Behind the wall, I start creating the world I need in Representative Belles’s mind.”

“I try not to look obvious as I wait for Mom’s answer. I feel as if I am on the edge of a knife, my feet being sliced by the blade, teetering toward one side or the other.“Oh, of course!” Mom exclaims, her voice trilling with laughter. “How could I have forgotten?”And now I know. Really know. This woman is not my mother. I don’t know who she is, but I know absolutely who she is not.”

“What else can you tell me?” Dad stares at me. “What have you learned while you were awake?”I learned that life is so, so fragile. I learned that you can know someone for just days and never forget the impression he left on you. I learned that art can be beautiful and sad at the same time. I learned that if someone loves you, he’ll wait for you to love him back. I learned that how much you want something doesn’t determine whether you get it or not, that “no” might not be enough, that life isn’t fair, that my parents can’t save me, that maybe no one can. “Nothing much,” I mutter.”

“Amy pulls away and looks into my face. Her pale skin is blotchy red, her eyes are veined and shadowed, and a shiny line of snot trickles from her nose to the top of he”

“I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This—this—this is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run.”

“I have no emotions. I just stand there, in the rubble of my life.This… this was my home. If it were a person, this would be a gaping chest wound, the kind no one can recover from.”

“And this is what she wants to do to people. Let them have their own lives, until she wants them. Give them the strength of giants, but not the power to control it.”