NaNo Excerpts
Finding out that one’s employer could shoot lightning from her hands would have been enough to deter most medics from asking undue personal questions without an immediate very good reason, but Ekaterina Vasilevskya had a kind of insane professional persistence that Valeriya had to admire.
“Forces” only matter in physics. In life, change is made by people. By blood and sweat and will and talent.
Pain and pleasure are strong though fleeting things, but spite and moral victory can keep you warm in a Siberian blizzard.
I wonder if that’s what children who weren’t raised by homicidal government conspiracies felt like all the time.
The battlefield is no place for prestidigitation!
They told me I was born in a madhouse. That my mother was one of the inmates, and died in a pool of her own blood after giving birth to me. That I would have been left it a basket on the steps of a church if it hadn’t been for the agent of the Aristoi who’d been passing through and decided to take me in. That my mother’s form of madness was hereditary at least thirty-four percent of the time. That I should be grateful to them.
They lied about a lot.
Valeriya believed that weather should be bold and assertive, if it was going to go to the trouble at all - thunderstorms were fine in their place, assuming that nothing she cared about was getting struck by lightning, but she had no use for generalized atmospheric clamminess.
Ekaterina had aged well, but not in the manner of someone whom time had bypassed. It was more like time had decided to treat her with a light and courteous hand for its own safety.