Nullrouted Space

For the hundred thousandth time, she fell in love, and it wasn’t brought on by any one particular thing. It wasn’t the complexity of her wife’s notes, or the knowledge that she’d been up picking berries before the lights came on. It wasn’t her choice of outfit, or the way her salt-and-pepper bedhead perfectly complement the ensemble. It wasn’t her beautiful hips or her beautiful ass or the stripes and folds time had been generous enough to gift her with. It wasn’t her focus, her fervor, or the predictable fact that she hadn’t noticed she had company.

What made Cora fall was the complete tableau, the whole portrait. The whole of her. h what Cora loved—every ingredient that compromised Signy, no one piece more defining than the rest.

page 57, Cora, Cypsela

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It was different from the way she’d blushed and felt her heart beat faster around one of the older boys at the samurai academy. Different from when she’d glimpsed on of the more handsome Shimazu sons that her father said she might marry one day, before they’d lost everything. She didn’t want Lee Turner to kiss her, or marry her, or fall in love with her. She wanted him to sit beside her on this porch and watch the stars with her for as long as she was still alive. She wanted to exist beside him, to be real and whole in someone else’s eyes, to bare her soul to someone and have them stay beside her anyway.

page 271, Sen

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She’d imagine how it would be, wakeful in bed, and sometimes in quiet moments, walking through Rennes or in long, tedious councils. How warm it was, to be so near someone else, how it burned to touch. His knowing eyes and knowing hands, the calluses of rein and swordhilt. How he’d taken the sacrifice upon himself, a gift she had never wanted because she’d never been able to imagine it.

page 228-229

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Cora Zeng does not get angry. Not because Auntie Lois says anger is a sin, or because Delilah could never be bothered with such an emotion, or because Cora is sage enough to understand that it is a pointless, destructive feeling. Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it’s a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her–she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

page 90

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Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.

Prologue

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