3
" Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over, and it was sunset, and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was.
He said, 'spiral jetty.'
She said, ''In sand?'
He smiled and said, 'That's its beauty.'
A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hand't seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth, a sweetness, a sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers.
Instead, she bent and helped, they all did. And deep into the morning, when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed somehow "
― Lauren Groff , Fates and Furies
5
" That narrow stretch of sand knows nothing in the world better than it does the white waves that whip it , caress it , collapse on to it . The white foam knows nothing better than those sands which wait for it , rise to it and suck it in .but what do the waves know of the massed, hot, still sands of the desert just twenty , no , ten feet beyond the scalloped edge ? And what does the beach knows of depths, the cold, the currents just there, where-do you see it? - Where the water turns a deeper blue. "
― Ahdaf Soueif , I Think of You: Stories
7
" Drake's whip hand spun Diana like a top.
She cried out. That sound, her cry, pierced Caine like an arrow.
Diana staggered and almost righted herself, but Drake was too quick, too ready.
His second strike yanked her through the air. She flew and then fell.
“Catch her!” Caine was yelling to himself. Seeing her arc as she fell. Seeing where she would hit. His hands came up, he could use his power, he could catch her, save her. But too slow.
Diana fell. Her head smashed against a jutting point of rock. She made a sound like a dropped pumpkin.
Caine froze.
The fuel rod, forgotten, fell from the air with a shattering crash.
It fell within ten feet of the mine shaft opening. It landed atop a boulder shaped like the prow of a ship.
It bent, cracked, rolled off the boulder, and crashed heavily in the dirt.
Drake ran straight at Caine, his whip snapping. But Jack stumbled in between them, yelling, “The uranium! The uranium!”
The radiation meter in his pocket was counting clicks so fast, it became a scream.
Drake piled into Jack, and the two of them went tumbling.
Caine stood, staring in horror at Diana. Diana did not move. Did not move. No snarky remark. No smart-ass joke.
“No!” Caine cried.
“No!”
Drake was up, disentangling himself with an angry curse from Jack.
“Diana,” Caine sobbed.
Drake didn’t rely on his whip hand now, too far away to use it before Caine could take him down. He raised his gun. The barrel shot flame and slugs, BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM.
Inaccurate, but on full automatic, Drake had time. He swung the gun to his right and the bullets swooped toward where Caine stood like he was made of stone.
Then the muzzle flash disappeared in an explosion of green-white light that turned night into day. The shaft of light missed its target. But it was close enough that the muzzle of Drake’s gun wilted and drooped and the rocks behind Drake cracked from the blast of heat.
Drake dropped the gun. And now it was Drake’s turn to stare in stark amazement. “You!”
Sam wobbled atop the rise. Quinn caught him as he staggered.
Now Caine snapped back to the present, seeing his brother, seeing the killing light.
“No,” Caine said. “No, Sam: He’s mine.”
He raised a hand, and Sam went flying backward along with Quinn.
“The fuel rod!” Jack was yelling, over and over. “It’s going to kill us all. Oh, God, we may already be dead!”
Drake rushed at Caine. His eyes were wide with fear. Knowing he wouldn’t make it. Knowing he was not fast enough.
Caine raised his hand, and the fuel rod seemed to jump off the ground.
A javelin.
A spear. He held it poised. Pointed straight at Drake.
Caine reached with his other hand, extending the telekinetic power to hold Drake immobilized.
Drake held up his human hand, a placating gesture. “Caine…you don’t want to…not over some girl. She was a witch, she was…”
Drake, unable to run, a human target. The fuel rod aimed at him like a Spartan’s spear.
Caine threw the fuel rod. Tons of steel and lead and uranium.
Straight at Drake. "
― Michael Grant , Hunger (Gone, #2)
13
" Well, what you ding this kind of work for--against your own people?" " Three dollars a day. I got damn sick of creeping for my dinner--and not getting it. I got a wife and kids. We got to eat. Three dollars a day and it comes every day." " But for your three dollars a day fifteen or twenty families can't eat at all. Nearly a hundred people have to go and wander on the roads for your three dollars a day. Is that right?" " Can't think of that. Got to think of my own kids." ***" Nearly a hundred people on the road for your three dollars. Where will we go?" " And that reminds me, you better get out soon. I'm going through the dooryard after dinner...I got orders wherever there's a family not moved out--if I have an accident--you know, get too close and cave in the house a little--well, I might get a couple of dollars. And my youngest kid never had no shoes yet." " I built this with my hands...It's mine. I built it. You bump it down--I'll be in the window with a rifle..." " It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look--suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but not long before you're hung there'll be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy." ***Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, foot-beaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the house-corner, crumbled the wall and wrenched the house from its foundation so that it fell sideways,crushed like a bug...The tenant man stared after [the tractor], his rifle in his hand. His wife beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor. "
