'Was'.

He'd rather have the girl.

That's a word he learned very recently.

Wrong type of glass for a callomanic, should be in a tulip.

... Except for a lingering aftertaste of fucked-ness. You can't quite place it, but this callomanic is definitely FKD.

She's doing this to put you at ease -- but an unopened bottle can still be poisoned. Don't drink it.

She's drinking from the same bottle, you're fine. Get her drunk, make conversation, see what guts she'll spill.

Hers is crumpled on the floor beside her, discarded like a tight bra after a mid-week work day.

Hold the line gäng! We're within striking distance!

YES, DIEGO. LIKE LIONS.

A perfect operant.

Solar Point: a small coastal area of Lágundi, a Luzian colony famous for luxury tourist resorts.

WITHIN EVERYONE IS MOP AND MOPPER -- A TRUE REVOLUTIONARY KEEPS BOTH HANDS FIRMLY ON THEIR OWN SHAFT.

Her posture straightens, as if she's ready to fight you -- but she's afraid.

Ten inches and your lips will meet hers.

Melita's voice in your ear: 'The Bank will always deal'.

The gap can fit a whole shrine in there?

You've been doohickeyed, bitch.

Twenty-six bones and no major blood vessels. She should be thanking you.

She won't. You can feel it, her knowledge of the doohickey. It weighs more than usual.

YOU WILL CATCH THE REACTIONARY IN THE ACT YET.

Desperate yearning.

A fighter's chin.

The final stage of colonisation -- the oppressed become strange parodies of the people that colonised them.

Its smell is the same as all port cities -- damp concrete, diesel exhaust, drifting mats of golden-brown sargassum.

Her costume is a stylized but unemblazoned piece of Luzian military history.

Most likely a mid-rank Weeping Eye asset.

Though she speaks fluent Illuminado, she is not Luzian.

Three hundred tiny windows, ghost hands tapping on the glass.

In the crowded rooms of your life, faces fragment into variations of themselves.

What began at one shrine ends at another.

Tension on the surface, yet all bound fast by an invisible thread.

There's a coil wired into the wall, fused to the socket with melted plastic and faith. That's where he eats, listening to currents crackle overhead.

Famous for sterile logistics, tax-flexible exports, and a stunning aversion to political alignment.

Curtains twitch at the windows. Inside, stacks of dog-eared dream and memory contaminate each other.

The remote viewers! Spoon-bending vöyeurs!

Asked as if the question scared him.

Better for everyone that you just take him at his word. The alternative... well, there's a recently vacated room at the bottom of a silo, if you're interested.

You have more pressing things to worry about than this. Better for the assignment that you just believe him and move on.

Standard Operant Bureau procedure: once burned, an asset is not to be revived except under exceptional circumstances.

Void is exactly what it is. The body is weight, presence -- the mind is conjecture, absence.

The air charges as he recites each name.

Like a ritual.

Comical, yes, but also horrifying. The last place you would suspect.

SURVIVAL IS SECONDARY. ANONYMOUS MARTYRDOM, ETERNAL.

The freckles and splatter patterns of blood droplets are indistinguishable from one another on the face of a tram driver pinned under rubble. The steel beams that have crushed her legs are the only thing keeping her blood inside her body. Even an inch of motion, and the arteries gush...

The toys always seem to die horribly.

So what, we partake in 'interpretive masturbation'? We think not.

You sense the weight of the structure above you, the inverted tower hanging over your head.

You'd take a week of the Weeping Eye fiddling with you over five years down here.

Checks