Narration: Perhaps his love for her made him less than impartial, but he also knew how deeply she'd been hurt and chided her for judging herself so m… - David Weber

Narration: No one else knew how she'd longed for extinction, how much part of her had hungered simply to quit. To end. She'd once intended, coldly and logically, to do just that... She'd sacrificed her naval career... and a corner of her mind suspected she'd actually wanted to sacrifice it - that she'd planned to use the loss of the vocation she loved so much as one more reason to end her dreary existence. It had seemed only reasonable then; now the memory was one more coal of contempt for her own weakness, her willingness to surrender to her own pain when she'd always refused to surrender to anyone else.

Narration: [Michelle] Henke sensed [Honor's] terrifying aptitude for destruction as never before. Henke had feared for her sanity; now she knew the truth was almost worse than that. Honor wasn't insane - she simply didn't care. She'd lost not only her sense of balance but any desire to regain it.

Narration: But the universe wasn't really unfair, she thought, and her mouth quirked. It just didn't give much of a damn one way or the other.