I don’t think that’s the answer he was looking for. It’s not the answer I was looking for. But maybe it’s the right one. - M. K. Hobson

Emily looked at him for a long time. There were so many things she wanted to know—but she wanted not to know them even more. She didn’t want any more answers. He had been the one thing she could trust, the one person she could rely on. She wanted to beg him to be that way again. But it wasn’t him who had changed. It was her. It was her own credulity she really wanted back. And credulity, like virtue, could be lost only once.

Spread out before the pyramid, as far as the eye could see, stretched a frozen ocean of blackness—stinking oily blackness that bubbled and churned. Voider than void, colder than cold, deader than dead.
It is your world.
It is the world we will make for you.

Was your mother furious?
"She'll get over it," Stanton said. "Perhaps not in this lifetime, but I happen to believe in reincarnation, so there's still hope."