Joanna took Mel to Dresden, to the Frauenkirche. The timed their visit to coincide with a monthly English evensong. “Firebombs not enough?” Mel whisp… - China Miéville

Oh, bullshit," Wyatt said. I blinked. "This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think about how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretending to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact." He laughed and shook his head. "Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn't lose our shit, did we?

There was no chance at all he would see her, in that labyrinth of dubious experiments, where the nature of the research made even the architecture untrustworthy.

Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.