There are always survivors at a massacre. Among the victors, if nowhere else. - Lois McMaster Bujold

Everyone talks to the gods, no one expects them to answer.

His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.

He had his idea-fixee now, and its ramifications and his rage were an effective block against incoming data.