The Psynet

“We are an abomination, a plague that will kill our people from within. Silence must never take root, must never infiltrate the PsyNet. Forgive us.”

“Normal Psy did not whimper, did not show any emotion, did not feel. But Sascha had known since childhood that she wasn't normal. She'd successfully hidden her flaw for twenty-six years.”

“The Psy are known to be icily controlled, inhumanly practical, and impossible to push to violence.”

“the Psy race had once felt the same emotions as humans and changelings. But something had changed long enough ago that in the present, it seemed as if they had always been formed of ice.”

“A life without love, without laughter, without pain, without sadness, without misery, without heartbreak, without . . . just without.”

“the Forgotten, with their hopes and dreams of a better life, were a roadblock to the Psy goal of absolute power.”

“Death followed the Forgotten like a scourge. Relentless. Without pity.

“Kaleb was nothing if not patient. The same way a cobra is patient.”

“The second he broke conditioning, he became a loaded gun with no safety switch. That was why he was never going to[…]end the Silence in his mind.

“Silence had been invented for those like him-the brutal killers and the viciously insane, those who had turned the world of the Psy into a blood-soaked hell so bad, Silence had become the better choice.”

“The flesh parting under the blade, the blood pouring, the pallor of death, she'd seen it all. It had left her a trembling, shaken mess, but she'd found comfort in the fact that it had been nothing more than a nightmare. Except now her nightmare had taken the ugliest of forms.”

“As a child he had been subjected to the most excruciating pain and then been taught to block it. A good Psy felt nothing. A good Arrow felt even less.

“Zaid Adelaja was washed from this Earth, but the torch of the Arrows continued to be handed from one acolyte to the next... until there was no more Mercury and the long-dead Adelajas were being hailed as visionaries.”

“Tendaji and Naeem Adelaja were as cool as ice, their emotions holding nothing of anger or madness...for a while. The experiment eventually failed. The dark side of emotion rushed back into the Adelaja twins in an avalanche”

“Mercury was a cult. That was what everyone said at the start. The Psy laughed at Catherine and Arif Adelaja's claims of being able to free their people from insanity and murderous fury. To be Psy was to court the edges of madness. It was accepted. It was accepted. There was no cure.”

“Though she'd never before felt anything, in those dreams she'd been drenched in fear, suffocated by the weight of terror.”