Quotes from Martha Wells

Can we hug you?" Maro let go of Tapan and faced me. "Uh." I didn't step back, but it must have been obvious the answer was no. Maro nodded. "Okay. This is for you." She wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed.

But him talking gave me a chance to work around the privacy seal on Aylen's feed ID and see she was listed as a Special Investigator. I didn't know what that meant, but it was a good job title and honestly it made me a little jealous.

And botched was putting it mildly; it looked like a bad human medic had jammed it in with their toes.

they still had to tell me about what had caused the latest fight. (I don't remember what it was, I deleted it from my memory as soon as I could get out of the room.)

I'm not the public library feed, Senior Officer, go do your own research. I said, "If I told you, then you might find all the bodies I've already disposed of.

A forensic sweep might show that I'd been there. If forensic sweeps worked like they did in the entertainment media, which, come to think about it, I had no idea if they did or not. (Note to self: look up real forensic sweeps.)

I couldn't risk the distraction of watching media, but I checked my storage space, and noted that I still had a comfortingly high number of episodes left in the new show I was watching. It helped, a little.

be my first accidental murder.

It's joking." Ratthi managed to sound like he completely believed that. "That's how it looks when it's joking." He sent me on the feed, Stop joking.

CodeBundle.FuckThisToo

No, I left, I said, I've decided to live here and just move from hotel to hotel, watching the entertainment feed. Okay, so that did sound like a much better idea than I meant it to.

Technically the barge's hull was only partly existent in reality and therefore couldn't be torn open if it hit a rock. But Kai didn't want to end up arguing with a barge determined that it had been hulled and needed to sink; the canal was too deep for that.

At least they were quiet, mostly because Moon told them if anybody woke Merit, he would personally beat them into unconsciousness.

I bonked his head against the edge of the hatch and yanked the damaged weapon away.

When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on.

But they were humans—who knows why they did anything?

Target Two made a wild grab for her fallen projectile weapon. I kicked the weapon over to Tifany, who snatched it up and secured it. (Yes, it was unnecessary and showing off.)

He wanted to give her a chance to yell at him in private before he apologized.

Oh. Oh, shit.

Disinformation, which is the same as lying but for some reason has a different name, is the top tactic in corporate negotiation/warfare. (There had been a whole episode about it on Sanctuary Moon.)

Moon had been consort to Jade, sister queen of the Indigo Cloud Court, for eleven days and nobody had tried to kill him yet. He thought it was going well so far.

My human parts were experiencing a cold prickling that wasn't comfortable. This place was creepy. I reminded myself that the terrible thing that had most likely happened here was me. Somehow that didn't help.

Normal = neutral expression concealing existential despair and brain-crushing boredom.)

Lots of shifting diagrams and numbers that might as well have been abstract art as far as I was concerned.