CW: possession, body horror, use of corpses, insects, uncertain reality

“But you know what unites the theories we had about that place? In all of them, the Cut is subject. It’s something attached, a barnacle lodged to the city.

But the Cut is not addition or reflection or parasite. It’s not mirror, but window – mud-caked, fogged and frosted. If we’re lucky, we can spy glimpses of the silhouettes inside. We can see the wonder, a whole ecosystem – spirit-grown and built from alien perspective.”

“I sent them to the Cut because it seemed like the best place for them. It’s obviously not a safe-house, but it were out of the authority’s control. As close to out of the city as I could get the Jubilant.  They’d still have to survive, to be canny; but at least there wouldn’t be half a city baying for their blood. If I’d known what was waiting for them down there…”

c/w psychological trauma, eyes

“I wouldn’t let Ezra be the middle of that blaze. They would not be our revolution’s effigy. I couldn’t… I wouldn’t… They meant so much more than that.”

c/w police, between 55’33 and 59’57: family conflict/threats and discussion of disfigurement

“Drawing connection between the revolution’s many parts was its own challenge. Both because we were a house built with uncommon brick and because of the families desire to keep us disparate. Ezra and Oken wouldn’t be the only ones to find trouble.”

c/w fights with police, animal harm, NPC death

“Across the city these splinters of defiance spread. Each spelk the families plucked saw two more embedded into Embrace’s flesh. Us ginnels and those like us, watched. We were both proud of our comrade’s successes, and jealous, desperate to join the fray.”

c/w description of insects and spiders, violence, NPC death

“For as long as I’d known, resistance in Embrace had been like puddles in the cobbles. Disparate, kept separate by the foundations of the city. Over there a union of factory workers fighting for pay and safety; here a group trying to raise their voices above Parsant’s tight dogma. For us Ginnels, so much of our work had been trying to score trenches between those waters, to turn puddle, into pool, into flood.”

c/w description of police violence (in intro: 0’00 to 2’43)

“Over the next few weeks, the families paraded their victory over us. Their news-sheets celebrating the crushing of the radical ward of Atrium and the arrest of the heretic priest Lena Fisher.

The press’ insults were the easiest taunt to brush off, their actions were harder to stomach. ”