Leviathan Falls (The Expanse Book 9)

Like the number of minutes in an hour, the width of a centimeter, the volume of a liter, the length of a year was the marker by which humanity told the story of itself.

“Trejo’s fighting to hold on to an empire. I’m fighting to have something that’s recognizable as the universe with living things in it.”

The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent h

“The stars are still there,” she said. “We’ll find our own way back to them.”

He remembered how, during the pregnancy, she’d always been warm as a furnace, even in the winter. No matter how cool they kept the bedroom, she’d kick off the sheets. He thought it had been her. He thought that had been him. But maybe it was someone else’s memory. Someone from the Preiss or one of the other ships. It was so hard to be sure.

The dysfunctions and idiosyncrasies of childhood became the self-evident norms of adulthood.

“Or maybe,” Amos said, “you’re not that important and it ain’t up to you to fix the universe?”

The sword that slew a billion angels had only inconvenienced the primates in their bubbles of metal and air. And a man named Winston Duarte, halfway between angel and ape, had been broken but not killed. The shards had found their own way.

The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time.