Extracts

IT WAS A STANDARD BATHROOM. 

Joan Goodwin gets to the Johnson Space Center well before nine, and Houston is already airless and muggy.

I have to kill my sister.

The king of the Gods demanded a beautiful evil - and so I was born.

Today was going to be revolutionary, Aria Loveridge thought as she got out of bed and reached for the metal-fibre gloves from her bedside table.

“Just before midnight yesterday Greenpeace boat the Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland harbour.”

Hers was the second dead body I’d ever seen, not counting my mother’s.

I’ve never feared dying.

‘Let’s buy a chateau’, they said . . . ‘It’ll be an adventure’, they said . . . ‘You’ll meet a prince’, they said . . .

Not long after uploading my first video, I started to receive messages—thousands of them.

We met quite young, both of us still finding our footing in college, but as soon as we were in each other’s gravity, Sara and I felt an undeniable pull that kept bringing us even closer together.

Beans Finds a Case

I ran. I ran in the mornings and in the afternoons, and I ran at night.

My earworm for today is ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ by the Boomtown Rats.

I have hated my mother for most of my life but it is her face I see as I drown.

Tommy Stojack.

People don’t tap their watches anymore; have you noticed?

New Zealand was greener than Emilia could ever have imagined.