You come to believe you cannot be seen, when the truth is that no one has ever dared to look.

It is a fragile thing, that kind of power, far more fragile than the people who wield it understand, because it depends entirely on the continued cooperation of everyone’s fear.

It has no substance of its own.

The moment one person with sufficient resources and sufficient resolve simply refuses to look away — refuses to be bought, refuses to be frightened, and insists on seeing what is actually there — the whole edifice of invisibility evaporates, because it was never anything more than an agreement not to look.

Those three families had spent a generation surrounded by averted eyes, and had concluded that they were gods.