Perpetua was ambitious; she could be partnered with.

Silvia was wounded; she could be pointed like a weapon.

Every other player in the whole affair had a price or a grievance that made them useful.

I was the one person whose participation could not be purchased or provoked, because I would have said no — and so the only way to deal with me was to remove my mind from the board entirely, one blue pill at a time.

It was, in a backhanded way, the highest compliment my family’s enemies ever paid me: they could not corrupt me, so they had to erase me.

And when the fog thinned for one second and I saw the imprint on that pill, the thing they could not corrupt woke up, and it turned out to be the most dangerous force any of them had ever underestimated.