Pretty sure I can smell my synapses smoking; not much juice for projects. Raided the leftover patches to reinforce the three-way seams. Bout all I got tonight. Perfectly ridiculous but done.
They weren’t utterly alone in the world, mattering to no one but themselves. It seemed utterly wrong to treat them like pennies in a purse. I wanted to go and speak to that boy, to ask him his name, to find out what his story really was. But that would have been dishonest, a sop to my own feelings. I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them — this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn’t a whole man.
~Naomi Novik, Uprooted