Josephine smiles, and Cassandra smiles back with a reflexive happiness that sends warmth spiraling up from Josephine's belly to her heart. The thing it has taken her a long time to learn about Cassandra is that quite often her impatience and sarcasm are a thin layer, fragile as the skin of ice over a lake--and the emotions they conceal are as drowningly deep as that lake.

“Well,” Kit says lightly. “This does seem to be a predicament, doesn’t it?” Pressed right up against him, gauntlets digging bruises into his almost-bare hips, Dogma squeezes his eyes tightly shut. “I'm going to kill my whole squad,” he says, perfectly certain and resigned to it.