This is it, she thought. You've done everything you needed. You need only live long enough for Sloan to get above the clouds, and then it's over. This lifetime of blackness, a blackness inescapable because it came from your own damn throat, thick like phlegm it clogged your arteries and aortas, stopped your wicked heart.

The world will be better for your absence.

Sloan in the bubble floated higher and higher and smaller and smaller and still the clouds hung overhead. Maybe the bubble wouldn't make it. Maybe Delaney had miscalculated. Wouldn't that be hilarious? All this effort, all these lives tossed away, and in the end it came to nothing, the bubble breaks before Sloan is even close, she plummets to earth like Icarus. Or worse yet—what if Delaney broke the bubble now? Wouldn't that be a devilish prank?

(Chapter 27)