How It All Goes Down
Both Place and Person
- "To take from the universe, you must give" (32.3), says Akiva.
- Karou feels queasy and uneasy as she wonders who felt the pain for each frivolous wish she's made over the years. Is having blue hair worth that?
- To change the subject, Akiva fills Karou in on the history of his world, Eretz.
- There, the chimaera and the seraphim have been at war for years.
- Akiva sees the chimaera as ungrateful: "They were nothing but barbarians. We gave them light, engineering, the written word" (32.34).
- Karou's opinion: "The seraphim want to rule the world, the chimaera don't want to be ruled, and that makes them evil" (32.33).
- Hm, when you put it that way the seraphim sound downright imperialistic.
- Akiva then reveals that the tattoos on his hands, the marks on the backs of his fingers, are tally marks for each chimaera he's killed.
- His fingers look like bar codes, so he's killed a lot of 'em.
- They end up going to a teahouse to chat. The waitress recognizes Karou as the flying girl. Then Zuzana calls, and says she's coming there to meet up with her.
- As if things weren't complicated enough.
- Karou tries to think through her dilemma.
- He as the enemy of her family. And yet, something tied them together, stronger than any of that. […] Anything she did to fight against it felt like discord, like disharmony with herself. (32.116) And he's hot. Did you forget how hot he is?
- We didn't.