How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
Tally shivered again, but not from the cold. It was hard to think of the Rusties as actual people, rather than as just an idiotic, dangerous, and sometimes comic force of history. But there were human beings down there, whatever was left of them after a couple of hundred years, still sitting in their blackened cars, as if still trying to escape their fate. (40.58)
It's hard to imagine strangers as real people with hopes and dreams and diets, especially when those people live in a different time period. (Not to bum you out, but every dead body in a car in the Rusty Ruins was once a person who had dreams and hopes.) And here's part of Tally's education process: not just realizing that the past was full of real people, but that her time will be the past for some future civilization.