Even uglier customers came on the scene:
- not normal coin art, but a crescent moon with a little star between its horns.
- Because the odds that the PSB would trouble itself over the activities of a nest of virus writers were not much higher than those of a zombie plague.
- At three in the morning she put on the scuba gear and carried her waterproof pouch to the miniature pod-sub,
- new box: a system for bouncing invisible lasers off the windowpanes of Apartment 505. Any sound inside the apartment would cause the windows to vibrate slightly, and the laser rig could pick up the vibrations and translate them back into surprisingly intelligible sound recordings.
- “Freedom!” he proclaimed brightly. “Thank you!” Zula exclaimed. “Is an illusion,” he continued, and snapped the manacle shut around his right wrist, chaining his right arm to Zula’s left.
- Not just any killer, but a killer who had killed another killer—which, in the video-game-based metric that Marlon used for keeping score in the world, conferred an elite status.
- Engineering! Another luxury of nationalities with huge populations and intact landmasses. Hungary, severed from half of the population and most of the natural resources that it had once claimed, had now to practice a sort of economic acupuncture, striving to know the magic nodes in the global energy flow.
- competitive fury at the fact that he had been outdone by the suicidal improvisations of this fanatic
- “Or smoke or tear gas.” Marlon and Csongor could communicate very clearly as long as they hewed to vocabulary from video games.
- turned it into a makeshift palanquin on which Olivia was borne, like a Jewish bride, around the edge of the crater to a place where it was possible to hail a taxi.
- ... followed by five million shells packed with propaganda leaflets. Local artisans dug them out of the ground and used the steel to make cleavers.
- Now that he was out of China, he was finally getting a feel for how things were done in the country, and realizing that they had a genius for the kind of simple technology that required no instruction manuals.
- No more than a hundred feet above them was the underbelly of a 747.