Excerpt: "...The building you have been hiding in has been condemned for years. You felt the cracks. You heard the inspectors. You stayed anyway; the rubble was familiar, and leaving would require admitting you had been living somewhere uninhabitable on purpose. This eclipse finds the building....."

Excerpt: "...You have been trading in a currency that the market no longer accepts. Discipline, endurance, the ability to remain upright while others had the good sense to collapse. You minted those coins yourself, pressed your own face into the metal, and spent decades exchanging them for the only thing you trusted: the certainty that if you could bear enough, you would eventually be worth enough..."

Excerpt: "...You've been running the most elaborate series of seminars inside your own skull for months, and, in case you haven't noticed, the audience left sometime around October. The chairs are empty. The slides keep advancing..."