Sublime

Perspective:

Brought face-to-face with the limits of his ability—of anyone’s ability—to master fate or turn back time, Charlie began reaching for the things he could control: his own actions, his own emotions, his own outlook, his own grit.

dyspeptic

His job consisted of watching monitors all day and expecting people to be dishonest assholes.

He was, in other words, the library’s memory and the soul of the scriptorium.

The awareness gave him pause: perhaps a funny-looking mixed-race kid could exist at the center of the world, not just on its periphery.

enfilade

He had returned to New York years before, with the intention of finding a way to reconnect, if possible, with the only family that remained to him in the world. Instead he had become immured, by fear and its majordomo, habit, in his cabinet of mysteries on the seventy-second floor of the Empire State Building, serenaded by a tirelessly vamping orch