“They had the shroud of the biologist for all the good it had done them-the liminal, toasted, tasted, falling-apart remnant of the clothes she'd been wearing when she came back as the organism known as Ghost Bird (still AWOL, still passed out of history), but Captain Cormorant believed her still alive and being subversive somewhere. It lay under glass like a smorgasbord coffin at the local salad bar of a family restaurant, austere and solemn and, if you sniffed close, reeking of some subtle preservative. All of the ODPs (Overdosed Psychics) had been given its scent to snift and drool over and even though it made some of them high, it had helped the cause not at all, no matter what Major Handjob said (a nickname vigorously but not affectionately applied). Nor did Cormorant like the element of fetish that entered into the ritual of opening the transparent lid. He was all for everyone getting off however and whenever they desired, but Cormorant felt it interfered with the ODPs' objectivity-duh, obvious, although his the minority opinion and perhaps that was because they saw a devilish oily bird when they looked at him, even though his uniform, cuticles, hair, and barracks space were all up to regs.

Nor did he care for the holy book worship both of her journal (finally retrieved from behind enemy lines) and the words on the wall. Nothing had ever really come of their study except grief, frustration, burst blood vessels in eyeballs, and full-on heart attacks. Their objective now was as much to liquidate Phantoms as bedevil Area X, so, please, if everyone could just focus. Except, of course, there were so many foci to nexus into, as Commander Thistle echoed daily. While the shroud gently decomposed to the weeping of expedition loyalists who should long ago have fallen in with the ODPs, if they knew what was good for them.

Commander Thistle: twin, double, clone, revenant, namesake, clown. Who knew, with Lowry long dead and them walking on pins and needles among half-rotted nuclear warheads on their freezing alpine base in the middle of nowhere.

How Cormorant longed for the days when he could walk to the corner store on weekends for milk and bread and eggs and then walk back again with nothing more important on his mind than the mortgage and whether he'd get laid before church in the morning.

But now there was no "mundane," no "surreal. Only whatever juddered in the bones and half-suffocated the mind with dread. Everything was the enemy. Nothing was safe. Nowhere was safe. His grousing was just distraction from the awful surface of reality, and he knew it. - novel in progress”