Daily excerpt from chapter 18 of Second Star to the Right:
‘It’s never been a problem,’ Kadek said. ‘But back to the subject. Lludd put you in the boot of a car. It was a punishment?’ ‘Yeah,’ Efnisien said. ‘Was it for something that made sense?’ Efnisien frowned. That was such a… He wasn’t sure anyone had asked him a question like that before. Though he was pretty sure Dr Gary had tried to get him to realise how arbitrary the reasons for his punishments with his family were. ‘I don’t know,’ Efnisien said slowly. ‘I was annoying him. And to be fair, I did go out of my way to annoy him sometimes. So yeah? It kind of made sense. But in that way where none of it did at the same time.’ ‘Yeah, I don’t mean like logical sense anyway. No humane person puts a child in the boot of a car against their will; it’s straight-up abuse under any context, but you know, sometimes something happens for no reason, sometimes there’s a reason. Sometimes, there being a reason makes it worse, because then it’s less about the random chaos of another person’s violence, and it’s more about worrying about getting everything right in perpetuity.’ ‘You know, you’d actually make a good therapist.’