Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [2102]

“Best to have the strength to keep ahead of it,” I said, and I took a water bottle from my pack and drank. We were within sight of the road and we had made it a rule not to eat or drink in such exposed places, but today that rule had to be suspended. To go into the hills away from the road might mean being cut off from the road by fire. We couldn’t know when or where a windblown piece of burning debris might land. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 2102

Note

Lauren answers Mora’s panic with an aphorism, then the narration quietly justifies the risk she’s taking — the group’s discipline (no eating in exposed places) is overridden not by impulse but by a colder calculation of which exposure is worse. The flat declaratives carry the reasoning without dramatizing it.