Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [916]

I fell with her, caught up in her death. I lay there, dazed, struggling to move, to get up. Cory and the boys, running ahead of me never noticed. They ran on. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 916

Note

“Caught up in her death” fuses the literal fall with a sympathetic one — but the paragraph’s real force is the sentence about Cory and the boys, where the omission of a comma (“running ahead of me never noticed”) makes the clauses run together as fast as the people do. The separation is happening at the level of syntax.