"If Laney had anticipated her at all, it had been as some industrial-strength synthesis of Japan’s last three dozen top female media faces. She was nothing like that…And now her eyes met his. He seemed to cross a line. In the very structure of her face, in geometries of underlying bone, lay coded histories of dynastic flight, privation, terrible migrations. He saw stone tombs in steep alpine meadows…Iron harness bells clanked in the blue dusk."