It was like boiling a frog; if you did it gradually enough the frog never noticed until it was too late. (Location 3941)
Amsterdam was a quiet, haunted place. The Low Countries had been hit hard by the Xian Flu and for a long time, even after the pandemic had burned itself out, very few tourists had come here. The trade still hadn’t recovered in any meaningful way; (Location 4002)
The place was half empty. The Netherlands had borne the brunt of the Xian Flu, and unlike, say, England, they had somehow not quite bounced back. Alice couldn’t remember how many people they had lost but she knew it was a large percentage of the fifty million or so who had died in Europe during the pandemic. There was a reflective, slightly haunted feeling about Amsterdam which grew even worse once you were out in the countryside. (Location 4024)
