"... it's not that I don't want to live. In theory." He walks next to the other. The alley is getting, if anything, deeper and darker. "I just don't see a life after all of this that I'd care to live. Or a route out that leaves me with one."

A failure of imagination, of lateral thinking? Perhaps. But he has thought so often of ways to break his chains, and he sees none he dares to take.