Like the wick of a candle (Visual Imagery, p. 32)
Kaz threatens Geels by claiming he's about to burn Geels's girlfriend alive: her building will "go up in seconds, burning from both ends with poor Elise trapped in the middle. Her blonde hair will catch first. Like the wick of a candle." The visual imagery of her blonde hair being the wick, with her body as the candle, is gory but familiar, as a candle is a common object attached to home life and safety. Kaz using such vivid imagery when describing the scene forces Geels to vividly imagine the event. Kaz uses visual imagery to strengthen the idea of Elise on fire, making the idea particularly real and threatening for Geels.
A howling bomb (Auditory Imagery, p. 147)
When they're surrounded by rival gang members, Wylan sets off a flash bomb so that Jesper can shoot their blinded enemies. "There was a shrill, shrieking howl, and then bright light bloomed behind Jesper's lids." Comparing the sound of the bomb to a shrieking howl makes the sound almost human, almost animal; because Jesper doesn't know the bomb is coming, this slightly misapplied auditory imagery communicates his sense of confusion.
Imagined comforting smells (Olfactory Imagery, p. 274)
Kaz recalls waking up to find his brother dead beside him. "When he woke, he couldn't smell hay or clover or apples, only coal smoke, and the spongy rotting vegetable stink of garbage." Olfactory imagery is used to create a vacuum of comfort, mentioning all the lovely things that he doesn't smell, then filling that hole with a long string of disgusting words. His farm life, his safety, is officially over, replaced by smoke and stink.
Wrinkled skin (Haptic Imagery, p. 275)
When Kaz awakes on the Reaper's Barge surrounded by the corpses of those who died of firepox, he finds "his clothes soaked through, skin wrinkled from the damp." His skin, at nine years old, has been wrinkled from exposure, evoking his premature aging; next to him, Jordie's corpse is "white and swollen with rot." Rather than wrinkled, his dead brother has bloated too much to fit into his skin. Both images create a sense of physical discomfort and wrongness.
