...there is a somewhere else after this, where everyone drinks elysia and lives forever.

We were too greedy, grasping for immortality too soon. Perhaps if we had only been patient, content to wait, we would all have forever in the end.

The noblest life is the one laid down for another.

Remember, Pia," he whispers. "Perfect is as perfect does.

They all seem infected with a vivaciousness that isn't common in our compound, and there are more smiles on their faces than I've ever seen at once. And yet as I watch them, I feel more intensely than ever the knowledge that I'm not one of them. For these moral humans, birthdays are a kind of countdown to the end, the ticking clock of a dwindling life. For me, birthdays are notches on an infinite timeline. Will I grow tired of parties one day? Will my birthday become meaningless? I imagine myself centuries from now, maybe at my three-hundredth birthday, looking all the way back to my seventeenth. How will I possibly be happy, remembering the light in my mother's eyes? The swiftness of Uncle Antonio's steps as he dances? The way my father stands on edge of the courtyard, smiling in that vague, absent way of his?

The scene shifts and blues in my imagination. As if brushed away by some invisible broom, these people whom I've known my entire life disappear. The courtyard is empty, bare, covered in decaying leaves. I imagine Little Cam deserted, with everyone dead and gone and only me left in the shadows.

Forever.

Death is a divine appointment.