The First Sister

The second reminder is this: while technological advancements can carry humankind to impossible heights, power must be exercised responsibly. After all, people tend to forget that Daedalus’s wings for his son did work; it was Icarus who used them incorrectly.

Isn’t that what growing up means, learning to be disappointed by your parents? You’ve said it is accepting them as human, but that’s the same damn thing, Lito. Seeing your parents as humans instead of the perfect, loving caretakers of your childhood is accepting disappointment and learning to live with it. Childhood is a lie. The end.

Perhaps man is a creature meant to love war by virtue of his own nature.

With a religion as oppressive as theirs, any time they can relax, any freedom they experience is quickly overindulged.

Go to sleep, I sing. “No,” I tell myself. Go to sleep, I beg. I am a traitor to myself.

Every night that Arturo and I slept in the captain’s bed, wrapped in sheets and each other, he whispered promises to me. Promises that he had no intention of keeping. I swallowed his words with all of the hope that only a girl who has nothing can. Why would he lie to me, I thought then, when I have given him everything he wants, a silent, obedient companion, and asked for nothing in return?

I wonder if the windows and lighting are so the managers can watch the employees in the offices, or so the employees can’t see what the smugglers are doing in the hangar. Plausible deniability and all that.

I’m almost twenty—I shouldn’t sleep—hic—shouldn’t have toys.” “There are bigger things in the world to worry about, and anyone who gives you shit about it isn’t worth your time, love,