33

Estre laughs. "I'm jealous!" he says. "It must be nice to be immortal without having to fight. I know that defending the whales is important to keeping the gift of immortality they've given us, but sometimes even I wonder if it's really worth it. The problem is that the fight just never ends, and no matter what, the whales still die eventually, with or without us. I want to do something more memorable."

Arraia starts undoing her hair to fix it. "I know what you mean about doing something memorable," she says. "It's scary, sometimes, thinking about just how much of our very, very long lives we can't remember." She shakes out her hair. "I mean, I've lost decades of memory. And I definitely don't remember anything from my first century."

You nod. Your memory's the same way: full of gashes, missing pieces. You have no memory of your childhood, if you even had one. Sometimes, you try to prod around those memories, and it just feels like empty blackness.

"I just hate the fact," says Arraia, "that days like this, miserable days, they'll probably stick with me forever. But then the good times, those will fade away. It's not fair."