It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.

Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat?

Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.

I will give them nightmares to haunt their dreams long after I'm gone.

She moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

That is your legend?" Akiva asked, incredulous. Madrigal had told him the story of the sun and Ellai while they flew. "That seraphim are the blood of a rapist sun?

There are boys you look at and want to touch with your mouth, and there are boys you look at and want to wear one of those surgical masks everyone in China had during bird flu. There are a lot more bird-flu boys at large.