#OpeningSentence

The boy was taken upstairs without warning, unprotesting as he had been through all the changes in his seventeen years, the shifts from cell to cell each time he outgrew the bolt on his ankle and the Doctor came to exchange it for a larger one, an operation performed with a tool the Hold people called the Mallet, which jarred the whole leg and sometimes made the blood spray from the anklebone, and caused a sense of queasiness and superstitious awe in the boy, who would glimpse, for the instant during which the bolt and chain were removed, the shiny and alien-looking patch of underexposed skin on his leg which, according to the prophet, housed the seat of the soul.

— Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain by Sofia Samatar

There were many things Asuka did not consider when she agreed to travel from one sun to another.

— The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei

You are alone when you die.

— Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon