Sunreach: Skyward Flight

It wasn’t enough to survive for survival’s sake. I wanted to live.

What did it change when any of us were gone? The DDF still churned out more cadets. If they ran out, they’d lower the age to take the pilot’s test and bring them in younger and younger. We’d keep sending groups on missions like this, never knowing if they’d come back, because our survival as a group mattered more than the individuals. I didn’t disagree with that; I saw the logic to it.
But I still wondered: if we didn’t matter as individuals, then what were we saving the group for?

I knew the reason for what we did—and I believed in it, much as I hated what it had done to us as a people. It seemed like that should make me feel better.

Now though, I understood the glue that held us together, and it wasn’t stupidity. It was the bond shared by people who faced death together. It was a sense of belonging, of being a piece of something bigger, something important, though I still wasn’t convinced everything about it was good. I’d never felt that I needed a military to tell me my place in the world before, and I still didn’t.

My father had taken to saying I was skysick, but it was the opposite—the sky terrified me. It was so big and wide I could fall into it and be swallowed up.