You know how they say ‘seize the day’ and ‘live in the moment?’ Well, that attitude works for those who have to worry about how much time they have left. You know, people with two weeks to live because of cancer and those who don’t know if they’re going to be hit by a speeding garbage truck every time they step out their doors. It works for people like that, but not for girls like me.

I don’t need to concern myself with petty things like cancer or death. Lucky, aren’t I? Yeah, you would think so. You see, people toy with the idea of immortality. They flirt with longevity, reaching ages of one hundred and twelve, at best. Living forever has always fascinated humans. They sprout myths and fables about it, conjuring up Fountains of Youth and Elixirs of Life. Because they cannot have it, they want it all the more. They will go to any length to obtain endless life, but it remains just out of their reach. Their fingertips scrabble at the edges, breaking off cryonics and plastic surgery, but they can never truly get a grip on its core.

But none of them knows—they can’t—what eternal life entails, what it means to exist, unchanging, forever. What it means to watch your friends, your family, the man down the street, age and diminish, get sick, die, while you remain…while you remain young, intact, powerful. What it means to watch countries rise, fall, change…while you linger, never altering.

It’s not something I would wish upon anyone. Sure, for the first hundred years or so it’s fairly cool, but once everyone you know has died off and you start wishing you could know what you would look like if you could grow up…. Well, the immortality thing kind of loses its magic. I guess you could call this book the compilation of all the dirty, messy truths about immortality, if you so desired.

My name is Lily Enders. I am approaching 2100 years old, even though I look like I’m seventeen. There are one hundred of us, one hundred people—if that’s what we are—who share this curse. I live with four of them. Alexander, Alex, has been with me since the beginning, the Roman Empire. We met Elizabeth in the fifteenth century, shortly after Henry VI’s birth. Matthew—Matt—and Kate, or Katherine, joined us on the crossing from England.

We’ve lived just about everywhere since then. From New York City to the Alaskan wilderness. Honestly, we’ve been all over the U.S.A. We even went back to Europe for the nineteenth century, to reacquaint ourselves with the countries there. After spending a hundred-odd years wandering around Paris and London and all that, we came back to the States on the Titanic. That was fun.

Travel has never been a problem for any of us, since we all know Latin, English, Greek, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and almost all of the other European languages. Two millennia gave us a lot of time to learn.

Speaking of learning, I have several degrees in various forms of medicine and psychology from Harvard and Dartmouth. Alex has a ton of poetry and literature doctorates—he’s even written a few hundred novels. All under pen names, of course.

Obviously, people would get suspicious if one author was still publishing books three or four hundred years after he started writing. Elizabeth is an expert musician. She plays even better than Mozart, I swear. But then again, I’m a little biased, having been her ‘sister’ for six hundred years. Matt is an unbelievable artist. He has mastered a few aspects of it, like carving and watercolors, and is more than sufficient in others. Kate…. Well, Kate drifts. Just recently, she has become obsessed with engineering. She built us a new computer the other day. A decade ago, it was chess. Mostly, she’ll wander down whatever path takes her fancy.

Ironically, even though we are the farthest things from normal, we do have the standard roles in the family. Alex, firm and unyielding, is Daddy, and Elizabeth is Mom, with all her maternal instincts and whatnot. Kate is the baby—she is as capricious and carefree as the typical teenage girl. Matt and I share the role of big sibling. Kate is a still a novelty to us; even after a few hundred years, she manages to shake things up a bit. We, Matt and I, both tolerate her eccentric schemes and notions with good humor.

So now that you’ve got a little insight into our family, I can tell you about the more interesting parts of being unkillable. There are people—monstrous and evil people, but human and mortal nonetheless—that live to hunt us down. They are glorified philosophers mostly, with a couple hit men mixed in. Believe it or not, some of those scholarly types know how to handle a gun—not that it does them any good, considering who they’re fighting. They have proclaimed themselves the Iskandar, the defenders of men. Their sole duty is to find us. Since they can’t kill any of us immortals, they capture us and torture us. For some reason, they don’t think that anyone should live forever. At all. Weird, huh? The Iskandar thinks that humans are in danger from us, from our unnatural origins. If they can catch us, they stick us at the bottom of the ocean. The pressure is too great for us to move, once we’re there. So after they’ve got us, we just kind of stay, until the end of the world, at the bottom of the sea. At least, I think we do. I’ve never actually experienced it myself. Sounds fun though, right?

No.

In the fifties—nineteen fifties—the Iskandar caught Kate. I’m not sure how, because 2000 years has given us a lot of time to practice self defense, but they did. They were just about to drop her into the Atlantic when Alex and I came to the rescue. I think we took out upwards of half their forces in our little heroic mission. Needless to say, I didn’t lose any sleep. Alex might have; his moral compass actually works, unlike mine.

You’ve got the facts. You know that somewhere, there are immortals waltzing around, trying to avoid psychos with ocean access. I can’t tell you where we are now—that would be immeasurably stupid. We’d be on the news in seconds. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the human race in two thousand years, it’s that they can’t keep a secret to save their lives.

Use the knowledge wisely, or we’re all in for a wild ride. Really wild. Like a rollercoaster, sans seatbelts.