Page 42 of Meet Me in Another Life

López is silent. Thora is used to her partner disappearing, even as he stands next to her: as if he’s communicating on a deeper level with the world, fitting together a puzzle made of cobbles and fragments of sky. But this is different. The expression on his face dislocates her: another moment, another López, a duality she can’t explain.

“Hey,” she says, touching his arm. “You okay?”

He jumps. “Yeah. Is he—did he...”

Thora crouches by the entrance of the tower, peering inside. She straightens up and comes back to López. “He’s climbed the stairs inside. About twenty meters up. I can see him there, pressed against the wall.”

López stares at the tower, rubbing the back of his neck. As Thora radios their location, he starts to walk toward it, slow at first and then determined.

Thora lowers the radio. “What are you doing?”

López sounds half-asleep. “Climbing up to get him.”

Thora stares at him. She sees it so clearly: López climbing, loose-limbed and unafraid, the possibility of falling never entering his mind. Rage takes hold of her, a possessive, violent refusal. “No.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her. Thora strides past him, physically puts herself between him and the yawning gap. “Hey. I’m the senior officer, remember?”Remember.Her voice echoes off the cobbles, comes back to her the same but altered. “You’re not going up there.”

López’s gaze drifts, focuses on her. “Why?”

Her mouth moves. The reason won’t form itself into words; it’s nothing but an inarticulate scream. “I just—I’m not going to let you kill yourself falling.”Again.She bites back the impossible word. Her head pounds, another migraine drowning her in images. A yellow scarf on a nail, blowing in the night wind. An old man smiling, leaving her treatment room for the last time. A hospital bed, Santi tied up in tubes and wires—she is losing him by pieces and their daughter has to watch, and she’s too young, why couldn’t the cancer have waited until Estela was grown, until she could understand—

López steps close to her. His voice is demanding, desperate. “Tell me why.”

Thora’s throat is dry. She can’t say it. But she can: this is López. She can say anything. “Because you died here.”

He smiles, almost in relief. “I know.” He turns to look up at the tower. The harsh lights in the square turn his face to an orange-and-black skull. “I remember falling. I remember not believing it, not understanding how the universe could have allowed my hand to slip.” He looks at her. “It felt like I had a long time tothink about it. And by the time I hit the ground, I knew. It was right. I was meant to die, there and then, and there was nothing I could have or should have done about it.”

“It was my fault,” Thora says, cutting him off. “Not God. Not the universe. It was my fault it happened then, and I’m not going to let it happen now.”

López laughs. “Thora,” he says gently, as if she’s a child who still doesn’t understand.

He’s never called her by her first name before. Not in this life. Thora meets his eyes. She doesn’t see her colleague, the partner she fell in with so easily that Lily joked they must have known each other in a past life. She sees her teacher, her student, her brother, her husband, her father: a vortex of realities spinning and collapsing together.

“Santi?” she says, as the universe explodes.

A boom, deep and reverberating. Then another. Thora looks up. The sky is full of stars, bursting and falling, burning out in trails of smoke. The New Year’s fireworks, exploding above the river. Between the blasts, the cathedral bells toll an interrupted midnight.

They have two seconds to look at each other. Two seconds to share the revelation that is turning them inside out: a blossoming, a bonfire, an ecstasy of remembering. Then everything happens at once. Thora sees the man emerge from the gap in the tower. Santi sees her face and turns. Before Thora can move, the man is already slashing at Santi’s throat.

Thora launches herself at the man without even pulling out her weapon. It’s madness, but she is not afraid. She is Thora Lišková, and she is immortal, and she will not let God or fate or the universe take Santi away from her, not this time.

She hits the man with all her strength. He stumbles but keeps his feet, turning to lunge at her. In her delirium, she can’t tell if the knife misses or passes clean through her. She dodges, grabbing his wrist and wrenching it until the knife falls. Thora yells, knees him in the stomach, and brings him down. He huffs out his surprise as she cuffs him cleanly.

The backup team swarms in. Someone lifts the man to his feet, escorts him away. Thora stands unmoored, empty with victory. Then she sees Santi on his knees, fingers at his throat slick with blood.

“No.” She falls to her knees beside him, hands searching uselessly for the artery. “López. Santi. Wolfie, come on.” Sirens wail, not close enough. Thora feels like she’s observing it all from afar, a tiny figure in a distant universe. “No, no, no,fuckyou,no!” She holds on to him, tight and desperate. “Don’t leave me alone in this.”

Santi’s mouth opens, his eyes fixed on hers. “Remember,” he says, before he goes limp in her arms.

Look Behind You

Santi wakes on an unmoving train.

He lurches forward, wincing at the pain in his neck. Where is he? He peers through the window into a high, vaulted space. Cologne Hauptbahnhof: his destination.

He sits back, pressing his eyes until he sees stars. Didn’t he just come from here? It feels as if he got on the train backward, rode it the wrong way through time to end up where he started.

The conductor strides through the carriage. “Bitte aussteigen! Der Zug endet hier!”

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