Page 62 of Meet Me in Another Life

“I don’t want you to be alone,” he says.

She should tell him to leave. He’s still a little drunk: he could slip and fall, and she would have another of his deaths on her conscience. She goes along with it anyway, because every terrible idea resonates to the frequency of her misery.

The tower is taller than she remembers. She stops while they’re still inside, on a ridge of the crumbled steps where there’s just enough room for them to sit. She gasps, getting her wind back; Santi, of course, is hardly out of breath. It hammers in what lies in store: the sickening repetition of another childhood, another rush of memories, another half a lifetime alone in the déjà vu city. She scrapes her hand against the brick until it grazes. Lifetimes ago, climbing down, she looked through a gap and saw herself endlessly refracted.

“What are you thinking?” Santi asks.

She looks at his open, concerned face. Fuck it: if she doesn’t say this to him now, she never will. “I never told you what it was like. To wait.” She looks down at her boots hanging over the drop. “Twenty-five years, Santi. Longer than your whole life sofar. That’s how long I was alone. Just—waiting for you to show up. And then you did, and”—her voice breaks on her laughter—“you were ababy. Can you imagine? You’re right there, but you’re not you, you’re this formless thing that can’t even talk, and I see glimpses of you in there, but it’s not enough, and everything I do to try and help you become yourself again might—it might—” She stops, swallows, finally speaks the fear that has gripped her since she first held him. “I worry I did too much. I worry I tried to turn you into someone, and I worry that it’s worked.”

His gaze is not troubled enough. “Whatever you did, you can’t have made me into a different person. I’m still me.”

“Which is exactly what I’d expect you to say.” Thora can’t articulate to him the terror of it: the only person she can’t see through becoming a mirror of herself, a creature of her own construction. She breathes out, trying to exorcise the long tension of this life, the feeling of everything being on her shoulders. “What I said before—I meant it. I can’t do this again. I can’t be so far ahead. I can’t wait for you to grow up.” Far below them, fallen leaves rustle invisibly in the dark.

“Before,” Santi says, his voice shaking. “When I said there wasn’t anything we could do about it. I was wrong, wasn’t I?”

Thora looks at him. His eyes flick unmistakably down.

A chill runs through her. She stares at Santi: not Santi, but something uncanny, a monster pieced together from her projections.What did I do to you?“Don’t be ridiculous. You—you’re at the beginning of your life—”

He shakes his head. “I want to do the right thing. I want—I want to help you.”

For an instant, Thora sees all the way into him: his deep uncertainty, his willingness to let her nudge him into a death he’s known before. Another Santi falling. Another Santi standing atthe foot of the tower, mourning his own death, accepting it as God’s will. He is, in this life, so much what she has made of him. If she told him to climb down, he would. But she’s not strong enough to do this alone. “Okay,” she says, her voice breaking.

Wind whistles through the gaps in the tower. A song in the unreal city’s voice.Do it.A thought worthy of another Santi, obsessively counting the locks on the bridge. Thora doesn’t truly hear it, but she knows one thing: if they climb down, this moment will never come again.

Her blood hammers in her ears. She has died so many times, but never like this. There is nothing familiar about hanging above this drop, knowing the crunch and shatter at the end, knowing it will be her own doing. Everything inside her screams, her body a palace of alarms telling her to back down. But she has never been one to do what she is told.

She turns to Santi, kisses his forehead. Their hands come together. “Find me, as soon as you remember,” she says. “I’ll leave a message for you.”

He presses his forehead to hers. She can feel him trembling. “I’ll wait for you.”

“I’ll wait for you.” Her hand tightens on his.

Together, they jump. As they fall, Thora knows a moment of sickening regret.No. I take it back.But it’s too late. Santi’s hand loosens from hers, lets go. She hears him cry out before they hit the ground.

At the moment of impact, she sees something else. Brightness beyond belief, hurting her eyes; then, in the dimming darkness, the shadow of a face looking back at her.

Follow the Light

Santi is waiting under the lighthouse in Ehrenfeld when Thora walks through the wall.

She looks the way she always looks to him, like reality precipitating from a dream. It’s a heart-shock to see her. She’s his age: of course, this time they must have been born at the exact same second.

She grins at him. “You figured out my message.”

Santi nods. He can’t trust himself to speak. He almost couldn’t bear to go to the clock tower; it felt like stepping on unholy ground. He only stayed long enough to read the words she had written there. FOLLOW THE LIGHT. It hit him like a cruel joke. What else has he been trying to do, all these many lives? And what has Thora done but drag him again and again into darkness?

She knocks his arm in friendly rebuke. “What took you so long?”

“I only just arrived.”

Thora frowns. She’s settled on a hair color, the rainbow he remembers dulled to the blue of an evening sky. He wonders if it’s a Thora costume, her way of making believe she’s the sameperson every time. When did she start thinking that way? When did he start thinking of himself as multiple, a series of watercolor portraits on glass? Like Thora said last time, they have been slowly changing sides. “I don’t get it,” she says. “We died together. We’re clearly the same age. Why did we still arrive here at different times?”

We died together.How easily she says it: as if they crashed in the same car, or fell victim to the same slow disease. He remembers taking her hand. He remembers falling in the dark, terror and rushing air and too-late regret. But he doesn’t recognize the person who made that memory. The act is a horror: a fault line in who he is that he doesn’t think he will ever come to terms with.

He remembers the moment of impact, the face that looked back at him when he died. Long-haired, shadowed, with eyes that saw him at his lowest and knew him for what he was.

He was sure—is still sure—that what is needed from them is atonement: a meaningful, deliberate sacrifice. There, inside the darkness of the tower, he believed that what he had to sacrifice was himself. He marvels at how completely Thora twisted his thinking. Joining her in self-annihilation was the easy way out. The true path to redemption will be harder: so hard that when he sees it, his soul will cry out against it. He is determined that this time, he will not fail.

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