Page 67 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora blinks. “Wow,” she says aloud, to the whipping wind and the impossible sky. “Looks like I broke gravity.”

The words resonate in her memory, bringing an echo back. Santi, hunched at his computer in the astronomy lab, saying the same thing about his simulation.

Thora sits bolt upright, almost losing her balance. Santi’s refilling coffee cup. The miracle food she has lived on for the past two lifetimes. The hole where she sits right now, a door between two places that shouldn’t be connected. Bugs, all of them, in a simulation more complex than she would have imagined possible. And hovering just below her, another bug, but with a difference. She made this one happen.

The Santi who was her student tips back in his chair, humming that same infuriating tune.I gave the simulation an input it wasn’t expecting.Thora peers at the frozen trail of red hanging between her and the cobbled ground. “I guess they didn’t expect anyone to pour wine through a hole in the sky.”

She laughs, caught in a rush of discovery she hasn’t felt for lifetimes. If she can break gravity in a single patch of air, there must be a way to break everything. Tear the city apart from the inside. All she needs to do is give the simulation inputs it wasn’t set up to handle, until she triggers a bug catastrophic enough to make it crash.

Elated, she climbs back through the mirror into Der Zentaur. Brigitta glares at her. “What are you doing behind my bar?”

Thora waves her arm through the mirror. “What’s a hole in reality doing behind your bar?”

Brigitta blinks, confused. Thora remembers the same look on Jules’s face and feels a tug like the pull of an old scar.

She sighs. “I know. You don’t know what to say.” She pats the barmaid on the shoulder and walks out, already planning her next move.

Thora pries another padlock off the Hohenzollernbrücke and hurls it down into the river. She waits for the faraway splash, then turns back to check her progress. Three-quarters of the fence stretches empty behind her; the rest still gleams with mismatched and sentimental eyesores. Soon, it will be clear, and the simulated river will have two tons of unexpected metal to contend with. “See how you handle that, universe,” she mutters. She crouches again, maneuvering her wrenches into the shackle of the next lock. She’s so absorbed that she doesn’t immediately notice when someone walks past her humming a familiar tune.

Her head turns. The man is walking away, but she’d know his gait anywhere. She watches Santi head for the opposite bank. The last thing she wants is to face him. But she burns with the need to know where he’s going, if he’s trying to find his own way out.

She packs her wrenches away in her rucksack and follows. Staying at a safe distance, she tracks him to the Odysseum, camouflaging herself in the crowd as he heads inside. He does a leisurely circuit of the planetarium and the hall of astronauts before turning into the quiet corridor with the room marked “Under Construction.” Thora watches as he sits down on a bench opposite the image from the Kepler telescope and starts sketching. Every so often, he looks up, as though he’s waiting for someone. Forher, Thora assumes as she ducks out of view; but why not wait at Der Zentaur, where she would know to find him?

He stays for half an hour. When he gets up to leave, she follows, tailing him back across the bridge to the cathedral square; through the old town to the clock tower; onto a train to Fühlingen, where he sits on the beach by the artificial lake where they once swam as brother and sister. In every place, the same pattern: sketch, pause, scan the crowd for a face he doesn’t find. When he leaves the beach, Thora watches him cross the main road and pass through a rusted wrought-iron gate into an abandoned three-story mansion.

Her scalp prickles with curiosity. She settles down in the bushes of the overgrown garden to wait.

Finally, as the sun sinks behind the house, he emerges. Thora waits for him to pass through the gate before she sneaks up the drive, under the arched cloister, and through the house’s open doorway.

She’s not sure what she expected. But as the evening light falls through the empty windows, she finds she isn’t surprised. Santi has turned the house into his memory book. Murals cover the crumbling brick walls: world after world of the two of them, the city, the cathedral, the clock tower. And the stars, over and over, filling the gaps between.

She follows the trail of paintings up the stairs. Some lives show up again and again: the pair of them in their police uniforms, fireworks bursting around their heads; the life where they were adopted twins, Thora underwater, Santi reaching to grab her heel; two students at the top of the tower, looking up at the bewildering stars. One wall shows their parents, Thora’s sharply observed, Santi’s more impressionistic, as if it is easier for him to capture what he is less close to. On the opposite wall, their other constants: Lily and Jaime and Aurelia, Héloïse and Jules. Thoraslides past them with a kind of vertigo, not daring to meet their eyes. She stops under the portrait of a long-haired man in a blue coat wearing a worried expression.

“I know you,” she says under her breath. “How do I know you?” She hunts back through her memories. A hand on her and Santi’s shoulders as they stood under the clock tower. A flash of blue against the sand, when he collapsed beside them on the beach. In a rush, it all connects. The beach. The clock tower. The Odysseum. Santi has been looking for this man, in every place they have seen him.

“Thora.”

She whirls. Santi stands in the doorway.

Thora stiffens against the wall. “Don’t come any closer.”

“I’m not going to hurt you.” He holds up his hands. “I saw you on the bridge. I know you’ve been following me.”

She stares at him. “Why didn’t you say something?”

His grimace is almost a smile. “I was too angry.”

“You’reangry?” Thora almost chokes. “You stabbed me in the heart!”

“You un-existed my wife!”

From the wall behind her, Thora feels Héloïse’s eyes boring into her back. The woman who was once her mother. The woman she led by the hand to her annihilation. Sickness rises up in her throat. “I shouldn’t have done it,” she says, looking away. “But—it’s always so easy for you to destabilize me. Like you did last time. Just show me Jules, and I’m a wreck. But you—you’re always so fucking serene, so in control. I just wanted you toreact, for once.” She takes in a deep breath. “I did what I did because I knew it would make you angry. But I never thought it’d make you angry enough tokillme.”

He avoids her eyes. “I told you I thought there was somethingwe had to do to atone. That we would have to give up something we didn’t want to lose.” He shrugs, helpless. “At the very end—I thought it was you.”

Thora puts her hand to her head. “Let me get this straight. You stabbed me in the heart because you thought God wanted you to?”

Santi has the grace to look ashamed. “Tests are supposed to be hard,” he points out.

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