Page 68 of Meet Me in Another Life

Thora gestures emphatically around them. “Well, we’re still here. Obviously you didn’t pass.”

A heavy silence falls between them. Thora turns back to the portrait of the man in the blue coat. “You’re looking for him,” she says. “Why?”

Santi walks hesitantly closer. “Everyone else who comes back—they belong to you or they belong to me. But this man knows us both. I think he might be able to tell us what’s really happening.” He looks at her sideways, reading her silence. “What?”

Sometimes, she wishes he didn’t know her so well. “Nothing,” she says. “It’s a good idea. It’s just very—you. Find the man in charge and ask him to explain what it all means.”

She sees him resist a smile. “What were you doing on the bridge?”

Thora explains her plan. He listens with his usual careful attention. “Trying to find a miracle that will break the world,” he muses when she’s finished.

Thora rolls her eyes. “Of course you’d find a way to make me hate my own idea.” She watches his face. “Go on then. Tell me what’s wrong with it.”

“You’re assuming that if we crash the simulation, we get out,” he says. “What if we don’t? What if it just—takes away the only reality we have?”

Thora gnaws her lip. Why does he always have to see the weakness in her plans? “It’s possible. But right now, I don’t have any better ideas.”

Another silence: an opening for them to keep talking, to find a way to work this out together. But what happened last time is still an open wound between them. “I should go,” Thora says. “World’s not going to break itself, is it?”

“Keep me posted.” Santi leans back against the painting of the man in the blue coat. “If I’m not out looking for him, I’ll be here.”

Thora pauses at the top of the stairs. “Why?” she asks, gesturing at the rest of his gallery. “What’s this all for?”

“Last time, you told me none of this was real.” Thora hears the pain that hides under the words: Jules standing in the square, her face a mask of confusion; Héloïse’s hand vanishing from her grasp. Santi turns back to his paintings. “I don’t think that’s right. I think there are—pieces of the real, scattered through each life.” He brushes dust off a corner of his work. “Those pieces are what I’m trying to find.”

“You told me once that was why you started your memory book.” The dim-lit kitchen of her and Jules’s flat at two in the morning, feeding Oskar while Santi wrote a codex of their deaths. The memory hurts. Was that the last life she got right? That self seems so far away, overwritten by all the mistakes she’s made. “And if we find out what’s real?” she asks. “How does that help us get out?”

Santi closes his eyes. “The life where we met in the hostel. I thought if I could find out who I was, then I would know where I was going.” His eyes open, meeting hers. “If we find what’s real, we find the way out.”

Thora looks away. She’s not sure she wants to know who she truly is. However much she dislikes her current self, she can still find comfort in the lives where she made different choices. Whatif her real self has made a choice she can’t take back: a choice she can’t live with? If she stops moving, if she tries to confront who they really are, she thinks she might fall to pieces.

She nods tightly. “Good luck,” she says. “If I see your guy, I’ll let you know.”

Santi watches her leave as if he doesn’t expect her to come back.

Thora sits on the grass, a spray bottle of water in her left hand and a blanket in her right. In front of her is a plate of millet. Behind her is a cage filled with parakeets.

The next bird lands in a flurry of bright green. Thora stays as still as death until it starts pecking at the millet. She moves like a closing trap, soaking the bird with her spray bottle. As it struggles to take off, she throws the blanket over it, bundles it up, opens the cage, and releases it inside.

She closes the cage door and counts the birds. Enough for a morning’s work. She gathers her tools and starts walking backward across the park toward Ehrenfeld. She hefts the cage at an old woman following her down the path. “Never seen someone walking backward with a cage full of parakeets before?” she yells, in a nonsense pidgin of bad Czech and Icelandic.

The old woman shakes her head and takes another path. Thora laughs out loud in the illusory sunshine, feeling herself teeter on the brink of madness.

At the foot of the lighthouse, she sets the cage down. She pushes each wriggling bird through the solid concrete and lets it go. When the cage is empty, she picks up her bag of seed and pokes her head through the wall. Inside, the air is a whirling mess of birds. She scatters a few good handfuls, tops up the water feeder, then backs out onto the street.

Trying to break the world is hungry work. She heads to the old town and grabs a miracle currywurst from the van outside the cathedral, although she’s not sure it will help. For the last few lives, food has been sitting hollow in her stomach. She doesn’t plan to tell Santi. He would only say it’s a metaphor for her spiritual starvation, or something equally profound.

She’s leaning against the glass wall of the Hauptbahnhof when she sees him on the cathedral steps, sketching in his book. She finds herself thinking of the house, empty and waiting, filled with their memories. Before she’s conscious of what she’s doing, she finds herself on the next train to Fühlingen. She doesn’t understand why until she walks through the house’s empty doorway and her feet take her straight to Jules.

She looks down from the wall, vivid as life, eyes crinkling in a frank smile. Thora thinks of all the versions of Jules she has known: each, if Santi is right, an echo of the real one. She remembers the conviction that crystallized in her over time, that she could only be with Jules if she gave up the idea of elsewhere. Is that a choice she has already made? Or one she is still making?

Before she leaves, she pauses under the painting of the man in the blue coat. There’s something she needs to remember: a word, lurking at the tip of her tongue. She closes her eyes to try and hear it better. Brightness flares at the corner of her vision, the smell of smoke sudden in her throat. Sand under her fingers, and a flash of blue.

The beach. The man in the blue coat lying on the sand, telling her something had happened. She asked his name, and he told her.Peregrine.

She writes the name on the wall under the painting. Let Santi find it, next time he comes. No doubt he’ll decide it means something.

The next day, she’s up a ladder in the planetarium of the Odysseum, patiently unscrewing the bulbs that stand for the stars, when her phone buzzes with a message.

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