Page 70 of Meet Me in Another Life

“His name,” she says, looking up at the mural of Peregrine. “It means wanderer.”

“Pilgrim,” Santi corrects her softly.

He meets her eyes. She sees the grief there, deeper than hers: he really believed Peregrine would lead them to the truth. “I’m sorry he didn’t have the answers,” she says.

He half-smiles. “It doesn’t mean the answers aren’t there. It just means we have to keep looking.”

Thora looks down at her fingers, the rope-like tendons controlling the poor puppet of her body. “I wish I was more like you. I wish I could see a meaning.”

“I don’t see it. I look for it.” His voice is quiet. “You think it’s easy. You think it—comes naturally to me. But it doesn’t. I choose it. Every single time.”

They keep looking. Thora sticks her fingers into the live sockets of the world, trying to raise a spark that will burn down the lies and leave the truth behind. Santi draws together threads from each of their lives, seeking a color that glitters through them all.

In a strange way, Thora is happier than she has been in lifetimes. She has a mission, the possibility of a way out, and she is not alone: Santi is searching beside her. Still, it doesn’t surprise her that the same goal manifests differently when filtered through their two minds. He’s still reading the world for meaning, as he has always done. She is trying to break it apart from the inside. Either way, this strange work suits their natures. In their different ways, they have always been explorers.

After a morning spent stripping padlocks from the rest of the bridge, she heads for Fühlingen under strange gathering clouds. She makes it to the house before the rain starts. Lounging on the sill of one of the front windows, she waits for Santi to arrive. Something odd is happening outside. Rain is falling, but not only rain: something else, heavy and flopping, splattering messily on the overgrown driveway. Thora leans out of the window and watches in delight.

A few minutes later she sees Santi running across the garden, pulling up the back of his coat to shield his head. He appears on the stairs, panting and shaking himself off. “Thora,” he asks patiently, “why is it raining fish?”

“Because my approach is working.” She jumps down from the windowsill and comes to see what he was painting last time. A vague, impressionistic portrait of a man she doesn’t recognize: bearded, with long dark hair, veiled in shadows. “Who’s this?”

Santi steps back from the wall, tilting his head. “After we fell from the tower.” Thora notices he doesn’t sayjumped. “I saw this face.”

Thora stares at him. “Really? I saw a face too.”

“The same one?” This version of Santi goes so swiftly from vague artist to laser-focused investigator. Thora supposes he’s had enough practice at being both.

She shakes her head. “The one I saw was definitely a woman.Also way less—Jesusy.” She wrinkles her nose. “Maybe we both just saw what we expected to see.”

“Why did you expect to see a woman?”

Thora shrugs. “Because whoever’s masterminding all this has to be pretty smart?”

Santi laughs, then closes his eyes, catching himself on the wall.

Thora frowns. “What’s wrong?”

Slowly, he opens his eyes. “Dizzy spell. I’ve been having them for a few lifetimes now.”

Thora watches him warily. “I’m hungry all the time,” she says. “No matter what I eat. I would have mentioned it before, but I was worried you’d tell me it meant something.”

Santi dips his paintbrush, giving her a tired smile. “Probably nothing good.”

Pushing down her disquiet, Thora moves past him to examine the walls. “You’re running out of space.” Almost every brick is covered. “Did you find your answer? Do you know who we are yet?”

He pauses, brush in midair. “I think so,” he says. “But you tell me.”

Thora takes in the gallery of their lives. Her eight-year-old self, wrapped in her father’s scarf, looking up at the false stars in the Odysseum. The two of them hunched over their computers in the astronomy lab, faces lit by the glow of their invented worlds. Santi, lost and homeless, searching a maze of streets for a sign that says WE ARE HERE. She looks back at him now: younger than he was then, but older, too, in a way only she can see.

“So?” he asks her with a fond smile. “What’s the heart of us, every time?”

“We always go looking,” Thora says. “We always want elsewhere.” She glances across at Jules, smiling down at her fromanother reality. “Even when it means leaving the ones we love behind.”

Santi nods. “I think you’re right.”

“Are you sure?” Thora’s voice catches. “Maybe that’s just who we wish we were.”

In lieu of an answer, he points with his paintbrush to a corner of the room she hasn’t seen yet. Painted down the wall are miniature tableaux of her explorations in this life, Santi’s graphic shorthand so practiced he can evoke her in a few lines. Thora on the bridge, hurling padlocks down through water clogged with space helmets and skeletons. Thora holding a flock of parakeets on strings, thorns and diacritics spilling from her mouth. Thora walking endlessly backward, like he’s calling her home. “It’s who we are right now,” he says. “You in your way, me in mine. We chose it, and we’ll keep choosing it.”

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