Page 74 of Meet Me in Another Life

Santi steps back, looking for the final piece. A glass case under the video wall. He and Thora head for it at the same time. He leans over to see a model spacecraft, the top cut away so they can look inside. Fuel tanks, oxygen, water, supplies. And two tiny figures in separate compartments, the simulacra of the people on the screen.

He becomes aware of a sound, a ticking like an irregular clock. It hypnotizes him until he realizes it’s Thora, tapping a silver plaque on the front of the case.Peregrine, it says. Below is a smaller version of the star map on the ceiling. Santi traces a course from Earth to an exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri.

For a long time, Thora doesn’t speak. Finally, she looks up at him. “You’re telling me we’ve spent lifetime after lifetime struggling and striving and longing to go to the stars, and we’realready fucking there?”

It’s such a Thora response that he laughs aloud. His laugh breaks through some wall in her. She laughs too, throwing her head back. “Santi, this is absurd. How could we—we can’t be...” She’s faltering, his endlessly argumentative Thora finally running out of words. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does.” Santi taps the plaque. “Remember his name?”

Thora traces the letters. “Peregrine,” she says softly. She straightens up, turns it into a summons. “Peregrine!”

He walks in as if he has been waiting outside. As the man in the blue coat limps toward them, Santi meets his eyes. Sad eyes, anxious eyes, like someone carrying a great burden.

“This is you?” Santi asks, pointing to the model ship in the glass case.

“Yes.” Peregrine looks at Thora, his expression flickering from awe to tenderness to grief.

“He’s an interface,” Thora says. “Between us and the ship.”

Santi was sure the man meant something, that he stood for something greater. It was true, but not in the way he imagined. He is a construct, built to turn a mind-melting complexity of matter into a form they can speak to.

Thora’s voice trembles. “What is our mission? Why are we going to Proxima?”

“You...” Peregrine’s eyes close, his face twitching. “First,” he says finally. “To see, to seek, to know.”

Joy bursts through Santi’s heart, filling his veins with light. He was right all along, to believe there was a meaning. “Exploration,” he says. “The first crewed mission to a planet outside the solar system.”

“Yes.”

Santi meets Thora’s eyes. “What no one else has ever seen,” he forces out through his rapture. “We’re going to be the ones to see it.”

Thora shakes her head, a violent, repetitive motion. “I can’t believe it. I want to believe it too much—I—”

He takes her in his arms. “Believe it.”

He feels the moment she succumbs, lets the knowledge becomeher reality. She gasps, her rib cage expanding against his like she is taking her first breath. “We fucking made it,” she says fiercely in his ear.

“We’d always made it.” He takes her hand, draws her back to look up at the two of them. He laughs hoarsely. “It’s us. Look at us. There we are.”

He can feel her shaking. “You’re really rocking the Jesus look.”

“Your hairisblue,” he says. “Well, part of it.”

“I would never dye my tips,” Thora says scornfully. “That’s short hair that’s grown out.”

At the same time, they realize what it means. Santi turns to Peregrine. “How long have we been in there?”

“For you—” Peregrine stutters, begins again. “Fifteen point three years.”

“Fifteen—” Thora’s eyes widen. “We’ve been in that box for fifteen years?”

Santi hallucinates the metal enclosing him, his body inert and powerless. He flexes his hands into fists. “How much longer until we arrive?”

Peregrine blinks, harrowed then calm in the space of a second. “Minus four point nine years.”

Santi looks at Thora. “I’m sorry. Did you say—minus?”

Thora’s face goes pale in the ghost-light. “He means we already arrived.”

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