Page 84 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Okay,” Jules says. “Does that mean maybe later?”

Later.There might not be a later for Thora. But then again, there might. In the moment Jules smiles at her, both possibilities exist at the same time. The hope of seeing her again; the risk of losing her forever.

“How about—” The thought makes her laugh before she says it. “How about I look you up when I’m back on Earth?”

Jules smiles, getting to her feet. “All right, space girl. I’ll be waiting.”

They keep trying. Thora drags Santi with her to the Odysseum to watch the grainy video of their real selves, poring over the feed for any detail they might have missed. In return, she sits by his side and listens to him argue with Peregrine until words lose all meaning. A hundred times, one of them comes up with a plan; a hundred times, the other one dismisses it. One day, they will find the possibility that lies between hope and despair, and be the right people to grasp it.

Until then, Thora lives a half-life in the city, in it but not of it. She thought by now she had seen all of time’s tricks: the elastic summers of childhood, the speeding-up sight of a beautiful girl, the way years, in hindsight, can seem to have flashed past like seconds. But she has never experienced anything like this. Now, she is painfully aware of time passing, the days that are minutes to their sleeping selves. On the afternoons when she walks the river path back from the Odysseum, she watches her shadow lengthen, imagining a heartbeat that lasts a hundred seconds. Sometimes, she thinks she can hear it.

Santi keeps painting his murals, until they spread all across the city from Deutz to Ehrenfeld. At night, Thora ventures out to embroider them with words: fragments of conversations, point and counterpoint in what she now recognizes as one long argument. Finally, she stands under the clock tower, facing its broken wall. Painted over the layers of graffiti is a mural of Peregrine as they know him, the ship that bears his name cradled in his upturned hand. Thora adds a speech bubble coming out from the window.Help, it reads.We’re trapped inside this bird.

Santi laughs when he sees it. “Perfect.” He touches up the paint, never quite finished, never quite satisfied. Thorawatches him working, frowning in concentration, until he stops. “What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Just—if I have to be temporarily stuck in a broken simulation with someone, I’m glad it’s you.”

He pulls her close and kisses her cheek. “Me too.”

Following his lead, Thora tries to pay attention to the beauties of this place. It’s easier now that she can see it as something created, something built with love. The light reflecting from the ripples on the water; the quiet hum of repeated conversations in the background of Der Zentaur; the flights of the parakeets from tree to tree and back. Even the mistakes have a sweetness to them, like familiar imperfections on a beloved face. Because, she realizes, she does love it: a painful, tired love, like the love you feel for a friend who has let you down, but who is so much a part of you that you cannot imagine yourself without them. Still, that’s all she does. Imagine a way out, built of the tiny revelations she and Santi offer each other day by day.

“I figured out what that sound was,” she says, sipping tea at his kitchen table. “The one we heard on the video the other day.”

Santi raises an eyebrow. “The one you described as ‘fucked-up whale song’?”

She nods enthusiastically. “I recorded it on my phone and sped it up.” She plays it to him, watches his face as he listens. “You were singing in your sleep.” The song she sang to him as a baby, the tune he used to hum in the astronomy lab.

His brow furrows. “Did you come up with that, or did I?”

“I don’t remember.” She finishes her tea and gets up to leave.

“Oh. Your question for Peregrine,” Santi says. “I finally got an answer.”

Thora stares at him, heart in her mouth. “Oh?”

He looks away, mumbling. “You’re in command.”

“I knew it!” Thora slaps the table in triumph.

Santi shakes his head. “Took me three hours to get that out of him.Who’s in command, me or Thora?didn’t work. He just stared at me like I was crazy.López or Lišková, though, that was fine.”

Thora smiles. “You told me I was the captain. When you were my teacher.” To Santi’s puzzled look, she says, “Don’t you remember? We were in the Odysseum, playing the navigation game. We had to decide whether to take the long way around or go through the debris field—” Her hand goes to her mouth.

“Peregrine made us play the game. Because it wasn’t a game.” Santi stares at her. “He had a decision to make, and he needed our input without waking us up.”

“So the collision was our fault.”

Santi nods.

“Fuck.” Thora punches the table. “One decision. One stupid fucking wrong choice.” She laughs bitterly. “All the chances we’ve had to live our lives again, to do things differently. And now the one thing that really matters, we can’t take back.”

Santi meets her eyes. “I guess that’s how we know it’s reality.”

Thora holds up her hand. “All right, Mr.there’s-no-wrong-choice, there’s-just-what-happens.” She drops back into her chair. “Do you think we would ever have chosen differently?”

She thinks she knows what he’ll say:No, never. We are who we are.But he shrugs. “Maybe in a different universe.” He gives her a sad smile. “But we’re in this one. We have to live with it, and make the best next choice we can.”

The last leaves fall from the trees. The city takes on a wintry beauty, the cobbles gleaming with frost. Thora’s breath puffs inthe stairwell as she makes her slow way up to Santi’s flat. It takes him a long time to open the door.

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