Page 85 of Meet Me in Another Life

“Sorry.” He rubs his eyes. “I keep falling asleep.”

“Look at us,” she says, breaking into laughter as she lowers herself onto his sofa. “I was in better shape when I was eighty years old and dying of cancer.”

“Thora,” he says. “What do we do?”

Thora feels a churning in her stomach, a last refusal. But it’s futile, like screamingnointo a hurricane as it tears your house apart. “Go to the Odysseum, while we can still get there. Keep trying. If we don’t make it—at least we’ll see how it ends.”

He nods, a terrible peace in his eyes. She knows him. The one thing he’s never been afraid of facing is death.

At the door, he casts about as if he’s forgetting something. He laughs. “What am I doing? It’s not like we can take anything with us.” Félicette rubs up against his legs, then spasms, hissing at something that isn’t there.

“We’re not bringing your defective cat,” Thora says, guessing what he’s thinking. She watches him scratch Félicette’s ears, make her promise to be good.

At the Odysseum, they sit in front of the video, looking up into the faces of their dreaming selves. Thora shakes with hunger. “So where are we now?” she asks Santi. “Hope or despair?”

“Both,” he says.

“Both,” she agrees. She lets her head fall onto his shoulder.

They watch and wait: for the end, for an answer, for a revelation. Time stretches and compresses like the beating of a slow heart. Thora is not sure if they sleep. She only knows she is aware of something new: a noise from the video, impossibly low, rattling like a train coming down the track toward them.

She lifts her head. “What is that?”

Santi sits up. “Do—do your trick,” he says, searching for words. “What you did with my song. Speed it up.”

Thora fumbles with her phone, the controls baroque and unwieldy to her clumsy fingers. On the third try, she manages. She presses play and hears a chime, soft and insistent. “Must be an alarm, warning us of our imminent demise. How considerate.”

“I’ve heard that before.” Santi turns to her, a spark shining through his exhaustion. “At the beach. Remember?”

Thora closes her eyes, reaching back through her myriad lives. Once, she was a teenage girl crouching on shaking sand. After the collision, after Peregrine collapsed beside her, she heard it, coming from everywhere and nowhere. “I could smell smoke,” she says. “But there wasn’t a fire.”

“There was,” Santi says. “But not in the simulation. On the ship.”

Thora understands. Flames too bright for this world, blazing at the corner of her eye in odd moments ever since. The smell of smoke. The alarm. Fragments of reality bleeding through.

She opens her eyes. Santi’s face is a mirror of her own: excitement, fear, and a trace of strange regret. “We were starting to wake up.”

“Fuck,” Thora says, and then, “Peregrine!”

“Yes?”

They both jump. He’s standing behind them, manifested from nowhere.

“Jesus.” Thora stands up, leaning on Santi for support. “Peregrine, this is important. Remember the collision? There was a fire on the ship. Whatever you did to stop it—could you reverse it?”

Peregrine stares at her like she’s speaking in tongues.

Santi gets to his feet. “Let me talk to him. I’ve had seven years of practice, remember?”

Thora bites her nails as Santi takes Peregrine aside. She watches him as he talks, as he listens, coaxing fragments of truth from a broken machine. Peregrine stutters, blinks, speaks. As Thora watches, something happens to Santi’s face.

“What?” she says when he comes back. “What did he say?”

He shakes his head, quick and tight. “We can’t do it.”

“Why?” He avoids her eyes. “Santi, I’ll ask him myself, even if it takes all the time we have left to get an answer. What, would it destroy the ship?”

“Not the ship.” He takes in a shuddering breath. “Your compartment. The fire—it started to melt the wires that control the outflow valve. It got stuck half-open. Air was leaking out.”

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