Page 88 of Meet Me in Another Life

A scrabbling from inside the tower. Peregrine climbs up through the opening, dusting off his coat. “Yes?”

Thora clears her throat. “We decided.”

Peregrine looks uncertainly at Santi. “Both?”

Santi shudders. Thora knows a moment of terror mixed with relief: he is going to refuse, spare her and doom them both.

“Yes,” he says, and it’s over, the choice is made.

Thora convulses with her first real jolt of fear. She holds on to the edge of the tower until it passes. “Peregrine,” she says. “I was wondering if you could do something for me.”

“Yes?”

“I want there to be a copy of me in the city. Built of everything I was in here. Sitting outside Der Zentaur, swearing at the new recruits, drinking Brigitta out of red wine.” She makes the mistake of meeting Santi’s eyes. She swallows. “Can—can you do that?”

Peregrine nods.

Thora turns to Santi, takes his hands. Her heart is an exploding star, and she wants this to be over, and she never wants it to end. “Remember me,” she says. With a choked laugh, she adds, “All of me.”

Santi shakes his head. “All of you wouldn’t fit in my mind, or in any simulation. Only the universe can hold you.”

“I’ve been lucky, really. Most people only get one life. I’ve had more than I can count.” She squeezes his hands. “They tricked us, by the way. Do you see how they did it?”

“No,” he says, heartbroken. “Tell me.”

She rests her head against his, looking out over the river. “I used to be so obsessed with making the right choice. Then, after I found out what was happening to us, I thought it proved that none of our choices in here meant anything. But I was wrong. Every single choice we made told us something about ourselves, about each other.” She turns back to him, moves his hands in emphasis with her words. “Peregrine tried to tell us, but I didn’t understand. I do now. That was the point. For me to know every you. And for you to know every me. Because there’s only the two of us here, we needed to be everything to each other. And no one can be that. Not in just one life.” Her voice shakes. “But we’ve lived so many, and I know you, as well as I know myself. And I know that every single version of us would choose the journey. Whatever it costs.”

He gazes at her, the tears streaming freely down his face. “Look,” she says, mock-frustrated. “I’m giving you this one. Why are you crying?”

A laugh mixes with his sobs. Thora kisses his forehead as a shadow falls across her. Peregrine, standing between her and the stars. “Ready?” he asks.

Thora takes in a deep breath. How could she ever be ready to die? She needs a recapitulation, her life flashing before her eyes, but which life? The one she wants is the one she doesn’t have: the real life she’ll never remember, shattered into echoes across this imaginary city.All right, space girl, Jules says in her mind.I’ll be waiting.

“One more thing.” She looks at Santi, a strange calm settlingover her. “I want you to take a message back to Jules. I don’t know if we’re together, or if we used to be, or if it’s just something I wish could have happened. I guess I’ll never wake up to find out. But I want you to tell her that if she’s half as amazing as her echoes, then I was very lucky to know her.”

Santi nods. “I’ll tell her.” He closes his eyes, getting himself under control. Thora just looks at him: his long eyelashes, his strong nose, the way his mouth moves when he’s trying not to cry. Like a childhood home, seen so close and so often that you stop noticing what it looks like, until you leave and ache with missing it. Before she can look away, he opens his eyes. “You can change your mind,” he says, almost pleading.

She smiles. “Would you?”

He shakes his head.

“Well, then.” A plume of parakeets rises from the fountain. Thora watches them fly over the river toward the edge of the city, imagines she can catch the moment when they disappear. She remembers standing at the top of this tower so many lives ago, sparking a flickering flame.You never know when you might need to set something on fire.“I’m ready.”

Santi turns to Peregrine, murmurs something. Then he gathers her into his arms.

She feels the warmth first, moving through her chilled limbs. Then she sees the flames, invisibly bright at the corner of her eye, the only light up here besides the stars. Her breath comes short. Santi is gasping in her ear, and she is clinging to him, and she doesn’t want to die.No, she thinks in desperation,no, I can’t do this, I need to live.But if she says it aloud, Santi will save her. She focuses on him, thinks of him waking into their shared dream. She relaxes her fingers and willingly, joyfully lets go.

The chime sounds in real time, sharp as the gathering smoke.She can’t feel Santi anymore. Her vision crowds with hallucinations: parakeets bursting through the wall of a spaceship; her and Santi’s names written across the stars; bridges crumbling, borne down by the weight of human love. She sees the view from the top of the tower, the square spread below her in impossible daylight. Squinting, she thinks she sees him at a table outside Der Zentaur: Santi as she has known him, head bowed, drawing in his memory book.

A laugh gasps through her stricken body, using the last of her air. Maybe this is what the afterlife will be for her. An endless argument with Santiago López Romero. In this moment, she can think of worse ways to spend eternity.

The visions fade, burned away by a white light that hums as it expands. Thora tries to draw in a final breath, but she is nothing and nowhere, drowning in radiance.A bright light, she thinks as it consumes her.How original.

The light hurts Thora’s eyes.

A cacophony of sound, resolving into the endless alarm and the delayed humming of Peregrine’s extractors. Thora rips her way free of the IVs, the heating pads, clumsy as if she has gained an extra dimension. She is here. She is alive. Gasping, she gropes for the button that unseals her compartment. She claws her way out in weightless delirium, her body remembering her training while her mind lags behind in the simulation, clinging to Santi at the top of the clock tower. She palms her way down the scorched wall to his compartment, believing for the first time in a miracle.Both of us. Both of us made it out.

Then she sees his body through the glass.

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