Page 60 of Meet Me in Another Life

“You’ll see her again,” she says. He’s half on the sofa, half on the floor, face pressed into her shirt while she rubs his back. It should confuse her, how she feels like his mother and his sister and his lover all at once. But the worlds have scraped away her capacity for confusion. “She’ll be back next time, just the same.”

“It still hurts to lose her,” he mumbles wetly into her shoulder.

Thora can’t repress her impatient thought: now Maria is gone, now he is grown, there is nothing to stop them from looking for a way out. “Wouldn’t be much of a punishment if it didn’t hurt,” she murmurs.

Santi pulls back from her. He frowns, rubbing the tattoo he got on his eighteenth birthday: the stars that haven’t been in the sky or on her wrist for lifetimes now. “Can we go somewhere? We need to talk.”

Thora blinks. “About what?”

“Everything.” He looks down with a bitter smile. “It’s not like there’s anything to stop us now.”

Thora shivers at the echo of her thought. “Of course.”

She lives in Agnesviertel this time, a futile attempt to make the city seem new. The streets are still deadly familiar, winding around them like a closing noose. Santi leads the way, south toward the cathedral and the old town. “I guess it’s good that we don’t have to speak in code anymore.”

“Code.” Thora laughs. “Like when you yelled at me, ‘You’re not my sister this time’?”

“That’s not fair,” Santi says. “I was six.”

Thora senses she’s upset him in a way she doesn’t understand. Shouldn’t she get him by now? Shouldn’t she be able to see inside him, find the problem, and fix it?

He meets her eyes in challenge. “So you still think we’re being punished?”

“Still?” Thora is puzzled until it comes to her: his crying eight-year-old face, a guilt that hung over her for days. “Oh. I didn’t think you’d remember that.”

He gives her a dark look. “Of course I remember. I was eightyears old, and you told me I was trapped forever because of something bad I’d done. That sticks with you.”

Thora looks away. “Sorry I traumatized you with the truth.”

He turns on her, all teenage anger, a Santi she doesn’t recognize. “How do you know it’s the truth?”

Thora spreads her arms wide. “What else could this be? Take two people who want to go everywhere and see everything, and trap them in one city for the rest of their infinite lives. Seems pretty perfect to me.”

“So what are we being punished for?” he asks her. “What did we do?”

“I told you, I don’t know! Maybe we murdered someone,” she says, half-joking.

Santi shakes his head. “We’re not killers.”

“Speak for yourself.” She takes out a cigarette—correlation or fate, that she always smokes in the worlds where she’s a medical professional?—and lights it. “I feel more murderous every day I spend in this place.”

“If you think it’s a punishment,” Santi argues, “you must think there’s someone doing the punishing. It means you think this is deliberate. Designed.”

Thora snorts. “Well, yes. Discovering reality literally has a wall around it did change my perspective somewhat.” Before Santi can go on, she adds, “I don’t think it’s God, if that’s what you’re wondering. No, this level of malicious fuckery is all too human.”

“Whoever it is,” he says as they pass under the medieval gate of the Eigelstein-Torburg, “if they’re punishing us, there has to be a chance of redemption. They must have designed a way out.”

“I told you, I’ve tried leaving the city a hundred ways—”

“I don’t mean a physical way out.”

Thora smiles. Maybe he’s not so different from the usual Santi after all. “Oh, I remember,” she says. “The right path.”

They enter the tunnel that leads under the train tracks. Santi’s voice echoes back to her strangely. “I don’t think about it that way anymore. If all of our actions matter, that creates too many paths for just one of them to be right.”

“I’m glad we agree.” Thora follows his shadow through the dark. “What are you thinking instead?”

“That there’s something specific we have to do to atone.”

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