Page 71 of Meet Me in Another Life

She swallows, too moved for a moment to speak. “Do you think it means we’ll get out of here?” she asks him when she can.

He looks up into the eyes of the face he saw when he fell. “It means we’re not going to stop trying.”

Thora shakes herself and heads for the window. “I have to go.”

“Me too,” Santi says dryly. “I have to wash the fish out of my hair.”

Thora pauses as she straddles the windowsill. “If the simulation shuts down, what do you think it’ll look like? I imagine the air sort of—dissolving.”

Santi shrugs. “A bright light, I guess.”

Thora gives him a look of disdain. “My God. The originality. It kills me.” She points out of the window, mock-amazed. “Santi, look! A bright light!”

“That’s the sun.”

“For now. Give me another couple of days,” she says, and climbs out.

She wakes to the knowledge that something is wrong.

Not wrong like waking to a baby crying, or to the smell of gas. Cosmically wrong, like going to sleep under the stars and waking buried alive.

She gasps, clutching at her throat. The air is heavy, then light, gravity and pressure pulsing like a clock out of time. Bracing against the wall, she pulls herself out of bed and hunches over, wincing. Time and space are streaming between her ears. Her nose itches, but she gets the feeling that if she tried to scratch it, her hand would go right through. She straightens up, sidesteps, lunges forward through the black, roaring space. Sounds slice through her, gibberish words made up of German and Russian and English. Visions of parakeets flying through stone, of Santi’s face in countless fracturing facets, oscillate before her eyes.

She doesn’t know how she gets to the window. Santi stands below her in what used to be the street, now a mosaic of fragments grouted with void. With one step, she is with him in no-place. He stands with his back to her, his outline vibrating.

“Santi.” She shakes his shoulder, feeling the buzz of conducted strangeness. Visions tear through her: mushrooms, pale and looming, Jules’s face, the skeleton of the clock tower, glassy and made of bones. A lighthouse made of crochet billows wildly across the sky. “I did it,” she says, hearing her words echo and split, come back to her as a buzzing whine.

Santi looks up at the swirling sky, fragments of Cologne funneling into chaos. “You did something.”

She follows his gaze upward. Twin stars, blinding her as they fall. She recognizes them too late as the lights on a subway train, hurtling down with a sound like claws on glass. She yelps in half-laughing terror and pulls Santi out of the way. She keeps hold of his hand as she runs, leading him in tripping leaps over swathes of nothing, down the floating fragments of what used to be the road into the city. A distorted chittering swoops above her. She looks up into a flock of tiny green birds, flying in a backward loop around their heads.

“Where are we going?” Santi yells.

“Out,” Thora yells back over her shoulder. “There are holes in everything now. There has to be one we can escape through.”

“Are you sure?” Santi shouts.

“No,” she yells back, closing her hand firmly around his. Even if they’re going nowhere, they are going together.

They stagger, sometimes crushed by a grinding force, sometimes floating above the shrapnel of the road. They run until the fragments under their feet coalesce into cobblestones. They are in the old town, or what’s left of it, a mess of shards like the moment of an explosion. Thora sees herself in the sky, a flash of blue and a beckoning arm. She and Santi are painted on the stars, where they have always belonged. At the base of the clock tower, the words she finally wrote there—WHO WE ARE—stretch and yaw, eddying out to surround them. The tower splits and expands in a spinning helix, a drill boring into the sky. A feeling roots itself in Thora’s heart, blossoms into a revelation.

“The stars.” Thora points. “They’re our way out.”

“Yes.” Santi laughs, looking at her in joy. “We finally know where we’re going.”

His hand tightens on hers as their feet leave the flickering ground. They are rising, toward the point where the sky tattersaway, a palimpsest universe coming undone. The wind rises so high they have to shout to hear each other.

“There,” says Santi in her ear, close enough to drown out the storm. “There, do you see?”

Thora can barely open her eyes. She squints upward where he’s pointing, but the light fades, the stars sucked into the maw of the city below, pulling them with it. The square is massing with shapes, a crowd of people staring up. Something is wrong. They’re not going to make it.

“We’re falling,” she tries to say, but the words come out garbled. Her breath pushes out, sucks in again, her body a bellows worked by something outside herself. The hands of the tower clock spin widdershins toward midnight. Time is running backward, unraveling them down to the ground. She holds on to Santi, even as she struggles to push time forward again, to reach the hole the tower is boring into the sky. They spiral down like the linked wings of a sycamore seed into the heart of the crowd. Time judders, resets, restarts.

“Dr. Lišková?” The Santi who was her patient, old and careworn, an endless sorrow in his eyes.

“Thora, what’s happening?”

She turns. He looks up at her, eight years old, lost: the Santi who needed her too much, who held her hand as they leapt from the tower.

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