Page 77 of Meet Me in Another Life

“We’ll get back.”

Thora meets his eyes. After a long moment, she drains the last of her wine. “Okay. Situation assessed. I’m ready to come up with a plan.”

Santi rubs his temples. “Here’s how I see it. We have an interface with the ship. I suggest we use it.”

“Peregrine?” Thora snorts. “He’s about as much use as a broken toaster. I already asked him to wake us up. Twice.”

“You only asked him one way.”

Thora rolls her eyes. “So we should say please?”

“That’s not what I mean.” Santi leans across the table. Something is wrong: Thora is getting further and further away. “The error has affected his language, right? Maybe if we ask the right way, we can get around his mental block.”

“You’re suggesting we try andargueour way out of here?”

“God knows we’ve had enough practice.” He can’t see Thora clearly, but he can still tell she’s giving him a look. “Let me guess,” he says wearily. “You propose a different approach.”

Thora’s voice comes out of the blur. “I want to go back to the Odysseum. Watch the video, go over every inch of that model ship. There has to be something we can—Santi?”

He goes to rub his eyes, but his hand won’t obey. He tries to stand, but his feet won’t support his weight. He collapses.

“Santi.” Thora’s voice, urgent in the darkness. The cobbles press against his back.

“Thora.”Did you break the world again?She’s shouting for help, and he’s floating, free of the cobbles, free of the restraints around his real body, on his way to the stars.

He wakes in a hospital bed. Thora sits in a chair by the window, biting her nails.

“It’s cancer. Again,” she says when his eyes open. “Brain tumor this time. Inoperable. They’re giving you less than a month.”

A month in the simulation; a matter of hours in real time. Santi hallucinates himself in his body, half-starved and feather-light, and feels a thrill of claustrophobic reality. He rubs his eyes. “Thanks for breaking it to me gently.”

“Don’t worry.” Thora shakes a bottle of pills. “Remember, I’m a pro at thwarting destiny. I’ll follow you. We can try again next time.”

Santi sits up, fighting the fog in his mind. A dawning horror breaks through. “No.”

Thora crosses her arms. “If you’re seriously going to try and argue me out of killing myself—”

“It’s not that.” He grips the thin hospital sheet with sweating hands. “We only have eight years left. If we die—yes, we come back, but there’s no guarantee we’ll come back together. Sometimes we’ve arrived in the city ten, twenty years apart.”

Realization spreads across Thora’s face. “I guess it’s part of the design,” she says. “To give each of us periodic breaks from the simulation. But if the clock starts as soon as one of us gets back—”

“By the time we both arrive, we could already be dead.” Terror transfixes Santi, worse than the fear he felt when he saw the blank panels in the museum. He could die between lives and it would mean nothing. All their striving, everything they have learned from each other, all for them to end as two corpses in a box, cut off from an elsewhere they will never see.

“Fuck.” Thora gets to her feet, paces across the room. “Fuck! I don’t believe this. What, are they trying to keep things interesting?” She punches the wall.

“Thora.” He needs her to stop, to damp down her anger and give his own room to blaze.

She doesn’t understand. “Of course. This is where you tell me there’s a reason.” Her voice drips with bitterness. “Go on. Tell me what it all means.”

He screams it at her. “I can’t!”

Thora stares at him without recognition. He waits for her to fight back, to demand the argument he’s denying her. Another Thora might have done that, long ago. But this one closes her eyes and nods. When she leaves, she shuts the door quietly behind her.

Santi stares at the hospital ceiling, gray tiles spidered with meaningless faultlines. He has tried so hard, all his long lives, to understand. What he saw in the darkened exhibit hall felt like the ultimate vindication: there is a meaning, a purpose to their existence, and it is the one he has dreamt of since before he can remember. For that to be destroyed, by something so senseless, so arbitrary as a randomly programmed death, feels like the root of his world being torn out.

Thora isn’t here to see. He doesn’t have to be strong for her. He weeps in rage until he falls into an exhausted, furious sleep.

When he wakes, a curtain has been drawn around his bed. He feels vague, groggy, half-there. Symptoms of his imaginary illness, or his real starvation? It doesn’t matter. There is only one question in his mind now, and only one person who can answer it.

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