“How long do you think it takes for our bodies to disintegrate out there?”

He sighs. The cadence of her thoughts is inscrutable, an entropic mess, so unlike the stern austerity of her garments, her station, closer to the girl she was than the woman she is. “Does it matter?”

“Doesn’t it?”

A laugh shivers in Fatimah’s ribs, mercury-cold and dangerous.

“I had a dream,” she continues before Allen can stop her. “I had a dream that you were the ghost of a sea captain. Every night, you walked your vessel from end to end, looking out into the cold black ocean, always calling for someone.”

Allen stills, breath lodged in his throat like a bullet. “Who?”

Fatimah laughs again, and this time the sound is wild, engine-roar, machine-death. “If this were most stories, this would be where I turn to you and say, ‘Me.’ But it’s not. You weren’t calling for me. For a while, I thought it was you calling for justice, for me but not for me, if you know what I’m saying? Like you were the color red and I was a ghost who needed justice. But no. You weren’t calling for those things either.”

“What was I calling for then?”

“I can’t tell you. The story isn’t over yet.”

They say that there was once a girl who was not real, a homunculus of photons and electro-impulses, illegal data-ghost, daemon; engineered by a young man’s dream of a dead woman with a similar face, a similar name; kept functional by faith and fury and hope.

They were in love, were always meant to be in love; their attraction wasn’t circumstantial, it was mandated by physics, irrevocable as the adagio of planets. But the universe is no place for love so potent, love so deep. Such beauty cannot exist without being balanced by tragedy.

And so, it sent death.

Some say it came asystolic-quiet. A cough, at first, wet and red. A discomfort in the ribs, an absence of hunger. Then, as a bloom of tumors, clotting in the gap between vertebrae. As convulsive fevers and dry-mouthed prayers, as a crescendo of anguish stuttering across hollow, sleepless months before at last, it all ended, and death crept from the room with her breath rattling in its lungs.

Some say it wasn’t death who came courting, but the girl who sought quiet against the flat of a blade, who trussed herself up in claret and plunged into the void, who asked for respite against the clamor of an indifferent universe.