Sometimes, I wish I was more like you, Koahu. I wish I, too, could forget. This is my seventh body. I hope it will be my last. Every crossing adds a lifetime of memories to the hoard. As Chanel, Joubert is in his sixth lifetime, and you are in your fifth—but he has his rage and you have your forgetting. I only have my guilt to sustain me. I have lost all desire for making another crossing. All of my lifetimes, combined with the hundreds, perhaps thousands of crossings I undertook as Balthazar, seem to have taken a toll. I find myself living in a constant state of exhaustion. Perhaps there is something in Madeleine that contributed to it too—the fatalism I noted before our crossing.

Time and again I ask myself why I am still alive. I’m not proud of myself. I’ve been a thief. I’ve made a mess of things. I’ve tried to undo something that cannot be undone. I only seem to have made things worse. The world we came from is gone forever and nothing can bring it back. There can be no crossing without a return crossing. I think about that often. It torments me day and night. Perhaps the world doesn’t end all at once, but slowly, imperceptibly, as a chain of seemingly innocuous events measured across generations.

If it wasn’t for Joubert, I would already be dead—and once I no longer have to worry about him and what he might do, I look forward to my ultimate release. I have yearned for death long enough. Chanel is getting closer, I know it—sometimes I imagine I can feel her hot breath on my neck. She has a network of informants looking out for me, I’m sure of it. Perhaps Massu, your friend at the Quai des Orfèvres, is one of them.

Whenever a murdered corpse is found with its eyes missing, like Vennet the bookseller, it is Joubert playing on my guilt, taunting me, luring me, daring me. One day I will take up the dare. One day I will finish this story once and for all. You, Koahu, may be my beloved, but he is my destiny. I hold myself responsible for him and all his acts of cruelty. Now that I have seen you, now that you know all you need to know, now that you’ve written it down, perhaps my story is finally approaching its end. Perhaps you can take on the legacy of our sin, all those lifetimes ago. Chanel doesn’t know about you. She doesn’t know for sure if you are even still alive. But if she finds out, she will want to destroy you just as surely as she wishes to destroy me.