“Infinite iterations,” Jules said. Their voice was hardly more than a whisper, but Ava could hear everything Jules was feeling in those two words: grief, but also acceptance, and just a hint of the wonder that always animated Jules, an abiding surprise with the world. They had told her once that they’d never expected to live to be twenty-five, and they still had a hard time imagining that they’d live to be thirty. It had seemed like too much to ask for, as a Black, trans teenager of immigrant parents. Thirty years had felt like an unreasonable expectation. So every day is like a gift, Ava had said. It had been early in their relationship, and every night had stretched into cycles of sex and kissing and rambling postcoital conversation.

Existence isn’t a gift, it’s a right, Jules had replied. But having to reclaim it every day makes life easier to appreciate, maybe.

Ava squeezed Jules’s hand, wishing she had the energy to articulate her feelings. She’d wished that she could have felt a fraction of their appreciation for existence.

“Do you hear that?” Jules said.

“Hear what?” Ava asked, but she realized that she did: a soft pinging sound from the water, like an underwater bell. Ava counted six pings before a flurry of bubbles erupted all around her and Jules.

What now? she thought, sure the two of them were about to be eaten by a whale. The previously calm water churned, buffeting them with waves. Ava lost her grip on Jules’s hand and was briefly sucked under the water, only to realize that there was something sturdy underneath her hands and knees. It rose steadily up and out of the water: a giant, dark gray surface, pebbled enough that she could stand on it without slipping. As the enormous thing breached beneath her, Ava thought again of a whale, but it seemed too broad, a surface nearly the breadth of a city block, the shape of a baseball diamond. Maybe she was going to be eaten by a giant manta ray. How novel.

A few feet away, she saw Jules scramble after something. The FINNA, she realized, and she watched it bounce and roll toward the edge. Jules caught it just before it toppled off, back into the water.

“This is real, right?” Ava asked them. “I’m not hallucinating from hypothermia?”

“Maybe we both are,” Jules called back. They stood on shaky legs, making their way back so the two of them could stand together. “But also, we’re in a different universe, so who actually knows.”

Ava looked closer as the pebbled skin of whatever they were standing on and found rivets in it. “I think it’s a ship.”