Title Page

Map

Map © Nicolette Caven.

Dedication

To Mum and Dad,

for this life

Part I

Welcome to Forever

Thora wishes she could start again.

She wishes she hadn’t dyed her hair blue, or worn the clashing orange pinafore dress that screams trying-too-hard-to-be-interesting. Above all, she wishes she hadn’t come here, to the thudding crush of the international students’ welcome party. The music rises another notch, obscuring what the boy in front of her is shouting.

“What?” she yells.

He leans close to her ear. “I said, I really feel like we’ve met before!”

She gives him a weak smile and throws back the rest of her half-empty red wine. Shaking the glass in explanation, she slips past him through the dark, strobing space, pushing the bar on the fire escape Out, she thinks with sudden desperation, let me out—to emerge into the cold wind outside.

“Whose idea was this?” she asks the cobbled square, the reconstructed façade of Cologne’s old town. “Who holds a ‘get to know you’ event where no one can hear what anyone’s saying?”

The city doesn’t offer an answer. But Thora knows the noise wasn’t really the problem. The problem was her. Since she stepped out of the Hauptbahnhof three days ago, she has felt a wall between her and everyone else, impenetrable and invisible as glass. She came to this party hoping the music and the drink would blast through it. Instead, she feels like she has spent the night screaming at her own reflection. Nothing from the other side came through. What are you studying? Physics, no way! Where are you from? Echo after echo of the same question, each leaving her more alone than the last.

She walks, not knowing where she’s going. A breeze blows her hair back, cools her heated face. To her right, the square leaks out through narrow alleyways to the flat silk of the Rhine. To her left, past a grassy courtyard, a ruined clock tower points toward the sky, hands frozen at seven minutes to twelve.

Thora doesn’t believe in fate. Still, she thinks some paths are better than others. Here, in her first week of university, on the threshold of so many futures, she feels a sick sense of vertigo. This is supposed to be where her life begins, and already she’s taken a wrong turn. Why can’t she be happy with one party, one city, one planet? What made her this way, gave her this ghost at the corner of her eye?