North, always north. The setting sun throws her shadow sideways across the fields. Darkness falls, revealing the stars, but she doesn’t look up. When she glances behind her, the city never looks any farther away, no matter how many hedges she crawls through, how many fences she climbs. Thora imagines the great mass of Cologne tearing loose from its foundations, edging along in her wake on flat concrete feet. She walks faster, breaking into a half-run. She’s pushing down the next fence when she sees a dark stain on the wire. Her blood.

She stops, laughing in despair. The same field. She’s been crossing the same field, over and over.

“This is fucking absurd,” she shouts. “Why am I trapped here? What did I do?”

No one responds. But even unanswered, her instinctive question feels like a revelation. This is a punishment, designed specifically for her. What could be worse than a world with no elsewhere?

She lies down, flat on her back on the cold ground. Out here, far from the city lights, the stars look like silver paint sprayed on the inside of a solid dome. She could stay here, wait to die of thirst or exposure. She hasn’t experienced either of those before. She suspects they would probably hurt.

Or, she can keep trying.

She gets to her feet and calls her mum.

In the passenger seat of her mother’s car, Thora looks through the window, through the world, recognizing it for the simulacrum it has always been. She remembers the holes she saw in other lifetimes, without understanding what they meant: her childhood window that looked onto the impossible, the mirror behind the bar in Der Zentaur that showed her a view from the sky. Perhaps, somewhere at the city’s edge, one of those holes waits to let her out.

“Thora. Are you listening?” her mother asks, in the falling question inflection she carried over from Icelandic.

Thora blinks. “Yes.”

“Then answer me. Where were you going?”

“Nowhere,” Thora says, looking out at the city streaming past. “Absolutely nowhere.”

Her mother’s fingers tense on the wheel until they turn white. Thora has learned how to dissolve the bitter pill of her anger, just as she has learned to defuse her father’s scorn. But right now, she doesn’t want to. Why should it always be on her, to change to fit their constancy? Why should she be the only one cursed to remember?

“You are such a teenager sometimes,” her mother says under her breath.