Thora stares at her. She wants to tell her mother she is no such thing: she is ageless, immortal. But her mother doesn’t know that. She just hears the same sullen daughter she’s known lifetime after lifetime. Thora’s weary mother-self comes back in a wave of reluctant empathy, remembering Estela at the same age. Is this how her life will be now? Feeling every age at once, unable to honestly inhabit a moment without drowning in reflections?

“Sorry,” she says. “I won’t do it again.”

But of course, she does: carefully, gradually, so as not to risk her parents finding out. She spends her weekends mapping the limits of the city, pushing at the fringes where reality blurs. She stumbles into endless woods, crosses and recrosses the same road, wades through water that deepens into shallows, stranding her back where she began. She hunts obsessively for a hole that will lead her out of the lie. But her jailers have built her cage too well. If there are gaps between the bars, none are wide enough for her to escape.

She is nineteen, crossing a scrubby field, when she sees the setting sun cast her shadow due east. The circle closes. She has tested every inch of the city’s boundary and found no way out.

Something in her snaps. She throws her head back and screams, pulling at the barbed wire until her hands are bleeding. “Let me out. Fuck you, fuck you, let me out!”

The wind blows her voice away. There is no one to hear her.

Not yet.

In her memory, Santi sits awkwardly by her hospital bed. He looked in his mid-thirties. She counts forward to his possible deaths—days, months, or decades after hers—and backward to her birth. He could already be here. Or, she could have as many as thirty years left to wait.

She wraps her bleeding hands in her father’s scarf and catches a bus back to the university. In her dorm room, she dresses her wounds, looking past her reflection into the mirrored darkness of the prison where she awaits her cellmate’s arrival. When she’s finished, she rides her bike to the old town. She wonders, as she props it against the railings of the courtyard by the clock tower, if the Santi she met in the hospital still lives, just the other side of where her fingers can touch. She thinks of him as she saw him last: scruffy, tired, the signs of a hard life etched on his face. She adds nineteen years, imagines him standing now beside her, looking up to where the hands of the clock clasp as if in prayer.