He’s quieter after that. Thora feels guilty, but she can’t feel sorry. Better he knows the reality of their situation before he grows up. And grow up he does. She thought her impatience would make it endless, but in what seems like a year he is twelve, then fifteen, then going to university. And he is Santi, familiar and all new, youth burnishing him while she feels herself dulling into middle age.

When his mother dies during his first year at uni, he goes to pieces. It’s not Aurelia he runs to: it’s Thora. At three in the morning, he shows up on her doorstep drunk and sobbing. She lets him in and holds him until his crying is done.

“You’ll see her again,” she says. He’s half on the sofa, half on the floor, face pressed into her shirt while she rubs his back. It should confuse her, how she feels like his mother and his sister and his lover all at once. But the worlds have scraped away her capacity for confusion. “She’ll be back next time, just the same.”

“It still hurts to lose her,” he mumbles wetly into her shoulder.

Thora can’t repress her impatient thought: now Maria is gone, now he is grown, there is nothing to stop them from looking for a way out. “Wouldn’t be much of a punishment if it didn’t hurt,” she murmurs.

Santi pulls back from her. He frowns, rubbing the tattoo he got on his eighteenth birthday: the stars that haven’t been in the sky or on her wrist for lifetimes now. “Can we go somewhere? We need to talk.”

Thora blinks. “About what?”

“Everything.” He looks down with a bitter smile. “It’s not like there’s anything to stop us now.”

Thora shivers at the echo of her thought. “Of course.”

She lives in Agnesviertel this time, a futile attempt to make the city seem new. The streets are still deadly familiar, winding around them like a closing noose. Santi leads the way, south toward the cathedral and the old town. “I guess it’s good that we don’t have to speak in code anymore.”

“Code.” Thora laughs. “Like when you yelled at me, ‘You’re not my sister this time’?”

“That’s not fair,” Santi says. “I was six.”

Thora senses she’s upset him in a way she doesn’t understand. Shouldn’t she get him by now? Shouldn’t she be able to see inside him, find the problem, and fix it?

He meets her eyes in challenge. “So you still think we’re being punished?”

“Still?” Thora is puzzled until it comes to her: his crying eight-year-old face, a guilt that hung over her for days. “Oh. I didn’t think you’d remember that.”