“I’m fine. What about you?” Thora searches his face. “I don’t want to know what you’re thinking, do I?”

He’s looking up at the cathedral. “You almost died. And I saved you. Just like you did for me, at the clock tower. Before—” He shudders. His hand goes to his throat.

“Fuck.” Thora stares at him. “What are you saying? That I’m fated to die now, and the world’s just going to keep trying until it kills me?”

“Maybe—” Santi bites off the word, looks away. “Maybe that’s part of the plan.”

Thora doesn’t have the breath to laugh. She looks past him, up at the cathedral that sent her death singing down to her. “So what, next time I’ll have to wait even longer?” Her voice shakes. “Fuck that. I can’t go through this again.” She pushes his arm off her and keeps walking, like she kept walking across the field that never ended.

Santi catches up with her. “There’s nothing we can do.”

She considers retorting: Actually, there is. It’s called a murder-suicide. What do you say? But she knows Santi would never agree to it. Some things are always sacred to him. However much it hurts her to know she’ll die before him, she can’t be the one to tear that away. “Why?” she says instead. “Because it’s destined? I don’t care. I’ll thwart destiny.”

A smile breaks through his troubled expression. “If anyone could, I’d bet on you.”

Thora snorts. “And from anyone but you, I’d take that as a compliment.” They come out through the narrow streets of the old town into the clock tower square. Her heart is steady now, her mind almost resolved. In the shadow of the tower, her fingers trace the words of her message. NOTHING TO LOSE. She takes a breath and ducks through the jagged hole in the wall.

“What are you doing?”

She turns. Santi stands in the light, like she’s seeing him through a portal to elsewhere. She wonders how she must look to him: a shape in the darkness, already half-gone. “Taking the only way out I can.”

She knows his face so well. The part of her that helped raise him cries out in protest. She doesn’t want anything to hurt him. “What do you mean?” he asks.

“I’m not waiting around for the universe to kill me.” She looks up at the dark space above her. “If I’m going, it’ll be on my own terms.” It’s a peaceful feeling. Like being in a nose-diving plane, her hands coming to rest on the controls.

She starts to climb. After a moment she hears Santi’s footsteps behind her. She turns, meeting his eyes in the dark.

“I don’t want you to be alone,” he says.