Thora sits on the edge of a hole in the sky, swigging from a bottle of red wine. Behind her, on the other side of the mirror, the hum of conversation in Der Zentaur continues oblivious as she swings her legs over the twenty meter drop to the cobbled square. One quick leap and she would be on her way down. The thought of falling doesn’t scare her anymore. But it wouldn’t be an escape. She would only wake, and remember, and follow Santi again and again into the dark.

She doesn’t know if he’s in the city yet. For the first time, she hasn’t left him a message. Pain flares behind her ribs, as if her heart is still recovering from his knife. She takes a gulp of her wine, staring down at where the fountain gleams in miniature like a carefully painted simulacrum. What hurts, even more than the phantom pain in her chest, is the memory of his face after Héloïse vanished and Thora knew she had done something irrevocable. She screws her eyes shut, wishing she could erase the memory, but it sits there, indelible.

Thora used to think of herself as infinite. Now she knows what she truly is: a spiral narrowing to a point that contains all the worst things about her. She looks at herself now, sitting on a patch of nothing, getting drunk alone on the same old stolen wine, and feels a rush of disgust. On impulse, she upends the bottle to send the wine down as impossible rain on the square below. The red liquid bubbles out of the neck and stops, sticking in midair.

Thora blinks. “Wow,” she says aloud, to the whipping wind and the impossible sky. “Looks like I broke gravity.”

The words resonate in her memory, bringing an echo back. Santi, hunched at his computer in the astronomy lab, saying the same thing about his simulation.

Thora sits bolt upright, almost losing her balance. Santi’s refilling coffee cup. The miracle food she has lived on for the past two lifetimes. The hole where she sits right now, a door between two places that shouldn’t be connected. Bugs, all of them, in a simulation more complex than she would have imagined possible. And hovering just below her, another bug, but with a difference. She made this one happen.

The Santi who was her student tips back in his chair, humming that same infuriating tune. I gave the simulation an input it wasn’t expecting. Thora peers at the frozen trail of red hanging between her and the cobbled ground. “I guess they didn’t expect anyone to pour wine through a hole in the sky.”