“He’s confused?” Thora slams the spar against the floor. Santi jumps. Peregrine doesn’t move. She hates him for that, as she hates him for what he is, an empty cipher, promising answers and delivering nothing.

Santi turns to face her. Only someone who knows him as well as she does would see the tension in his shoulders. “This isn’t you,” he says.

“Are you sure?” She laughs. After all this time, how little he knows her. “We killed each other, Santi. I annihilated your wife and made you watch. We don’t know who we really are. And I don’t think we want to.” She gestures wildly at the walls, his beautiful visions of the lives he chooses to remember. “You say you’re trying to find the truth of us. But how do you know you’re not just finding what we wish was true? You can’t just—collect all the bits of yourself you like and say, that’s me, everything else is an aberration. We’ve both done terrible things. That’s part of us, and we have to own it.”

“We do,” he says, and she sees how deeply he means it, how the scar of her murder has sunk into him. “But it can’t be all we are.”

His words vibrate through her. She wants to believe him, desperately, but all she can feel is Héloïse’s fingers disappearing, her own hand driving the knife into Santi’s chest. “Who cares?” she says, her voice breaking. “If I’ve been a murderer, does it matter if I’ve been anything else?”

“Yes,” he says, fire in his voice. “Thora, yes. It’s not one choice. It’s a hundred choices, every single day, and all of them matter.” He holds her gaze steadily as he says, “I learned that from you.”

All the fight goes out of Thora. She hangs her head with a breathless laugh. She drops the spar. “I’m sorry,” she says to Peregrine. “You can go.”

Peregrine looks at Santi, as if he needs his permission. Santi nods. The man in the blue coat wanders away down the stairs. Thora exhales and sits down, feeling like she has won and lost at the same time. Santi comes to sit beside her. They watch, together, as their only real lead disappears from view. It hurts like it hurt when she was eleven years old and her parakeet flew away.

“Well done,” Santi says, like he’s congratulating her on passing a test.

Thora laughs under her breath. “I thought you decided we weren’t being tested,” she says. “After you stabbed me in the heart and it failed to magically get us out of here.”

Santi looks at her wryly. “You think I act the way I do because I’m being tested?” He shakes his head. “I act the way I do because it is the only choice I have left.”