Thora smiles at the echo of her own thought, coming back to her changed by Santi’s mind. She watches him as he turns to the window. Lifetime after lifetime has made him translucent, until she can see through his varying exterior to the constant thing within. She was wrong a hundred lives ago, when she laughed at him for saying two people are forever a mystery to each other. She knows Santi as well as one person can know another, all his facets and sides and angles. But his heart is further from her understanding than ever. The shadows she’s seen it cast make up an impossible object, bigger and stranger than he should be able to contain. The same isn’t true of her. World by world, she’s felt herself becoming smaller, diminishing into an obvious, snarling thing whose only desire is escape. Perhaps that’s all she was, even back at the beginning she can’t remember; the rest was fragile dress-up, like her orange pinafore and her sharp comebacks, sloughed off by the hurricane of what they’ve been through. Or perhaps Santi is right. Perhaps she still gets to choose who she wants to be.

“His name,” she says, looking up at the mural of Peregrine. “It means wanderer.”

“Pilgrim,” Santi corrects her softly.

He meets her eyes. She sees the grief there, deeper than hers: he really believed Peregrine would lead them to the truth. “I’m sorry he didn’t have the answers,” she says.

He half-smiles. “It doesn’t mean the answers aren’t there. It just means we have to keep looking.”

Thora looks down at her fingers, the rope-like tendons controlling the poor puppet of her body. “I wish I was more like you. I wish I could see a meaning.”

“I don’t see it. I look for it.” His voice is quiet. “You think it’s easy. You think it—comes naturally to me. But it doesn’t. I choose it. Every single time.”

They keep looking. Thora sticks her fingers into the live sockets of the world, trying to raise a spark that will burn down the lies and leave the truth behind. Santi draws together threads from each of their lives, seeking a color that glitters through them all.

In a strange way, Thora is happier than she has been in lifetimes. She has a mission, the possibility of a way out, and she is not alone: Santi is searching beside her. Still, it doesn’t surprise her that the same goal manifests differently when filtered through their two minds. He’s still reading the world for meaning, as he has always done. She is trying to break it apart from the inside. Either way, this strange work suits their natures. In their different ways, they have always been explorers.