“So?” he asks her with a fond smile. “What’s the heart of us, every time?”

“We always go looking,” Thora says. “We always want elsewhere.” She glances across at Jules, smiling down at her from another reality. “Even when it means leaving the ones we love behind.”

Santi nods. “I think you’re right.”

“Are you sure?” Thora’s voice catches. “Maybe that’s just who we wish we were.”

In lieu of an answer, he points with his paintbrush to a corner of the room she hasn’t seen yet. Painted down the wall are miniature tableaux of her explorations in this life, Santi’s graphic shorthand so practiced he can evoke her in a few lines. Thora on the bridge, hurling padlocks down through water clogged with space helmets and skeletons. Thora holding a flock of parakeets on strings, thorns and diacritics spilling from her mouth. Thora walking endlessly backward, like he’s calling her home. “It’s who we are right now,” he says. “You in your way, me in mine. We chose it, and we’ll keep choosing it.”

She swallows, too moved for a moment to speak. “Do you think it means we’ll get out of here?” she asks him when she can.

He looks up into the eyes of the face he saw when he fell. “It means we’re not going to stop trying.”

Thora shakes herself and heads for the window. “I have to go.”

“Me too,” Santi says dryly. “I have to wash the fish out of my hair.”

Thora pauses as she straddles the windowsill. “If the simulation shuts down, what do you think it’ll look like? I imagine the air sort of—dissolving.”

Santi shrugs. “A bright light, I guess.”

Thora gives him a look of disdain. “My God. The originality. It kills me.” She points out of the window, mock-amazed. “Santi, look! A bright light!”

“That’s the sun.”

“For now. Give me another couple of days,” she says, and climbs out.

She wakes to the knowledge that something is wrong.

Not wrong like waking to a baby crying, or to the smell of gas. Cosmically wrong, like going to sleep under the stars and waking buried alive.

She gasps, clutching at her throat. The air is heavy, then light, gravity and pressure pulsing like a clock out of time. Bracing against the wall, she pulls herself out of bed and hunches over, wincing. Time and space are streaming between her ears. Her nose itches, but she gets the feeling that if she tried to scratch it, her hand would go right through. She straightens up, sidesteps, lunges forward through the black, roaring space. Sounds slice through her, gibberish words made up of German and Russian and English. Visions of parakeets flying through stone, of Santi’s face in countless fracturing facets, oscillate before her eyes.