She doesn’t know how she gets to the window. Santi stands below her in what used to be the street, now a mosaic of fragments grouted with void. With one step, she is with him in no-place. He stands with his back to her, his outline vibrating.

“Santi.” She shakes his shoulder, feeling the buzz of conducted strangeness. Visions tear through her: mushrooms, pale and looming, Jules’s face, the skeleton of the clock tower, glassy and made of bones. A lighthouse made of crochet billows wildly across the sky. “I did it,” she says, hearing her words echo and split, come back to her as a buzzing whine.

Santi looks up at the swirling sky, fragments of Cologne funneling into chaos. “You did something.”

She follows his gaze upward. Twin stars, blinding her as they fall. She recognizes them too late as the lights on a subway train, hurtling down with a sound like claws on glass. She yelps in half-laughing terror and pulls Santi out of the way. She keeps hold of his hand as she runs, leading him in tripping leaps over swathes of nothing, down the floating fragments of what used to be the road into the city. A distorted chittering swoops above her. She looks up into a flock of tiny green birds, flying in a backward loop around their heads.

“Where are we going?” Santi yells.

“Out,” Thora yells back over her shoulder. “There are holes in everything now. There has to be one we can escape through.”

“Are you sure?” Santi shouts.

“No,” she yells back, closing her hand firmly around his. Even if they’re going nowhere, they are going together.

They stagger, sometimes crushed by a grinding force, sometimes floating above the shrapnel of the road. They run until the fragments under their feet coalesce into cobblestones. They are in the old town, or what’s left of it, a mess of shards like the moment of an explosion. Thora sees herself in the sky, a flash of blue and a beckoning arm. She and Santi are painted on the stars, where they have always belonged. At the base of the clock tower, the words she finally wrote there—WHO WE ARE—stretch and yaw, eddying out to surround them. The tower splits and expands in a spinning helix, a drill boring into the sky. A feeling roots itself in Thora’s heart, blossoms into a revelation.

“The stars.” Thora points. “They’re our way out.”

“Yes.” Santi laughs, looking at her in joy. “We finally know where we’re going.”

His hand tightens on hers as their feet leave the flickering ground. They are rising, toward the point where the sky tatters away, a palimpsest universe coming undone. The wind rises so high they have to shout to hear each other.

“There,” says Santi in her ear, close enough to drown out the storm. “There, do you see?”