Thora can barely open her eyes. She squints upward where he’s pointing, but the light fades, the stars sucked into the maw of the city below, pulling them with it. The square is massing with shapes, a crowd of people staring up. Something is wrong. They’re not going to make it.

“We’re falling,” she tries to say, but the words come out garbled. Her breath pushes out, sucks in again, her body a bellows worked by something outside herself. The hands of the tower clock spin widdershins toward midnight. Time is running backward, unraveling them down to the ground. She holds on to Santi, even as she struggles to push time forward again, to reach the hole the tower is boring into the sky. They spiral down like the linked wings of a sycamore seed into the heart of the crowd. Time judders, resets, restarts.

“Dr. Lišková?” The Santi who was her patient, old and careworn, an endless sorrow in his eyes.

“Thora, what’s happening?”

She turns. He looks up at her, eight years old, lost: the Santi who needed her too much, who held her hand as they leapt from the tower.

Thora spins, looking for the real Santi, her Santi, but she has lost him in a crowd made entirely of himself. She pushes through, uselessly yelling his name, but there are too many of him and they all remember her, they all have a claim on her. They clutch at her, pulling her down until all she can hear is her name, repeated again and again in a hundred voices. A shudder, a crack splitting her into fragments, and everything stops.

In the Stars

Santi dreams of a message written on the sky.

He’s so close to it—Thora’s hand in his, the stars flickering all around them like candles in the dark—that he can’t make out what it says. As they start to fall, he stares upward, trying to resolve the pattern, to read the truth he missed. But the message won’t come clear. His vision blurs, the stars expanding to globes of light, merging with the flames that always wait at the corner of his eye.

He wakes in sunlight, uncertain who he is. Once, this feeling would have panicked him. Now, he flicks through selves like he’s flicking through transparencies, light superimposing them all into one. Thora lies in bed next to him, which narrows down the possibilities. It’s rare that they are both attracted to each other in the same life, but it still happens. He reaches out and strokes her cheek. She makes an inarticulate noise, burrowing into the sheets.

“Time to wake up,” he says, kissing her frown.

Her voice is muffled. “What do you mean, wake up? This whole thing is probably a dream.”

He smiles. “Oh, so you’re dreaming about me?”