He looks back at the board. He was imagining each drawing as its own separate universe. Now she’s pulled him into hers, into the orbit of the tiny planet she’s exploring.

“You’re absolutely right.” He draws a quick bubble around his head. “Now, I mean it. Silent working.”

He sits down, oddly touched by Thora’s generosity. He’s still pondering it at the end of the day as he passes through the empty playground onto the cobbled street, the buildings of Cologne’s old town pressing in on him under lowering clouds.

Santi wants his life to make sense. Usually, his faith carries him through when the world sends him nothing but static and noise. But moments like this, clear as a voice speaking in his ear, are what he lives for. If he couldn’t do it, perhaps Thora can. And perhaps he can be her first step on a pathway that leads to the stars.

He knows this is a terrible idea. It’s one reason he never had children of his own, so he wouldn’t project his frustrated ambitions onto them. (The other is that Héloïse divorced him and moved back to France.) But this, he argues with himself as he passes under the golden sign of the centaur and sits down at the bar, is different. Thora already told him her ambition: his job is to let her know it’s possible.

Brigitta the barmaid places a slim glass of local lager in front of him. Santi raises it to her and drinks, taking in the reflected version of Der Zentaur that exists in the mirror behind the bar. Conversations in half a dozen languages wash over him: thick Kölsch dialect, standard German, English, Russian, Spanish. Those he understands, he can almost mouth along to: familiar complaints about the traffic on the Ring, the new crop of university students crowding the bars of the old town. He remembers when he was one of those students, stumbling into Der Zentaur with no idea of the resentment he was causing to the old-timers at the bar. It feels impossible that he should be one of them now.