When he wakes, a curtain has been drawn around his bed. He feels vague, groggy, half-there. Symptoms of his imaginary illness, or his real starvation? It doesn’t matter. There is only one question in his mind now, and only one person who can answer it.

“Peregrine,” he says.

The door opens. The man in the blue coat ducks through the curtain and stands by the end of the bed. Santi remembers how it felt when he tried this the first time: when he spoke a name to the air and the answer walked in. There in the memory house, he took Peregrine for a channel to God, a mouthpiece of the universe. But he was only another hollow revelation, a puzzle box with nothing inside. Santi takes him in, his lank hair, his bewildered face. He has freckles. Who thought to give an anthropomorphic construct freckles? “Peregrine,” Santi says. “Why do we have to die?”

Peregrine frowns. “I—I don’t . . .” He trails off.

Santi draws in a breath. However long it takes, he has to understand. “This is a simulation,” he says. “Whoever designed it could have chosen to compress time differently. To have us live one long life. Why not?”

Peregrine tilts his head. “Transit phase.”

We’re not in transit phase. A Thora response, jumping to the front of Santi’s mind as naturally as if it were his own. He closes his eyes, searching for the calm that used to come so easily, but it’s as impossible as grasping a flame. “What does dying over and over have to do with transit phase?” he snaps.

Peregrine’s face flickers from anguish to serenity. “Part—part of the plan.”

“Wow,” Santi says, scratching his chin. “Thora’s right. That is annoying.” Peregrine looks at him with open curiosity. “Why?” Santi asks, his voice thick with all they have been through. “Even if you have to kill us, why not kill us at the same time? Why do we come back the same but different, again and again? What plan is it part of?”

Peregrine’s mouth opens, then closes. He tries again. “Not enough. Two people. Need—every one. Of you, of him. That was—” His brow furrows. “Sorry. Something—”

“Happened. We know.” Thora pulls back the curtain. How long has she been listening? She looks at Santi, and what he sees in her face breaks his heart. “They’re discharging you,” she says. “We’re going home.”

She takes him back to their apartment in the Belgian Quarter. As she lowers him onto the sofa, Santi stares past her at the raindrops dotting the gray square of the window. His rage has subsided, leaving behind a quiet despair. “How do you do it?” he asks her.

She looks down at him with a pity he can’t bear. “Do what?”

“Go on. Live.” His voice sticks in his throat. “When you don’t know if there’s a meaning.”