“No. We probably hate each other.” She looks down at him fondly. “As soon as I wake up, I’ll remember how much. Then I’ll throw you out of the airlock.”

He laughs. “This may shock you, but I disagree.”

“Well,” she sighs, “it wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I look forward to continuing this argument in our next life.” He wants to keep his eyes open, to keep the sight of her as long as he can, but he’s so tired, so ready for an ending. He lets them drift closed. In the darkness, points of light hover unreachably far away. There’s a pattern here: one he may never understand, at least not while he is alive. But he chooses to believe the pattern exists, whether or not he can see it. “Ah,” he sighs, something like peace stealing over him. “Thora, I wish you could see this.”

Her voice is quiet, getting quieter. “What is it? What are you seeing?”

Through the pain, a smile spreads across his face. “The stars.”

Only One Choice

Thora lives.

In a strange, accelerated place, between somewhere and nowhere. She watches her life happen from a distance, like an audience who knows the magician’s tricks: sees the secret door in the drowning cabinet, the assistant swimming free. The early move from the Netherlands to the UK that should have fractured her. The chance comment from her father that was supposed to lodge in her mind forever. She floats through it all, a skillful sailor on a sea she knows by heart. At thirty-five, she rides the wave to a crest and leaps, landing on her feet outside the Hauptbahnhof, the cathedral rising above her into the cloudless summer sky. Here she is, back in Cologne again as if she never left.

She takes in a shuddering breath. She’s not dead. There may still be time to find a way out. She runs, abandoning the suitcase she brought with her. The staring people fade into the background as she pelts past the cathedral, one goal in her mind. Get to Der Zentaur. Wait for Santi.

It doesn’t occur to her that she might not be the first one there until she sees the mural on the building across the street: a blue-haired girl sitting on top of the clock tower, her profile making a gap in the stars.

She stares up at it in mingled joy and dread. Santi is already here. How long has he been in the city without her?

She hurries on past a food truck, the frying smell tugging at the emptiness inside her. She didn’t think the hunger could get worse. She forces herself on, into the narrowing streets of the old town. Colors blaze on the white wall of one of the old beer houses. Another mural: a lighthouse, parakeets flying out through the lantern room’s shattered glass.