Thora laughs. “Take what time? Last I checked, we had less than six months left. And we’d already decided we were too far gone to do anything but sit and watch ourselves die.”

“We were wrong. We just need to try harder. We could do a lot in six months.” He advances on her, angry. “You said it last time. Both of us or neither of us.”

“I was wrong. You know I was wrong. If one of us can get out, we take that chance. No question.”

Santi shakes his head. “We got this far by working together.”

She laughs at him. “Got where? Got where, Santi?” She sweeps her arm wide in answer. “Here. Always here.”

He walks away. She watches him stand with his back to her, silhouetted by the video wall.

“Be honest,” she says. “If our positions were reversed, you wouldn’t hesitate for a second. You’d sign your life away before the question was even asked.”

He turns. “And you’d be happy to let me?”

“Of course not. But it wouldn’t make any difference. You’d insist anyway. And so will I.”

He sets his jaw. “I’m not going to let you do it.”

Thora gazes at him. “Hope and despair, Santi. Who did we realize we had to become to make it out of here?” She shrugs. “This is it. This is the risk that’s worth taking. This is the everything we had to be willing to lose.”

Santi sits down, head in his hands. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

Thora joins him on the floor. “You’re just upset to have been denied your chance at martyrdom. Sorry, pal, the lions get to gnaw on me this time.” She is in awe of how she feels: joy, almost euphoria, coursing through her like she is made of it. Sometime soon, this rush will be over, and she will have to confront what she has agreed to do. But for now, she rides the certainty like a chariot through the sky. For so long, she has been obsessed with making the right choice. Now, at what might be the end of her, she doesn’t feel like she’s choosing. There is one path, and she walks it with a glad heart. She marvels at the paradox: this constraint, this inevitability, feels like the freedom she has been kicking and screaming for her whole long existence.

Santi runs his hand through his hair. “God knows how to test me. And always, always in a different way from what I was prepared for.” A shallow laugh escapes him. “You’d think I’d be prepared for that by now.”