The chime sounds in real time, sharp as the gathering smoke. She can’t feel Santi anymore. Her vision crowds with hallucinations: parakeets bursting through the wall of a spaceship; her and Santi’s names written across the stars; bridges crumbling, borne down by the weight of human love. She sees the view from the top of the tower, the square spread below her in impossible daylight. Squinting, she thinks she sees him at a table outside Der Zentaur: Santi as she has known him, head bowed, drawing in his memory book.

A laugh gasps through her stricken body, using the last of her air. Maybe this is what the afterlife will be for her. An endless argument with Santiago López Romero. In this moment, she can think of worse ways to spend eternity.

The visions fade, burned away by a white light that hums as it expands. Thora tries to draw in a final breath, but she is nothing and nowhere, drowning in radiance. A bright light, she thinks as it consumes her. How original.

The light hurts Thora’s eyes.

A cacophony of sound, resolving into the endless alarm and the delayed humming of Peregrine’s extractors. Thora rips her way free of the IVs, the heating pads, clumsy as if she has gained an extra dimension. She is here. She is alive. Gasping, she gropes for the button that unseals her compartment. She claws her way out in weightless delirium, her body remembering her training while her mind lags behind in the simulation, clinging to Santi at the top of the clock tower. She palms her way down the scorched wall to his compartment, believing for the first time in a miracle. Both of us. Both of us made it out.

Then she sees his body through the glass.

Her breath won’t come. She is alive, she made it, but now she is suffocating, staring at him where he floats, frozen and inert. She doesn’t understand. “Peregrine,” she yells, but there is no one here: only the silence of the ship where she is the only living occupant. Only the marks of the fire on the wall. Only the damaged panel beside Santi’s compartment, the melted wires that opened a tiny, fatal window to the stars.

Thora pounds on the wall and screams.

An hour later, she sits in the pilot’s chair of the lander, watching the planet turn beneath her. A vastness of blue and gray, speckled with alien clouds: a new world.

The ship creaks, a minuscule adjustment that hits Thora’s senses like an earthquake. It’s too much, as everything has been since she woke: blisteringly, painfully real, in a way that makes the city seem in retrospect like a shadowed dream. Through a glass darkly, she thinks, and wonders where the thought comes from.