She sets up the landing sequence. For as long as she can, she doesn’t think of Santi. She thinks instead of her trajectory, of the thousand variables between her and survival, of what might await her on the surface of the new world. But she can’t keep him out. He seeps through the cracks in her: his smile, his bowed head as he carefully draws in his memory book, the look he gets sometimes like God stooped down and kissed him right between the eyes. The look she loves. It’s too late. Though her hands still work the controls, her thoughts are of nothing but how much she loves him; how he never knew, because while he was open and flowing as a stream, she was dammed up, too cold and guarded to tell him what he meant to her. And now she’ll never see him again. She hunches over, racked by spasms of grief. “How did this happen?” she gasps, and she knows she’s asking him, that she will keep asking him until the day she follows him. But she already knows the answer. She did this, by arguing too well for her own annihilation, and she can’t take it back. Worst of all, even if she could, she can’t imagine any version of her choosing differently.

There’s no wrong choice, Santi says. There’s just what happens.

She sits up, gasping. Like a gift, like a curse, she remembers him, a flood of him coursing through her: laughing in the park with her and Lily, throwing crumbs to the parakeets; playing table tennis with Joost, the engineer who gave Peregrine his face; painting his mural on the wall of the clock tower, brow furrowed in concentration; in the pool during spacewalk training, giving her an underwater thumbs-up. His real and virtual selves collide into something that’s smaller than the truth of him and yet bigger than she can contain. She draws in a shuddering breath, focuses on one image: Santi at a table outside Der Zentaur, raising his glass to her.

I knew what I meant to you. She doesn’t know if it’s exactly what he would say. He always did know how to surprise her. But the feeling behind it, she’s sure of. Now go. See it for both of us.

“I will,” she says, and starts the countdown.

Acknowledgments

Huge thanks and appreciation are due to the following people:

To my brilliant, determined agent, Bryony Woods, without whom this book would still be little more than two characters in search of a story.

To Natasha Bardon and Julia Elliott, whose editorial genius and deep understanding of the characters made the book into a much stronger version of itself.

To the teams at Harper Voyager and William Morrow, whose enthusiasm for the book carried me through the increasingly uncertain times of its editing and production.