“It’s not ridiculous.” He’s not supposed to contradict the parents directly. He revises. “What I mean is, an interest like that is an important motivator. I would advise encouraging it. Or at least not actively discouraging it.”

He can tell they aren’t convinced. They nod, though, and thank him before moving on. Santi watches them go. He reminds himself: if God’s test were easy, it would be meaningless.

At morning break the next day, Santi brings his coffee back to his classroom and finds Thora at her desk, drawing. He watches her pause to delineate a cluster of faint dots on the inside of her wrist.

“Thora, it’s break time.”

She doesn’t look up.

He tries again. “You’re supposed to be outside.”

“I want to stay here.”

Officially, he should send her out: he can’t shelter a child from the natural order of things. The lions take down the gazelle and it lies twitching and eviscerated. But, fresh from his anger with her parents, he rebels. When he sits down next to her, she flinches in surprise. She bows her head and starts violently coloring in.

“What are you drawing?” Santi asks.

She looks up, a flash of blue like a shy tropical fish. “Hades.”

“Wow.” Santi looks at her drawing: a lot of black, with fragments of exploded buildings and what looks like a rabbit with a baby’s head. “You like the Greek myths?”

Her expression is noncommittal. “My mum and dad got me a book about them.”

First blood to her parents and the classical education. “They’re good stories,” Santi says. “It’s interesting to see how people used to explain the world, before they had scientific ways of figuring out what was really happening.” Second blood to Santi and the stars.

“Yeah,” Thora says. “Like, in ancient Greek times, they thought people went on after they died.”

Santi frowns. “You don’t think they do?”

She gives him a look of flat scorn. “You’re a science teacher,” she says, and goes back to drawing her hellscape.

Santi leans back, weighing his words carefully. “Science can’t tell us much about what happens to people after they die.”

She looks up at him in challenge. “Yes, it can. We go moldy and decompose, like in the bread experiment we did last week. And then we’re skeletons.”

“You’re right,” he acknowledges. “But that’s just what we can observe. How do we know there isn’t some other part of a person that goes on? A part we can’t observe?”

Thora chews her pencil. “I guess we don’t,” she says, looking annoyed. “Unless we could talk to someone who had died and ask.”

“Well, I’ll probably die before you,” Santi says. “I promise, if there’s anything after, I’ll try to come back and tell you about it.”