He sobs, his body shaking but his mouth closed, holding everything in. Thora sits paralyzed. Help, she thinks, without knowing who she’s asking: the ghost of Santi’s real sister, maybe, who should be here to comfort him through the grief she caused. What would she do? The answer comes to Thora, not as words or even as an idea, but as possession, opening her arms and drawing Santi into them. She holds him, and he leans into her, clinging as if she can fix what is broken in him. Over his shoulder, the indifferent world goes on: a child building a sandcastle, a man sleeping with a book over his face, a long-haired man in a blue coat running along the edge of the sand. Thora has never been so angry: at Santi’s family for dying, at his God for abandoning him, at the mindless universe for changing him from the person he ought to have been. She doesn’t know where it comes from, her clear picture of the Santi that would have existed if they hadn’t died, a version of him she never met. A version that was calmer, less angry, who laughed more: Santi as he was meant to be. And her without him: lonelier, spikier, less ready to forgive. Maybe they would still both be here on the beach, sitting apart, neither even noticing the sullen girl with the sea-green hair or the laughing boy in his knot of friends. Thora imagines them passing each other underwater, nothing but two vague shapes in the blue.

Santi pulls back from her. He’s calmer now, his breathing easier, and his face is hot with shame. “Sorry,” he says. “Shit, that was embarrassing.”

Thora digs her fingertips into the cool sand. “I won’t tell anyone,” she says.

One moment they are looking at each other, Santi’s eyes red and his grin sheepish, Thora half-relieved and half-triumphant, like she’s passed a test she didn’t know was coming. Then the man in the blue coat is falling to his knees beside them.

“Excuse me. Something’s coming,” he says, looking back and forth between them. “Sorry, I tried—”

Thora is not sure what happens next. She is aware of a rending, tearing noise, and a shaking that lasts an instant and seems to go on forever. Time folds, inverts: she’s six years old, lights blazing off the wet road, and when the collision comes it reverberates through her whole life, from the moment of her birth to the far-off instant of her death, changing everything. She and Santi fall together, his head buried in her shoulder, her arms tight around him, as if that will save them when the world ends. Not yet, is the only thought that escapes her before everything stops.