She opens her eyes. Santi’s grip loosens as she draws back from him. They are on the sand by the Fühlinger See, and children are playing in the shallows, and everything else is the same.

Not everything. Thora hears a sound, over the chatter of the oblivious beachgoers, the splash of the water: a chime, soft but insistent, like a clock striking an endless hour. The man in the blue coat crouches next to them, hands braced against the sand. Thora feels a brightness at the corner of her eye, but when she turns her head, it disappears. She smells smoke on the air. She coughs, trying and failing to catch her breath. Beside her, Santi is hunched over, gasping, but she doesn’t look: she’s hypnotized by the man in the blue coat, his worried face, his stillness.

The chime stops. The smell of smoke vanishes. Thora isn’t completely sure she didn’t imagine it. Still, she feels light-headed, as if she has been underwater for too long. Beside her, Santi takes a breath, his wheezing gradually calming.

The man in the blue coat sits up, looking dazed. “You’re all right,” he says to Santi, touching Thora on the arm. “You’re all right.” He says it like a line from a poem in a foreign language, memorized by heart.

“What about you?” Santi says. “Are you—”

The man’s eyes roll up in his head. He collapses onto the sand.

Santi leans over him. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

Expressions flicker uncannily across the man’s face, joy to anguish to laughter. Thora feels a roll of danger in her belly. “I think he’s having a stroke.”

“Fuck.” Santi stares at her. “Did you bring your phone?”

She shakes her head. She didn’t want to leave it while they were swimming. “Go,” she says. “Find someone to call an ambulance. I’ll stay with him.”

Santi jumps to his feet and pelts away across the sand. Thora will remember it for a long time after: the man’s blue coat spread around him like wings, the paler blue of the sky, the sand flying up from Santi’s heels as he runs.

“Something happened,” the man keeps saying, over and over.

“I know,” Thora says, as if it will help him to know that someone is listening. “What’s your name?” she asks.

The man looks up at her from his twitching, changing face, as if she has the answers, as if she can save him. “Peregrine,” he says.

“Peregrine, we’re getting help,” she says. “Just hold on.”

Part II

Not Enough Sky

The stars are wrong.