It’s New Year’s Eve, twenty minutes to midnight. An hour ago, a drunken man stabbed two people in a beer hall and fled. Now, she and López are part of the team tasked with hunting him down. Their official search area is Heumarkt and the square to the north, but they might as well be trying to search a moving labyrinth: the stalls of the Christmas market and the crowds of revelers form infinite paths, opening and closing behind them as they force their way through. Thora scans the square, looking for someone who matches the killer’s description. She keeps thinking she catches him, then turning and seeing someone else, as if his face has been copied again and again onto the shifting crowd. Her blood fizzes with anticipation. This is the part of the job she loves most: the joy of seeking, the promise of discovery, the undercurrent of danger that makes her feel alive. Beside her, López reaches inside his jacket, a nervous motion she recognizes.

“Bringing a knife to a knife fight?” she asks.

He shakes his head. “Don’t dismiss my choice of weapon just because you don’t have the skills to use it.” He pulls the knife out without unfolding it, points the handle at her. “This can bring a man down in minutes if you do it right. Under the left arm, straight into the heart.” He demonstrates on her.

Thora bats his hand away. “May I remind you we shouldn’t be aiming to kill anyone?”

López smiles. “You know I’d never use it. It’s symbolic.”

“Everything’s symbolic with you,” Thora grumbles, as a queue for glühwein bars their path. They cut through into a knot of swaying people, lost in laughter until Thora yells “Polizei!” and they scatter, giggles turning to drunken screams. Thora grimaces. “Why did this guy have to pick New Year’s Eve of all days?”

“Why, did you have something better to do?” López asks.

“Of course not. Making the city safer is my life.” She gives him a sideways look. “If I was joining the party, I’d have picked better company.” She’s not worried that he’ll take it to heart. She never has to watch what she says with López; she speaks to him almost as she would speak to herself.

True to form, he smiles. “You don’t think we’d be friends if we weren’t colleagues?”

“You mean if I wasn’t your boss?” She catches his wry look. “Why, do you?”

He avoids the question. “You’re the one who loves speculating about parallel universes. I’m content with the one we have.”

Not speculating. Fragments of other lives, other selves, so vivid they sometimes overtake Thora’s current existence entirely. “You don’t think any universe could be better than this one?”