Santi feels a lurch in his stomach, the beginning of an endless fall. “No. That’s not what I’m saying.” He leans forward. “I’m saying there’s one right path, and we have to find it.”

Thora’s nose wrinkles. “Right according to who? And why?”

“That’s what we have to find out.” He nods, filling in her agreement for her. “Maybe that’s part of the test. To find out what all this means.”

“What it means?” Thora laughs. “It means we’re fucking immortal. It means we never have to get stuck with a wrong choice again.”

After so many lives, he still forgets how alien her mind is to his own. “I don’t think that’s—” he starts, but she cuts him off, her face alight with revelation.

“I didn’t understand until you put it that way. But do you realize, this is what I’ve wanted my entire life? My entire lives. A way to go back. To see how it would be if I did things differently.” She shakes her head in wonder. “I’ve always been so scared of choosing wrong. Now, I don’t have just one choice. I can live every life I want to. Explore every version of who I can be.”

He speaks carefully. “You can’t control everything that happens to you.”

“Maybe not. But I remember all the ways things go wrong. Now I can learn from that. Make them go right.” She leans across the table, her eyes fever-bright. “I’ve already started. Even before I remembered. My mum and dad—you remember, my relationship with them used to be terrible. But I know how to deal with them now. I’ve learned, over lifetimes and lifetimes.” She laughs. “If I can learn that, I can learn anything.”

Santi can’t articulate the horror he’s feeling, endless as their existence, stretching back and back to a beginning he can’t remember. Thora touches his hand. “Hey. What’s wrong? You can do the same. Figure out your perfect life—your perfect lives—and make them happen.”

He shakes his head mechanically. “You can’t have more than one perfect life.”

Thora snorts. “Speak for yourself. I’ve always wanted to do everything. Be everything. Why should I have to settle for one version? Why can’t I live them all?”

“I can’t live like that. In—in pieces.” He takes his head in his hands, as if that will contain the selves that are spilling out, leaving nothing behind. “It all needs to make sense together. The stars, the clock—we have to explain it . . .” He looks up, pleading with her. “There has to be a cause. There has to be a meaning, somewhere at the heart of all this.”

Thora looks at him, level and serious. Then her focus shifts, caught by something she’s seen over his shoulder. Her breath catches. “Jules.”