At least I died trying. And I won. I never gave them away. I never hurt them. I did my best to find them. I tried to keep my promise.… I die for them.

I counted nineteen steps before I could respond. Nineteen sluggish, futile crunches across the sand.

“Then what am I dying for?” I wondered, the pricking feeling returning in my desiccated tear ducts. “I guess it’s because I lost, then, right? Is that why?”

I counted thirty-four crunches before she had an answer to my question.

No, she thought slowly. It doesn’t feel that way to me. I think… Well, I think that maybe… you’re dying to be human. There was almost a smile in her thought as she heard the silly double meaning to the phrase. After all the planets and all the hosts you’ve left behind, you’ve finally found the place and the body you’d die for. I think you’ve found your home, Wanderer.

Ten crunches.

I didn’t have the energy to open my lips anymore. Too bad I didn’t get to stay here longer, then.

I wasn’t sure about her answer. Maybe she was trying to make me feel better. A sop for dragging her out here to die. She had won; she had never disappeared.

My steps began to falter. My muscles screamed out to me for mercy, as if I had any means to soothe them. I think I would have stopped right there, but Melanie was, as always, tougher than I.

I could feel her now, not just in my head but in my limbs. My stride lengthened; the path I made was straighter. By sheer force of will, she dragged my half-dead carcass toward the impossible goal.

There was an unexpected joy to the pointless struggle. Just as I could feel her, she could feel my body. Our body, now; my weakness ceded control to her. She gloried in the freedom of moving our arms and legs forward, no matter how useless such a motion was. It was bliss simply because she could again. Even the pain of the slow death we had begun dimmed in comparison.

What do you think is out there? she asked me as we marched on toward the end. What will you see, after we’re dead?

Nothing. The word was empty and hard and sure. There’s a reason we call it the final death.

The souls have no belief in an afterlife?

We have so many lives. Anything more would be… too much to expect. We die a little death every time we leave a host. We live again in another. When I die here, that will be the end.

There was a long pause while our feet moved more and more slowly.