The Trickster fell silent and turned his head slightly to look away at the distant, unreal horizon. Mercifully, she waited and did not press him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Perhaps I will go back to this.” He indicated his shape, undying but humanlike, with a sweep of his hand. “Perhaps I will simply cease to be myself. We do not die, but we do have an end—when all the paths that we can trace have been traced, we fragment and dissolve and return to our source.” His voice grew stronger, chanting the final words in recitation of some half-forgotten litany.

“But what about what happens to humans when they die? Might that not happen to you?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I don’t know what happens when you die. We’ve never been able to follow where you go.”

He looked down at her and quirked an amused eyebrow at her obvious disappointment. “We are neither all-powerful nor all-knowing. I thought you had realized that by now.”

He looked away, pensive once more, and tried again. “The undying are not meant to be immortal, but humans—now, they can be. So, theoretically, the first step to immortality would be to become human.”

“And the second step?” Miranda prompted as he paused.

“Change fate. Make an important choice. Create a completely new destiny.” He spoke without conviction, listing hypotheses, not facts.

Choice. He noticed that she flinched as he spoke the word.

“Did Chance bring me out of the world to solve my own murder?” She spoke lightly, but the question retained a terrible weight.

The Trickster sincerely did not know, and the novelty of the situation tickled him; he let his lips twitch and his eyes crinkle. “I think that’s the wrong question, but I’m sure we’re making progress.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

“It’s not that I mean to be cryptic,” he said apologetically as he rubbed at the fresh scratches on his wrist and put himself a safe distance from her short but rapid reach. “You see, this has never happened before. We’re all a bit baffled. Well, except for Patience, probably, but as you’ve noticed, she prefers not to interfere. She’ll only tell you what you’ve already guessed for yourself.”

“All my guesses are pretty grim right now,” Miranda hissed, “at least as far as my life is concerned. If I’m meant to die, why can’t I die quickly? What’s the point of all this suffering? And if I’m meant to survive this, how can you claim I’m dead?”

“I never said you were dead,” the Trickster exclaimed, shocked into genuine compassion by her distress. “Just that there was a probability that you might die.”

“I don’t understand all this talk of probability,” she said. “Did I die? Was it an accident? A murder? Do I have a choice of any kind?”