This is how I die? she kept thinking. This is it?

In Caldwell, in a shitty rooming house, on a cold night in December, in a fire?

Determined not to have that fate be what separated her from her family, from her life, from the future years that she felt like she deserved, Therese got herself moving again. But the momentum didn’t last long, and she didn’t make it far. She was running out of strength, and her thinking was getting muddled—

-ese! Therese!

The sound of her name, repeated over and over above the fire’s beastly temper, had her lifting her head. Except how could she be hearing this? Who would be here for her? It must be a hallucination, a last-ditch effort in her mind to—

A ghostly apparition appeared before her, coalescing from the smoke. It was a female, with dark hair, just like her own, a face… just like her own… and a body… just like her own.

This is me, Therese thought. This is what I was.

The conviction made absolutely no sense, so she focused on the strange white robe, and the fact that whoever it was was utterly unaffected by the flames and the lack of oxygen. And she was impossibly ethereal. The female was positively glowing in the midst of the horrible, billowing smoke, an angel straight from the Fade.

No… not an angel, Therese thought. She is me.

So great was both her confusion and her certainty—the two poles of cognition existing in the same moment about the same thing—that for a split second, Therese forgot all about the fire’s deadly heat.

Oh, wait, so she must have already died, she decided. That must be herself risen unto the Other Side, her soul looking down upon the broken body it had had to disinhabit.

Just as this thought occurred, a flood of memories deluged her mind, all the images and sounds making no sense, yet being totally familiar: She saw an all-white world that turned colorful, grass becoming green, tulips becoming pink and orange and yellow, a forested rim now verdant instead of dressed in shades of pearlescent cream. And there were people in the sanctuary, females in white robes, and males who were warriors. And there were temples and loggias made of white marble, and seeing bowls that showed the history down on the earth below, and quill pens that recorded the events on parchment, and a library of leather-bound volumes detailing narratives collected and cherished as the history of the race.

And there was something else.

Someone else.

There was Trez.

All at once, the vision of the female in front of her, the one of herself in a white robe from that other place, was broken through, a huge figure scattering the apparition with his own, solid, very real body.

Except it couldn’t be. Why would he know she was trapped in here?

“Therese!” he yelled as he saw her sprawled on the hallway floor.

As the tremendous male before her crouched down, she decided that this was her last thought, the final cognitive spasm of her consciousness: On the edge of her death, she had conjured not her mahmen or her father, not her brother or any of her cousins or her friends, but… him.

Somehow, she was not surprised.

“Oh, God, Therese!”

Except then things got weird. Well, okay, weirder. The hands that reached out to touch her did not seem like something she was imagining. They seemed very real, and she screamed at the contact with her burned skin.

“I know this hurts,” he said roughly, “but I’ve got to get you out.”

As the Trez vision spoke over the din of the fire, she was very impressed by the hallucination. It was so accurate, the way his voice cracked, the coughing, the fact that her body’s nerves went haywire with pain as he dragged her up off the carpet and held her against his chest and turned away from the center of the inferno.

Running now. He was running, and it was terrible, the jangling of her limp arms and legs causing her to retch from the agony as her raw skin rubbed against his shirt, his muscles, his bones. And there was even less oxygen to be had up off the floor. As she gasped and gagged, she had no idea how he was breathing through the exertion. Or how he knew where he was going. The smoke was blinding, not that she could have tracked anything, because pain was making her go in and out of consciousness, her eyes checker-boarding and then clearing… only to phase out again.

And then there was pause. And an explosion.

No, wait, he was kicking down a door.

But it wasn’t to the stairwell. It was to an apartment, and she was rushed into the space.

Trez—or what seemed to be him—slammed the door shut behind them and went farther into the apartment, all the way to the back, to a bathroom. The air was clearer now, and he yanked down the shower curtain with one hand, and laid it out on the tile.

“I’m going to put you down now,” he said.

He was careful as he did so, but she moaned in pain as her body was shifted, and as soon as she was on the hard flooring, a coughing fit curling her onto her side—and she was pretty sure she vomited. She didn’t know. She was just trying to breathe, but all she could seem to draw in was smoke, even though her eyes, unreliable as they were, were telling her that there was none in the cramped room.

Trez turned away. Opened the window. Got out a phone.

Then he was back down beside her, leaning over her as he spoke to someone.

All she could do was study his face.

He was totally familiar to her, she realized in her delirium. But not just because she had met him at the restaurant. Or because she had had sex with him. Or because she had been thinking of him all day and night since their breakup.

It was because she knew him… from before.

And this conviction made her study him all the more closely—although what she saw terrified her. Soot streaked the dark skin of his beautiful face, and part of his short hair was gone, singed off from the heat. The collar of his thin silk shirt was black, but not because the fabric had come in that color. The smoke had seeped into the fibers that had been white, and she had a thought that their lungs were the same, now clogged with particles.

What if he died here, too—

He was talking to her. Urgently.

When he took her hand, she moaned in pain, and he immediately stopped. In the strange, surreal silence between them, he looked as terrified as she felt, and she knew he feared he was too late when it came to having saved her. Just as she was scared she had endangered his life.

She wanted to tell him she loved him. Because she did. In a way she could not understand, the clogging, blinding smoke had brought in its thick, impenetrable folds a clarity that revealed everything: She had been his at an earlier time, and he had been hers, and they had been separated by death. After which she had been placed on the doorstep of her parents’ house and destined to find him here, in Caldwell, some decades down the line, in this specific moment right here.

This was the reunion that he had recognized first and then doubted.

And that she now saw for what it was.

A Christmas miracle.

Desperately, she wanted to tell him all this, but her strength was draining fast, as if, now that they were in relative safety, the adrenaline load that had kept her barely alive was leaving and taking the functioning of her vital organs with it. She was out of time.

Therese thought of her mahmen. Her brother. Her father.

And then she focused on Trez’s face.

With the last vestiges of her energy, she lifted her hand. As it entered her line of sight, she had a momentary horror at the bald anatomy that was showing. But then not even that mattered.