Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

“Like the sway of the sea and the tug of the tides, love is a moving, eternal thing. Let us not be afraid of the wax and the wane, the rise and the fall, the eternal undertow. Each time our souls meet, let us submerge our bodies in the bright blue cold, and let the waves make us anew.” A tear slid down the apple of her cheek. “I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”

The last thing they saw before the world blinked out was the red ribbon of fate still binding their wrists.

My eighteenth birthday was only a few days away. Which meant that soon, I would be dead.

And in the next life, Papá would be but a stranger.

A little reckless, perhaps, but in my defense I was an immortal being due to die any day now.

I did not fear the aftermath; my father’s ire would not kill me. Only one thing—one person—could.

“You were funny back there.” There was a smirk in his voice, almost flirtatious. “Like you don’t care what happens to you.” I shrugged, trying to bridle the uneven canter of my heart. “It’s all so—” Before I could finish my sentence, there was a knife at my throat. A sharp bolt of adrenaline; a hollow pit in my stomach. The blade was warm from where it had been tucked into his pocket.

My tone dripped with sardonic boredom, but my chest thumped wildly. No matter how many times I was murdered, it never got any less painful. And, in truth, I hadn’t suspected Rafael for a moment.

I swallowed hard, the knife pinching my skin. “Usually you make me fall in love with you first.”

“Siberia hurt you as much as it hurt me.” Swinging my legs out of the pool, I rolled away from him, wincing as my knees grazed the rough tiles. “Is that why you kept your distance this time?”

I pressed the tip of the knife under his chin. “And still you won’t tell me why you hunt me through every life.” “It’s insulting that you don’t remember.”

Moments after Rafael’s final gargled breath, the darkness creeping at the edges of my vision finally swallowed me whole. Floating in a pool of crimson, our hearts stopped beating as one. Every fucking time.

It was human folly, or hubris, to think we could wrong-foot forces like seasons and time, to think we could build a dam against life and death. But that didn’t stop us from trying.

In truth, the thought of anything bad happening to my sister was deeply painful for me too, even if I likely wouldn’t be around to see it. I’d loved a lot of siblings in a lot of lives, but Gracie was a firm favourite. Sharp, weird, bright in an entirely unique way. So alive. The image of her body lying empty in a cold, damp grave was so incongruous that my body folded in on itself whenever I thought about it.

“I am a bit bald, it has to be said. Though I’ve always been eccentric, so perhaps the protruding skull fits my persona. I might start carrying a scythe to really freak people out.”

I remembered the last five or six lives in Technicolor detail—the sights and smells and emotions, the casts of loved ones I’d left behind, every line of Arden’s new faces. But the lives before that became less and less distinct the further back they went, until everything was smudged with fog.

And beneath it all, shrouded under several layers of love and fear and confusion and hurt and grief and anger … there was a why. A why that had eluded me for centuries.

“It’s a viral sensation,” Gracie said scathingly. She eschewed popular culture out of principle. “Honestly, what was Becca thinking? I have cancer, not bad taste. Speaking of which, I’m honoured that you’re still wearing the necklace.”

“Because you are getting out of here, Gracie. I promise.” The absurd thing was that I genuinely believed it.

It seemed so unfair that someone so full of life could be sucked clean of it by a brutal disease. Yet while I had lost a lot of people in a lot of lives, I could save her. A rare power. A gift in a lifetime of curses. I just had to survive long enough to do so.

If only I could tell her that my original generation was born more than a thousand years before hers. Most adults and authority figures acted like they’d been around longer than me and thus had some greater understanding of life, but while I’d never lived past eighteen, and my frontal lobe had never fully formed, I’d still seen some stuff.

In every life, Arden was drawn to literature like a bee to nectar. So if I was going to find them anywhere, where better than here?

As she handed it to me, I ran a finger over the title. Ten Hundred Years of You. Author unknown.

I shook my head numbly. “I’m not on social media.” Not just out of some vague sense of self-preservation but out of principle. Over the past lifetime I had seen the way it eroded democracy and gamified conflict, the way it splintered attention spans and polarised opinions to dangerous extremes, the way it devalued art and fed the leeches of artificial intelligence, the way it jacked adrenaline and manipulated dopamine and narrowed human awe to a singular flickering point.

I read one theory that it was sent to Earth by some kind of celestial being.”

For centuries I’d begged to read their writing, to no avail. And now the twin forces of fate and synchronicity had handed it to me on a platter. This was Arden’s poetry. It had to be.

My fingernails would’ve dug crescents into the ridges of his shoulders had there not been several inches of fur and suede between us. “Why can’t we just … be?”

“We can’t live to … We can’t. It would ruin us.” I let go of him, my limbs growing sleepy. “Have I lived to eighteen before?” A terse nod. “Twice.” “And? What happened?”

He chuckled bitterly. “I love you too.” It wasn’t the first time he’d said it in this life, but it might have been the last. “Even after the crossbow at Mount Fuji?” “Even after the crossbow at Mount Fuji. Right through the eye. Couldn’t do it again if you tried.”

“Fuck, I don’t want to do this. I love you. I love you. What am I doing?”

“Last night, when we were in bed … I can’t explain. No language I’ve ever encountered can express what we have to go through over and over again.” He knelt before me, resting his forehead on my knee. “All I know is that I’d do anything to lie in that bed with you just once without thinking about how I’m going to have to kill you soon. That’s all I want. You. Alive. With me.” He looked up at the sky as though pleading with some sadistic deity. “The thought of waiting another sixteen or seventeen years to see you again is too much to bear.”

“And I’m just so tired of this. I’m so tired, Evelyn.”

“I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you,” he whispered, hoarse, tortured. My throat ached. “I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.”

next to the soul I’d loved for a hundred lives and lost in every one, we took our final breath beneath the indifferent stars.

Almost everyone I had ever loved was dead, and the hurt never went away; I just learned to exist alongside it. Yet, for better or worse, I always let myself love anyway. Call it courage, call it insanity; both would be correct.

In truth, a part of me believed that everyone I’d ever loved would come back to me again in another life, in another form. They wouldn’t necessarily know we had met before, and nor would I, but that energy would still thrum between us, that recycled love, that historic bond.

And so, in the absence of any abiding religious convictions, this was the one blind faith I had: that love was a physical force, and it was never wasted. Once it was called out into the universe, it would echo back to us forever.

“My love for you could fill an ocean, Evelyn.” There was an awful resignation to her tone. “But it can’t stop the tide of time.”

Because that’s the thing about humans—we leave traces of our souls everywhere, as unique and identifying as fingerprints.

Arden was here. He had found me. And very soon, he was going to kill me. So why had I wanted so badly to run into his arms?

“The Evelyn I know … they love over and over and over again, even though it can only ever end in tragedy. Even though they’ve lost everyone they’ve ever loved, and they miss them in the next life, and the next, and the next. Never have they developed hard edges like I have. Never have they tried to protect themselves from that pain. They love softly, and fiercely, and openly, and it’s the bravest thing I know. The most human thing I know.”

Arden was a vast tapestry that grew more detailed with every incarnation. Perhaps the raw material began as a simple expanse of goodness, of loyalty, of creativity and imagination, but with every life they lived—and every life they took—another section of elaborate beadwork was stitched through the silk. Each piece of knowledge gained was a jewel in the border; each new person they encountered was an intricate patch of embroidery.

I craved their presence, their conversation, their embrace—even if it would ultimately result in our death. It was a yearning so complex that it defied all reason.

I tucked my phone away and instead pulled out Ten Hundred Years of You. I ran a fingertip over the page where Arden described grief as clay—clay that could be used to sculpt something beautiful—and began to sob.

“But for what it’s worth, that’s what I love about you. It’s not just how kind you are, or how deeply, stupidly brave. It’s how you still allow your heart to be tender. How you never lose faith in humanity.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulders. “Do you know how powerful that is? Do you know how rare you are, in a world where the sky rains fire?”

“I thought I was supposed to be the poet.” A sigh, long and low. “Though, without you, there would be no poetry.

“You have faith in all of humanity. You have faith in love. Please, have faith in me. I do this to protect you. Do you understand that? That I would lay my body over yours, war after war after war, life after life after life?”

“All right. Well, good luck on your date, then. Don’t put out straight away. Or, if you do, wear protection.”

He’s going to kill you, I reminded myself, and, in turn, your sister.

It felt so soft, so easy. And after a lifetime of sharp edges and terrible ends, I needed all the softness I could get.