Our Infinite Fates

by Laura Steven

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.”

“Have you heard the hype?” 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.

Almost everyone I had ever loved was dead, and the hurt never went away; I just learned to exist alongside it.

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.

Then a throat-clearing that made every hair on my body stand on end. I turned around. Dylan. Leaning against the stable door in his mucky overalls, watching my every move. “This is a bit much, Evelyn. Even for you.”

had called Arden’s bluff, and I had won. He hadn’t killed me the second I’d loosened Ceri’s ropes. Which meant there had to be hope that he would let me live past eighteen. He’d changed his mind once before, in the silver-cold of darkest Siberia. I could get him to change it again. My hand went to the folded square paper in my pocket. I still believe.