He opened his mouth and closed it again. There was so much more he wanted to say to her, but Alistair knew that he couldn’t. He could remember her. He could remember this: the two of them standing side by side. Only it wasn’t this moment, but another, centuries before. Two sides of the same coin. It made him want to shout in excitement; it made him want to hide in shame. She doesn’t remember.

You’re an old soul, Ava...” he’d begun, his voice tired.“God, Dad... Let’s not do this now, please...”“It’s true. You are. But that means you have to choose your life… not just react to it.

Don’t cut too deep in your first prints.”“But what if we do dig too deep?” a girl in the front asked. “What happens then?”Giulia reached out to the side, pulling up a print stained with inky shadows, but within its depths, the faint outlines of something else. An echo of what it had been still visible in the second plate.“Cut too deep,” she said, “and your image will keep coming back again and again, no matter how many times you rework it.

And then they half-ran, half-skipped the last eight blocks to her apartment, their bodies connected by their crossed arms. Half a block away, their combined shadow looked like the wings of a single sea bird, wheeling in a bright sky. Two blocks further, and they looked like two boats, alone on an endless ocean. One block from that, and their joined bodies merged into a symbol of infinity.

No, I’m serious,” he insisted, matching her pace perfectly. “Someone you’ve never met before… but it seems like you have.”Ava slowed slightly and he followed without dropping her eyes.“Like you...” Ava answered.She intended for it to be a question, but it came out as a statement instead, because this was part of what unsettled her about Cole Thomas. The feeling that she knew him somehow, or had known him at some point… and that there was something more to it.

Cole felt like he’d stumbled into some arcane Templar practise, his sense of ease disappearing the moment the cups were pulled from the shelf.