Tally couldn’t help the smile that twitched at her lips, finishing up their slides on the Ming dynasty. There was onlyone more dynasty to go. The 1600s had rolled around. Their PowerPoint would end with the final Qing, which was just as well, because the project was due next Monday and they needed time to go back and proofread the slides.
The rain beat on. Nate amused himself, lying down on his rug and picking at the threads, while Tally designed the color scheme for the Qing dynasty slides.
“Take a guess,” he said after a moment. “Did we end up royalty or peasants next?”
“It seems like we usually alternate between lives.” Tally tilted her head, trying to align the text. “I’d say royalty. Or at least the elite. Probably not a great life.”
Nate lifted onto his elbow. “Because the last one was so peaceful?”
“No, because the Opium Wars started in the Qing dynasty.” Shedidknow her major history. Her GPA didn’t maintain itself.
“Ah.” Nate scrunched up another wad of paper. “Good guess. Yeah, it wasn’t pretty. We were around as the children of elites for the Second Opium War.”
Something about his tone pulled Tally away from her keyboard to look at him. For a minute, she forgot that she was supposed to be skeptical. For a minute, she was awash in the weeks and weeks of stories from the past that he had been regaling her with, and before she could stop herself, she said, “Hey.”
Nate glanced in her direction.
“Why...don’tI remember anything?”
Perhaps she should have asked this from the very beginning. It seemed this was the one discrepancy, wasn’t it? In every other incarnation, he alleged that she remembered immediately.
“I don’t know, Tally.” Nate sat up, resting his elbows on his knees. Quietly, he added, “Maybe you wanted to forget me.”
Tally had accustomed herself to Nate’s mood switches, flipping fast between intense seriousness if he was recounting a death and superficial humor when he moved to dramatizing the details. She had not heard this yet: vulnerability, scraping at his voice, turning his eyes large and sad.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He looked down into his lap. “In our last life, we had a fight right before we died.”
Tally leaned forward. Nate shifted, uncomfortable, and her arm snapped forward in an instant, latching on to his ankle before he could get up.
“About what?”
Nate was forced to remain on the floor. An edge of bitterness gripped the set of his mouth and the posture of his shoulders, but it wasn’t directed at Tally. It curled inward at himself, turning his whole disposition stiff.
“I guess we’ve finally reached the modern history part of the timeline.” He pushed his laptop screen down. “It was the 1940s. We were academics in Beijing. The city was getting too dangerous, but we couldn’t agree on what to do. You wanted to leave. Flee overseas. I thought it was better to stay. You were so mad at me because I wouldn’t listen.”
Tally’s fingers flew over her keyboard.1940s Beijing, she typed into Google.Civil war,Japanese occupation,domestic revolution, the search results spat back at her.
“I boarded a train for a conference the next day,” Nate continued. “I think you must have felt something was wrong. Some immortal instinct—I suppose. You came after me on that train. And the moment you found me in that carriage, before we even got a greeting out for each other...” He motioned with his hands, bursting outward. “It blew up. A political attack. I did some research last year to see who set the blast, and history didn’t even remember it.”
Nate fell quiet.
“Hey,” Tally said again. Carefully, she reached out, prodding his elbow. “Disagreeing on one thing doesn’t mean I’d want to be separated from you forever.”
The rain outside battered down on the dorm window. Nate stared at the trembling glass.
“There was a lifetime in the Song dynasty where I didn’t come searching for you—I haven’t told you about that one yet,” he said, his voice nearly dropping to a whisper. “We died so brutally in the previous run that I thought you were better off without me. We stayed separate up until we were twenty years old, and then your memories came in anyway. You tracked me down yourself, so angry at me for staying away that I promised I’d never do it again.” His eyes swiveled back to her. “So I don’t know, Tally. This has never happened before. All I can think is that you finally changed your mind in 1943 and you wanted to forget me.”
Tally’s brow furrowed. The pain in his voice twisted her stomach, dug into her innards like glass.
“You’re being ridiculous,” she said firmly. “How can you believe that two thousand years together could be dissolved by one argument in one lifetime? If we hadn’t died at that exact moment, we would have worked it out. We would have talked about it and come to a compromise.” Tally cleared her throat, suddenly hearing herself. What was she saying? “Hypothetically, of course. I’m only guessing.”
The fog cleared in Nate’s eyes. When he gave a small smile, it was the sun on wet pavement, made brighter because of the glistening shine.
“You mean that?”
“I’mguessing,” Tally repeated, turning her attention back to her laptop. “Now go back to the Qing dynasty. We have ten slides to fill up.”