My sister brought me coffee in a building that would not exist on Thursday, which is how I knew she wanted something.
Petra crossed the nave with two cups and the careful walk of someone who'd recently let strangers install hardware behind her eye. She still misjudged distances. She set the coffee down a full handspan from where the stone actually was, and it landed anyway, because the stone, like everything else in St. Belsen's, was both there and partly gone.
"You look like a woman saying goodbye to a husband," she said.
"I'm tuning."
The organ breathed under my hands even with no one playing it—a low residual hum, the last analog lungs in three cities, exhaling into rooms that would soon be numbers. I had until Thursday to make it sing properly one final time. Then a woman with a clipboard would sign a form, and the breathing would become a file, and the file would never be cold or out of tune or alive.
The woman with the clipboard was standing by the archived windows. Audra Vey. Silver in her hair, hands that wouldn't stop reading the room. She'd come close earlier to ask whether I needed more time, and she smelled of solder and bergamot. I had said no. I had meant the opposite.
"I'll leave you to the paperwork," Petra announced, far too lightly, and gathered her coat. She squinted at me from the wrong distance, kissed the air near my cheek, and was gone before I could ask which paperwork, since there was none that required me.
That was when I understood.
Petra reads transition files for a living. She decides which memories people keep when they upload. And Audra Vey, who signs buildings into death and walks away, had a file too—and somewhere in it my sister had found my name flagged under *worth keeping*. Petra hadn't brought me here to mourn an organ. She had arranged the roster. She had delivered me.
I could have left. Instead I let the silence do what silence does in a room built to hold it.
Audra came back across the pale footprints of the absent pews. "Your sister," she said, "is not subtle."
"She thinks she is. It's kinder to let her."
The cold made our breath visible. She stopped close enough that I could see the assessment leave her hands, replaced by something less rehearsed.
"You knew," she said.
"I suspected. About the file. About what's in it."
"And you stayed."
"You signed the death warrant on the only thing I love," I said, "and you flagged me as worth remembering. I find I can hold both."
She undid the top button of my coat, watching my face for the place to stop. I gave her no such place. The second button. The third. Cold air found my sternum and then her hand did, flat against the thin shirt, warmth arriving through the fabric like a change in weather.
The organ hummed. The windows glowed in colors truer than glass should manage, pixelating gently at the edges, and against them she traced my spine, vertebra by vertebra, a survey done by someone who meant to keep the map. I turned my head and the kiss I expected at my mouth landed at the hinge of my jaw instead—the catch of her breath there—and I made a sound I hadn't decided to make.
Her skin was cold where mine was cold. We warmed each other in the specific friction of two people who had run out of buildings to hide in. She was solder and bergamot and a pulse I could feel under my thumb where the old scar was, and I had wanted, for months, to touch one real thing before everything I loved was smoothed into the eternal.
We stopped just short of the floor, just short of everything, lingering at the threshold because the threshold was the unmediated thing. Her forehead against mine. Our breath the warmest object in the room, except possibly the forgotten coffee. Somewhere in the pipes above us, a mouse was running—I could hear its nails on the metal, quick and oblivious and completely unarchived.
In the morning Petra brought me coffee again.
"You're glowing," she said, squinting at my collarbone from across the table.
"Building must've gone gently."
"It did."
She had given me the one thing I'd never have asked for, and would never admit she'd given. So I drank my coffee and let my little sister believe she'd gotten away with everything, which is the only gift worth offering someone who already knows you completely.
