Lars was standing in the dim light of the Head Museum, and he was pretty sure he was dreaming.

He had to be. He hadn't been back to the Head Museum in months. And he couldn't remember getting there - couldn't remember getting off the couch at Planet Express, even - which seemed like solid evidence of dreaming.

He was standing in the exhibition hall for the 20th Century, staring at the shelf nearest to him.

Lars moved closer, inspecting the heads in their jars. There were five of them and they were all asleep, pale and unnatural behind glass.

His parents were at the head of the line, and then Yancy, followed by Lana and finally his nephew, Philip Jr. He looked about six, frozen at the age Lars had known him.

Lars touched the glass in front of his mother's face.

She didn't wake. He hadn't really expected her to.

There was a sixth jar at the end of the row, but this one was empty and rimed over with ice. Lars picked it up, and read the name inscribed on it with no great surprise.

Philip J. Fry.

He turned it over in his hands, feeling the chill.

"Sorry," he said to his sleeping family.

He put the jar down and walked on through the greenish light, through the rest of the hall. Past dead presidents and the cast of Star Trek, until all the faces that looked familiar had faded and he found himself passing only sleeping strangers. He left them behind at last and stepped into an anteroom.

It didn't look like any room in the real Head Museum. For one thing, there were screens on the shelves here instead of heads in jars.

And the screens were alive.

They flickered and jumped when he looked at them, whatever they depicted moving too fast to see. Every time Lars thought he'd caught a glimpse of something - a face he knew, an image he might recognize - the screen would zap to something new, like someone changing the channel. The harder Lars tried to see, the faster the scenes flicked away from him, as if they were taunting him in their refusal to stay still. The air in the room didn't help. It was thick and charged with electricity, shifting from green to blue and back again, like the northern lights in an Arctic winter.

Maybe it was some kind of electrical storm.

There was no evidence of people in this room, but there were robot parts strewn across the floor. They were all old and rusted, as if they'd been worn out and tossed away in a hurry, to be replaced.

Lars nudged one with his foot.

"Bender?"

There was no reply.

"Bender? Are you here?"

Why he was calling for Bender, Lars couldn't say. But there was something familiar about this place. It didn't exist - he was sure of that - but he couldn't shake the feeling he'd been here before, or the feeling that he might find Bender here, if he only waited long enough.

It felt as if Bender had just walked out of the room ahead of him - or maybe as if, if he turned around fast enough, he might see the robot in the shadows.

"Bender," he said again, but his voice sounded weak and tinny in the eye of the storm.

There was a flash of purple on one of the screens - a flash that might have been Leela's hair - but it was gone by the time Lars snapped his gaze back to look at it.

"I'm going," he said to the crackling air.

There was no reply.

Reluctantly, Lars turned his back and walked on. The hall he stepped into next was full of heads again. He almost felt relieved, except that this wasn't right either. This wasn't the Head Museum he knew. The shelves were stacked too high, teetering out of sight, and they stretched on further than he could see.

Here, the heads were all awake.

They watched him as he passed, following him with sorrowful, accusatory stares.

Something compelled him to speak.

"I don't know you," he said. Then - hopelessly - "I'm sorry."

He walked on as they stared. There were rows and rows of them, more than he could count. There was a swathe of soldiers, looking sad and lost, and then a section of tiny, furry Nibblonian heads, who watched him with eyes as blank as glass. There were Trisolians, glowing bright blue and swirling in agitation in their jars, and faces that looked like Kif's people, crying silent tears.

Lars tried to hurry past them, but the rows never seemed to end. Every step he took brought new faces. The silence was getting louder. He couldn't hear his own footsteps anymore, or the sound of his breathing. He stopped and put a hand to his chest, watching it rise and fall. Feeling his heart beat.

You're alive, he told himself. You're alive.

Why was it so quiet?

The further he walked into silence - the more the sound drained from the world - the more the heads seemed to be trying to talk to him. Their mouths were moving now, pleading noiselessly - shouting at him, even - but Lars couldn't understand what they were saying. Go, or no, or . . .

Lars jumped.

The face he was staring into was the Professor's. The old man was yelling so hard spittle flecked the inside of his jar.

"I'm sorry," Lars said desperately. "I can't hear you. I can't help you. I don't understand."

His own voice was the only thing left.

"I'm sorry . . ."

Hermes was on the shelf beside the Professor. And LaBarbara.

He knew a lot of these faces, Lars realized suddenly. There were strangers on all sides, sure, but . . . there was that crazy lady who threw cats at him sometimes, and there was Scruffy the janitor, and Michelle, and Randy . . .

They were screaming at him.

Lars ran. Stumbling, too slow, his leg buckling under him. On and on, until the faces blurred, until -

His foot snagged on a ruck in the carpet and he pitched forward, sprawling out onto his face.

He lay there, breathing hard.

There was gloom up ahead. The light was fading but the shelves were finally receding, falling away to leave an empty space.

The heads had stopped shouting at him. He passed Kif, and an Amphibiosan girl, and a gray-faced young woman he almost thought he knew. They watched him intently, but none of them tried to speak.

Lars left them behind and stepped into the twilight.

Amy was waiting for him. Not just her head - the real Amy, a small figure standing on the edge of the dark. She tipped his chin up, and examined him closely. Then she shook her head, resigned, and walked away.

"Amy!"

She moved faster than Lars could. He tried to chase her but she was lost before he knew it, swallowed up as the light rolled over him in a blue wave.

Leela was standing on the other side of it, alone.

She was holding something that looked like a baby, swaddled in blankets. When she saw Lars she took a step back and hugged the bundle tighter.

"No," she said. An absolute rebuke. A line in the sand.

Lars stepped closer, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

"No," Leela said again, as iron-hard as before.

Lars pulled back the blanket.

It wasn't a baby. It was the Professor's doomsday device.

"No!" Leela insisted - furious, defiant - as the cold swept in and the wind picked up, the storm howling all around her. But her voice was cracking now, and there were tears in her eye. "No! Don't you dare - I won't let you -"

Lars watched from outside himself as he shook his head, and kissed her, and took the weapon out of her hands.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Please. You have to trust me," he told her.

He took a step back, and pressed the detonator, and blew himself to hell.

Lars bolted forward and crashed off the couch onto the floor.

He struggled to his feet.

He'd fallen asleep in front of the TV. He hadn't meant to - sleep felt like something being stolen from him, now - but the blaring drone of the Hypnotoad had wiped his mind blank, and his body had taken over.

The room was pitch black around him, the faint glow of the city outside the only light. He must have been out for hours.

Lars shivered, watching his breath mist in front of him. There were snowflakes stuck to the window.

The TV had gone blank, just a black screen with a tiny green light flickering in one corner. Standby mode. Lars turned it off and grasped for his crutch. So much for sleep.

He limped out of the room, crutch clicking quietly on the tile of the corridor. What was he supposed to do now? He couldn't go find Leela. She wasn't his to find anymore.

He paused in the corridor, uncertain.

For the first time, he felt alone.

"Amy?"

He found her in the lab, asleep at her workstation.

Nibbler was curled up nose to tail beside her. He'd made himself a nest of shredded papers and was snuffling, panting as if he was running in his dreams. Lars stroked him to soothe him but decided to let him sleep.

He should let Amy sleep too. It wasn't fair to wake her just because he was lonely. Just because his subconscious had freaked him out. That wasn't her problem.

He turned to go.

"Kif?" Amy said blearily.

Lars winced.

"Uh, no. Sorry. It's me. Go back to sleep, it's okay. I was leaving anyway."

Amy yawned and rubbed her cheek where it had stuck to her forearm.

"I'm awake now," she mumbled.

"I know. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have disturbed you. Go back to sleep."

Amy frowned at him.

"What did you want?"

"It doesn't matter."

Amy stared at him for a long moment. Then she stood up and stretched, yawning again.

"Let's have coffee," she said decisively. "You want coffee?"

"Amy -"

"You're my friend," Amy said quietly. "And you're dying soon. If you want to talk, we're talking. Even if it's the middle of the night. Because soon . . ." She swallowed. "Soon I won't ever be able to talk to you again. I don't care if I'm grouchy tomorrow. I want to talk. Or not talk. I don't mind. We can just sit and drink coffee, if you want. But you shouldn't have to face this alone."

Lars nodded, fighting the sudden lump in his throat.

"Coffee sounds good," he said at last.

Amy patted him on the shoulder.

"Okay. Let's get some air."

The snowfall had slowed, out on the balcony. A lone flake drifted into his coffee cup and melted into the creamer. Lars wrapped his hands around the mug, trying to keep the heat in as the cold air leached it away.

He felt more awake out here. And less alone, with Amy by his side.

"So," she said.

"So?"

"You couldn't sleep?"

Lars shook his head.

"I slept. For a while." He stared down into his coffee. "I dreamed."

"Dreamed?"

"Yeah. I was in the Head Museum, and all the heads were screaming at me."

Amy snorted.

"Isn't that your idea of a hot date?"

Lars was too rattled to rise to the insult. He shook his head.

"It wasn't the screaming skulls. It was the regular heads."

"Ooh, spooky."

"No, you don't understand. It wasn't spooky. It was scary."

Amy sobered.

"Oh. Sorry. I didn't mean to laugh at you."

Lars waved this away.

"It's okay. That wasn't the scariest part." He swallowed. "Leela was there too. In the dream. She knew what I was going to do."

"With the doomsday device?"

"Yeah. She had it. She tried to stop me." Lars clenched his fist. His hand had started to shake. "She begged me not to do it. But I did."

Amy was quiet.

Lars found himself talking to fill in the silence.

"I'm being selfish," he admitted. "Aren't I? I know I am. I want to protect Leela, I want to save everyone, and . . . this is the only way. But I know Leela. If she knew what I was planning, she'd try and stop me." He laughed sadly. "This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, and the one thing that made it easier was knowing at least I wouldn't have to see her face. After. I wouldn't have to see how much it hurt her."

"But in the dream you saw it."

Lars nodded.

"I'm sorry," Amy said in a small voice.

Lars nodded again, not trusting himself to speak. What else was there to say?

"Amy?"

"Uh huh?"

Lars shifted his coffee cup from hand to hand, searching for the words.

"What's gonna happen to me? When it's over?"

"It won't hurt," Amy said quickly. "If there's one thing the Professor is really good at, it's designing doomsday devices. All the atoms in your body will be shredded in a nano second. You won't have time to feel pain."

Lars shook his head.

"That's not what I meant. I don't care if it hurts. I'm not afraid of that. I meant . . . what happens to me after?"

"After?"

"Yeah. After."

Lars made a wiggly gesture with his hand. It looked like he was pulling a snake out of his chest and making it fly away, like one of Bender's magic tricks.

But Amy seemed to understand it.

"Oh. You mean . . ." She winced. "I don't know. No-one knows."

Lars nodded, staring out at the snow. He didn't know what else he'd expected. If science had proven the existence of an afterlife at some stage in the last thousand years, someone probably would have mentioned it by now.

"What do you believe?" Amy asked. "Your family, I mean. Are you, um . . ."

Lars shrugged.

"We weren't anything, really. My dad was in the Vietnam War and when he came back, he stopped going to church. He said if God was real he wouldn't have invented the nuclear arms race." Lars frowned, remembering. "He used to say, the only thing a man can do before dying is square it with himself. And take down as many of the enemy as possible. But he always said that was a situational consideration."

"What about your mom?"

"She thought church was a waste of time. She used to stay home and watch the game instead."

"What game?"

Lars shrugged again.

"Any game."

Amy nodded.

"Yeah. My parents aren't religious either," she said. "My dad always said religion was for suckers. But I think that's because our family got rich by scamming the Native Martians out of their sacred land. The Martians had thousands of years of spirituality and ancestry and y'know, connection with the land. And stuff. And then we came along and poured concrete all over the planet."

She caught a snowflake on her upturned palm, and stared at it.

Her voice turned sad.

"Maybe that's why my parents can't care about anything except themselves. I used to feel like that too. It's hard to think anything matters, when you see how easy it is to tear it all down. My whole life, that's all I've been watching my parents do. Tearing down thousands of years of history so we can put up a strip mall and a 7-11." She rolled her eyes. "My mom says the Martian sacred traditions are woo-woo. She calls their sacred artefacts junk. The really sad thing is, I don't even think the Native Martians care anymore. No-one cares, on Mars. We just chewed up the planet and spat it out. Everyone left there is lost, or has no soul."

Lars blinked.

"I didn't know you felt like that."

"I didn't either, until I met Kif. Sometimes you don't see what's in front of you until you look at it through someone else's eyes."

Amy fidgeted, chipping at her fingernails.

"We were talking one day," she admitted. "Um. One night. And I realized . . . I don't believe anything. If something happened to Kif tomorrow, I don't have anything that could help me. That could make it okay. He'd just be gone, forever."

She took a nervous breath.

"It was scary, figuring that out. My life on Mars was hollow but it never scared me, because it felt safe. I was living in a bubble, and if I never looked outside it, if I never thought about it . . . I felt safe. I didn't hate my life," she said. "But then I fell in love with Kif, and suddenly . . . I could see the bubble. I could see how empty my life was, on the inside. I tried not to think about it, but Kif kept going away to fight, going to all these really dangerous places, and . . . it scared me."

"You were scared he'd get hurt?"

Amy nodded.

"Uh-huh. But I was more scared of what would happen to me, if something happened to Kif. I know that sounds selfish. I know it's awful. But for the first time, I could feel this . . . this emptiness. Like a pit under my feet. I couldn't see it but I could feel it under us all the time, even when we were happy. My life without Kif. It scared me. I was scared one day I'd get a call with bad news and I'd fall into that pit, right through the floor, and nothing could pull me back out. I didn't know how to make my life mean anything again, if he wasn't in it."

Lars nodded. He had some idea of how that felt.

Amy wiped her eyes.

"Sometimes I think I broke us up so I wouldn't have to feel scared anymore," she admitted.

"Did it work?"

Amy laughed.

"No! I'm still terrified of anything happening to Kif." She hesitated. "But following you guys to the sewer, and overclocking Bender . . . everything that happened this year . . . it made me realize." She blushed. "Kif isn't the only thing that has meaning in my life. If I lost him . . . I wouldn't lose everything." She shrugged. "It's not a religion or anything, but . . . it helps, I guess. It's something to hold onto."

Lars nodded.

"That makes sense."

He'd done something similar, in the past. It was a good rule for living, to find something to hold onto.

But a bad rule for dying, when you couldn't let go.

"What about Kif?" he asked. "He believes something, right?"

Lars was hazy on the specifics of what Kif's people believed, but all the weird swamp rituals had to mean something. And they had always seemed important to Kif. Maybe there was some meaning there.

Amy nodded.

"Yeah. He believes."

"Does it make him happy? I mean . . . believing in sacred life-giving gunk and stuff. Does it make it easier?"

Amy snorted.

"It's not about the gunk. He doesn't worship the gunk. Well, not exactly. It's more like . . . his clan, they're grateful for life. They think it's a gift your ancestors give to you. And you pay it back one day when you have kids, or when you die and your body gets sucked back into the ooze to feed new life. It's a cycle, and it's all in balance. It's pretty neat."

Lars nodded. There was something he liked about that. If life was a gift then it made sense to pay it forward when your life was over. Wasn't that what he was doing? Dying so everyone else could live?

"The swamp part is gross," he admitted. "And the rotting bodies. But I like the rest of it. So his people don't have a god or anything?"

"No." Amy was quiet a minute. "I think they worship love," she said softly.

"Like hippies? But Kif doesn't even smoke marijuana. And I think he was a virgin when he met you. Uh, no offense."

"I'm not offended. He totally was." Amy smiled. "It was sweet. I had to get used to it but it was nice. It slowed me down. I was such a party animal before, but every little thing meant so much to Kif, it kind of forced me to slow down and be in the moment more." She glanced at Lars. "You know. Intimacy."

Lars stared at his shoes.

"Yeah," he murmured.

It was what he'd had with Leela. Not because they'd taken it slow, but because they'd had time. Two years was a long time to be with someone. Ten years was a long time to know someone. He'd never had a relationship last so long, or run so deep.

Amy broke into his brooding with a friendly nudge.

"Anyway," she said. "You're thinking of free love. That's hippies. Kif's people aren't like that. They think love is like a . . . a force, I guess. Or a power." She sighed. "I'm not good at explaining it. But they think it's the only thing that matters. They think it comes to you and it changes your whole life. Like fate."

"Like soulmates?"

"Yeah, but your soul can belong with people in different ways. There are different loves. Your romantic love is your smismar, like I am for Kif, but you can have friends you love in different ways, or family. They have words for every kind of love you could imagine. I don't know them all. Kif says the only thing that matters is if the love is there, and it changes your life somehow. Then the bond you have with that person is special and you have to let fate lead you where it wants you to go."

Lars absorbed this.

"That makes sense," he said at last. "Kif has it all figured out, huh?"

Amy wrinkled her nose.

"I don't know," she said thoughtfully. "He can be so passive. It drives me crazy sometimes. He's always waiting for the universe to give him a sign for what he should do. But sometimes I think he's right. If he hadn't stayed with Zapp all those years, he never would've met me on the Titanic that day. Maybe fate does exist. Maybe some people are meant to be together, no matter where they are in space." She gestured up at the stars. "Or time."

She looked sidelong at Lars.

He nodded.

"I always thought me and Leela were meant to be," he said. "Even when she didn't. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I felt it."

Amy snickered.

"You were crazy. You thought your macaroni Valentine could tell the future."

"Hey! It did! We were meant to be together! It was all there, in the macaroni. Me and Leela, true love -"

Amy dissolved into laughter. Lars held the coffee cup out of her hands, so she wouldn't spill hot coffee all over herself, and passed it back to her when the fit was over.

"I put a lot of work into that Valentine," he said wistfully.

Amy cracked up again, slopping coffee across the floor.

"Sorry," she gasped when the fit was over.

Lars shrugged. He didn't mind seeing Amy laugh, even if she was laughing at him. He wanted happy memories of his friends, while he was still around to notice them.

"I don't mind."

He sipped his coffee, watching the snow.

"I miss those days," he admitted. "Back when the worst thing I ever wondered about was 'why doesn't Leela like me?' The world made sense then."

Amy wiped her hand on her sweatpants and set her coffee cup down out of the way.

"Why?" she said softly. "What do you wonder about now?"

Lars shrugged.

"It doesn't matter."

"It mattered enough to wake you up in the middle of the night," Amy pointed out. "C'mon. What do you wonder about?"

Lars stared into the depths of his coffee cup.

"All kinds of things," he admitted. "What really happened to Bender. If Skreem was scared when she died. If I'm doing the right thing, lying to Leela like this." He breathed out, feeling shaky, and plunged on. "If I'm still me anymore. If Leela will hate me when I'm gone." He swallowed past the hard lump in his throat. "What happens to me when I die, if I don't have a real soul."

Amy blinked.

"You have a soul. Don't be crazy. Of course you do."

"Do I?"

Lars looked her in the eye, challenging.

"Sure you do. Clones have souls."

"But I'm not a clone. Am I? Clones are like the Professor and Cubert. They have the same DNA but they're different people on the inside. That's not what I am. I'm just the same person twice. Or . . . half the same person, maybe."

Amy opened her mouth, then shut it again.

"I . . ."

She stopped.

Lars nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "That's what I thought."

They sat in awkward silence.

"What do you think you are?" Amy asked tentatively.

Lars shrugged, as if he didn't know the answer. But he did.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt like a whole person. And Fry looked like there was something missing in him too. Something more than just Leela.

Their paths had diverged in a darkened room, a thousand years ago, and the more time passed, the more Lars felt like only half of each of them had walked away.

"It's weird," Amy said.

"What is?"

Her gaze darted to him, then back out over the balcony.

"You guys," she said carefully. "You and Fry. You're like . . . mirrors."

"Because we're the same person?"

"Not exactly." She frowned. "It's like you reflect each other."

When Lars gave her a blank look, she gestured at his neck, trying to explain.

"I mean, don't you think it's weird? You got strangled by a kill bot, and he got strangled by a soldier in the DOOP. And you were miles apart, you were on different planets but it must have happened around the same time. And now . . . you look the same. Don't you think that's creepy?"

Lars scoffed.

"We don't look the same. Fry still has hair."

"He's growing a beard."

Lars gave a disparaging snort.

"That's not a beard. He just can't shave. He burned his face."

"And he's got that weather-beaten look," Amy said staunchly. "Like you. And his voice is going all scratchy."

"No, it isn't."

"Yes, it is! Listen to it next time he talks! He doesn't sound exactly like you but he's all . . . husky now. He burned his throat. And -" Amy held up a hand, triumphant - "you sound more like him."

"The hell I do," Lars objected.

"The hell I do!" Amy mimicked. "See? You do! You talk more like him, and he sounds more like you. It's creepy."

Lars tore open his mouth to argue with her, then stopped. Amy wasn't wrong.

"Maybe we are connected," he admitted. "But we're not the same. It's coincidence. Or, I don't know, DNA." He shrugged. "I don't think it matters. We're not connected in a good way. We're more like . . ."

He stopped, unsure how to explain himself.

"Magnets," he said at last. "That's what I think. Sometimes. Me and him. It's like that thing magnets do."

"Um . . ." Amy stifled a giggle. "Attract?"

"What? No! The other thing."

Lars gestured, his fingers pulling away from each other.

"When you put two ends of a magnet together and they're the same, so they push each other away. Because they can't get too close. That thing. You know."

"Oh!" Amy nodded, comprehension dawning. "They repel each other. Yeah." She frowned. "What does that have to do with you and Fry?"

"That's what we're like," Lars said patiently. "Magnets. Or those little scales Lady Liberty has at the courthouse, that have to be in balance. When one of us does something, the other one has to do the opposite. He tips one way, I tip the other way."

He mimed a see-saw action with his hand.

"Um . . ."

It was no good. Amy still looked lost.

Lars sighed.

"When I married Leela," he explained. "It was the happiest I've ever felt. But Fry was miserable, that whole day. And all the days after. And that's how it's always been. The happiest days of my life are the worst days of his life, and the worst days of my life . . ."

He stopped and shook his head, before he said something unfair.

"It's still happening," he said instead. "Fry comes back to make Leela happy again, to fix my mistakes, finally . . . and I find out I'm doomed to die and break her heart. And I can't do anything to stop it. It's not fair. But maybe this is how it has to be. Maybe it's a law of the universe. I don't know."

He stared up at the stars. Tiny pricks of light in a sea of dark.

Amy sighed.

"I feel like we should be drunk for this conversation," she declared. "Coffee isn't cutting it."

Lars smiled wryly.

"Yeah, but I don't want to die hungover."

He felt his gaze pulled up to the stars again. They seemed far away and cold, lost in the dark instead of shining through it.

It was a lonely sight.

"I'm not afraid to die," he murmured. "I'm afraid of what happens after."

Amy hugged his shoulder, shivering in the cold night air.

"If it makes you feel better . . ."

She stopped suddenly, frowning at the night sky.

Lars waited for her to go on, to continue with whatever words of comfort she'd been about to offer. But she didn't.

"Uh . . . Amy?"

Amy ignored him. She reached into her pocket instead, and pulled out a crumpled up piece of paper.

A picture, Lars realized. It was one of those print-outs of the galaxy the Professor had been poring over at his desk, before they'd knocked him out.

Amy was frowning at it now. She lifted it a little higher, holding the image up against the sky as if to compare.

"That's not possible," she murmured.

"Amy?"

Amy jumped.

"It's nothing," she said quickly. "It's not possible. I must be seeing things. Not seeing things. I need sleep."

"Seeing what?"

"It doesn't matter."

Amy crumpled up the picture before he could get a good look at it, and stuffed it back in her pocket.

"We're going crazy," she declared. "Both of us. We need sleep."

"Amy -"

Amy gathered up their coffee cups and pushed them into his hands.

"It's nothing," she said. "I thought I saw . . . I thought there was a galaxy missing up there." She laughed sheepishly. "But that's impossible. A galaxy burning out takes billions and billions of years. There's no way you could see something like with the naked eye. The rate of collapse would be impossible."

Lars glanced up at the sky.

"Maybe it's just cloudy."

"Maybe." Amy laughed, over-loud and over-bright. "Or maybe I'm hallucinating." She thought for a minute. "I'll come up here again tomorrow night, when I'm feeling better. With a telescope. I'll find it." She gestured at the cups in his hands. "You should wash those."

"Oh . . . yeah." Lars coughed. "Well . . . goodnight, I guess. Thanks for the talk."

Amy nodded brightly, then gave an exaggerated yawn. Her hand strayed to her pocket.

"Totally! Good talk! But I'm beat. I better sleep. Night, Lars!"

"Night," Lars said numbly.

He watched Amy take off down the corridor, almost running. He sighed.

Great. You made her uncomfortable.

Normal people didn't want to be dragged out of sleep to talk about death and destiny and the potential emptiness of existence. And Amy had never been good with all that doom and gloom stuff. Lars couldn't blame her for running away. It had been selfish of him to drag her into it.

He set down the coffee cups and sat down again. It was too early to start the day. He didn't want to wake everyone up.

He tilted his head back against the wall, staring up at the stars.

Maybe he'd just sit here for a while, and wait for the sky to turn blue.