The Alchemy of Forever

jump?”
    Taryn exhales, her shoulders slumping. “Why do you care?” Tears shine in her green eyes.
    I search my heart, wanting to say the right thing. But all that springs to mind are six hundred years of platitudes, so I settle on the same question I asked myself when I decided to let myself die: “Do you have a good reason?”
    She turns away from me, and I follow her gaze across the water. The twinkling lights of downtown San Francisco are barely visible through the fog, swirled and smudged like the Milky Way. When I was little, my mother and I used to lie out in the grass behind our house in London and spell my name in the stars, like a celestial connect-the-dots. “ Seraphina” means “angel,” she would tell me . Can’t you see it written in the heavens?
    “Do you have any family?” I ask, stepping close enough to touch her.
    “I don’t have anyone,” she says, the wind lifting her hair behind her.
    I reach out for her thin shoulder. I look deep into her green eyes. “Not even the boy at the bar?”
    “Especially not him,” Taryn says fiercely.
    I nod, understanding. “You won’t find any comfort in death,” I promise her. “It’s a void. It’s nothing. You only want to die if you desire that nothingness. If you don’t want to be alone, that means you’re still alive. There’s hope.”
    “Who are you?” she asks. I can barely hear her voice over the wind.
    I think back over my unnaturally long life—my childhood in London, swimming in the sea in the south of France, arriving in San Francisco in the 1960s—and scroll through all the names I’ve gone by, starting with Seraphina and ending with Jennifer. I look her in the eye. “I am no one.”
    She takes a step away from me, closer to the edge. I look down at the hard, glittery pavement, some forty feet below. The surface glistens with moisture.
    “Taryn,” I say urgently. “You can’t fly. The stars aren’t your friends. Climb down. Go back to the bar. Find some people.”
    She hesitates, chewing her lip. I see her resolve softening. “I can’t promise I won’t be back here later, though.”
    “That’s fine. You decide to live one moment at a time. When it’s time to die, really time, you will know.”
    Taryn walks back toward me and I again put my hand on her shoulder. For the first time I see fear in her eyes. Good. Fear indicates a desire to live. “Get down,” I tell her with a little push. And she does, her small hands gripping the ladder, moving slowly, trying not to fall.
    I hold my hand to my brow, watching Taryn fade into the foggy night, her red T-shirt slipping away like a heart. When she’s gone, I let out the breath I’ve been holding. I saved a life tonight. Two, if I count Claudia. It doesn’t erase all the lives I’ve taken, all the borrowed time I’ve lived on. But it’s something.
    I take a step closer to the edge, retracing Taryn’s footsteps. If I run and jump, I should be able to hit the water. But first, I fish in my bag and pull out Cyrus’s book and a lighter. This knowledge dies with me. The cover is leather, dyed a brilliant shade of blue. It reminds me of Cyrus’s eyes—I have seen them in every shade of blue. Currently, they’re an icy blue, like the snow-covered part of a glacier. But when I first met him, they were this exact shade. The rich color of the morning sky before the sun rises. In one smooth motion, I bang the book against the metal platform beneath my feet, and the lock breaks away.
    The pages are thick, smooth vellum. The smell transports me back in time, when I used to sit with my father in his study as he scratched away at his balance sheets. But I realize, my heart sinking, that they won’t burn quickly. My father told me that vellum is made from animal skin—not plant fibers, like modern paper. It’s why the book, at least as old as Cyrus, has lasted.
    I run my hand over the surface of the pages. They are a jumble of Latin, Greek, and Old English, plus other languages I don’t recognize, mixed in with astrological and scientific symbols: the output of Cyrus’s alchemy studies. One page has a rough sketch of two people facing each other, a braided cord joining them at the navel. It’s been painstakingly shaded with metallic ink. I know instantly what it is: the silver cord that binds the soul to the body.
    I don’t have time to burn it, but I can take it with me into the sea. The water will do its job, eventually, washing all the ink away. Hugging the