The Alchemy of Forever

up late and eating it right in the kitchen in our nightclothes. A century later, after I’d complained of missing my mother, Cyrus had fed me my first bite of real ice cream and smirked triumphantly at my delight in it. “See? Why ever long for something from the past when the future brings things that are so much better?” he’d asked.
    “I still can’t believe Cyrus let you out of his sight the night before your switch,” Charlotte says as we turn the corner and walk toward Michael’s. I strain my eyes to see the daily specials written in neon on the window—hazelnut, raspberry swirl, and mint gelato.
    “Yes, well, he has to learn to live without me sometime,” I say lightly. Starting tomorrow, I add silently.
    He didn’t want me to go out tonight—“There’s still so much planning for the party, Sera,” he’d said—but he relented after much begging on my part. He’s never quite been able to resist when I stick out my lower lip. Juvenile, I know, but it does the trick and I needed one last girl’s night with my best friend.
    We walk through the doors of Michael’s, and a cold, sweet smell instantly envelops me. Michael’s looks like it was scooped up in a tornado in the Midwest and plopped down in the middle of San Francisco. Painted wooden cutouts of chickens, cows, and corn line the wall, and a row of rusty tin milk pails hang from the ceiling. We are the only people in the shop other than the girl behind the counter, who has hair the same color as the Blue Moon sorbet, and two little piercings that sticking out of her bottom lip like fangs. She takes a break from whispering into her cell phone to serve us our cones, then instantly goes back to gossiping.
    Charlotte and I sit in our usual spot, two stools facing the front window, so we can watch people walk by.
    “Gerald, 1913,” she says without preamble, pointing to a man in his midforties with a wobbly chin and a healthy outcropping of ear hair. This is the game we always play. Although as far we know we are the only Incarnates in the world, we always wonder if others have found a different route to immortal life, perhaps by a philosopher’s stone that allows them to stay in their original bodies. We watch people on the streets and on TV, deciding who they could be from our past.
    I frown. “No, Gerald had nose hair, not ear hair.”
    “Oh, right,” Charlotte says with a snort, then takes a bite of her mocha-chip ice cream.
    As it’s a Friday night, we watch a steady stream of beanie-wearing teenagers and singles rushing to dates, but no one else looks familiar. These bodies are all new.
    After a few minutes I voice the question that’s been haunting me ever since I made my decision to die. “Do you believe in true reincarnation?”
    Charlotte turns her hazel eyes toward me. “What do you mean?”
    “What do you think happens to people’s souls when they die? Do they just evaporate, or are they reborn into new bodies with no memories of their past lives? And what about our souls? We’ve been around so long, would ours even know how to move on?”
    Charlotte takes a bite of her cone and crunches thoughtfully. “Well, you know what Cyrus says.”
    I do know what Cyrus says. He told me his theory in 1666 while we sat together on a boat on the Thames during the Great Fire of London. As we watched the world burn around us, I confessed that I sometimes considered dying, so I could join my parents in heaven. The flash of anger that came over him was sudden and intense. The flames flickered red in his eyes, and for the first time in my life, I truly feared him.
    “The soul is nothing but a concentration of energy, held together by will, or, in our case, years of practice,” he said fiercely. “Our Incarnate souls are different from human ones. Ours are stronger.”
    “But—” I began.
    He grabbed my arm so tightly that his fingernails drew blood. “There is nothing after this life for humans, but your soul is strong, too strong. If you are killed, Seraphina, your soul will want to leave, yet after years of being intact, it will not know how. You will become a hungry ghost, unable to affect the physical world.” The idea that I could stay on Earth in purely spiritual form terrified me, and I huddled against Cyrus for protection while the city where I’d grown up disintegrated before my eyes.
    But now, as I truly face my own mortality, I have to wonder: How can he possibly know what comes next? Did he say those things just