What if Megalos has stumbled upon something he does not understand? What if he’s wrong about everything except this, and Stella has been drawn here through time? Perhaps the Stella I knew was a pre-echo of this one, a shadow who had to die in order to exist fully in a later state. Or perhaps the universe has just re-created her perfectly as a Boltzmann entity, a woman born out of a random event. It is not theoretically impossible. On any given day, boiling water poured over your hand could make you cold—although, of course, it never does, just as you never win the lottery every week for a year. Or those odds may come in all the time and we never notice: deep space could be filling up with spontaneous creations, persons existing for a heartbeat of bewildered, frozen agony, as James or Kalil or Sara or Mariam jerk into being in the endless waste between stars and, mistakenly remembering a life, die mystified and appalled. I was just shopping in Glyfada! But they weren’t. They had never been to Glyfada.