Our Infinite Fates

Evelyn runs, half expecting Arden to leap out at her. When she reaches the bus stop, she realizes that there’s an hour until her bus arrives. She decides to go to the hospital to see Gracie one more time. While Evelyn is affectionate and loving, Gracie is her usual prickly self. When Evelyn exits the hospital, she sees Arden across the street, waiting.

Evelyn realizes that love has always been her “downfall”; if she’d just left without saying goodbye to Gracie, she might have made it. She bursts into tears, and Arden holds her gently. Evelyn says that she tries to keep her emotional distance from people, like he does, but she just can’t. He asks how she wants him to kill her, and she quickly conceives a “plan to find peace at last” (267). Evelyn tells Arden that she wants to know why, saying that it will hurt her more not to know. She claims existential exhaustion, and he agrees to finally tell her the whole truth.

Arden says that he first fell in love with Evelyn in Northern Song, when she showed such “goodness” in protecting his father. She admits that she can only remember with clarity as far back as the psychiatric hospital. Her most compelling theory to explain their lives is that they made a deal with the devil. Arden says that they didn’t make a deal with the devil; Evelyn is the devil.

If the narrator does not reap her first soul by the morning, “the Mother” will destroy her. Because the speaker is immortal, she won’t die, but she can be tortured. Her empathy sets her apart from other devils, and it is as though she has her own soul; she just wants to be human. She takes the Mother’s advice and searches for someone desperate. She finds a young man in a church, praying over his sister, who is gravely ill. She tells him that she can save his sister, but he must sacrifice himself by allowing her to take him to the “Underrealm,” and he will have to reap souls. He accepts her offer and asks her name. She selects “Evelyn” because it is close to “devil.” His name is Arden.

Evelyn is shocked to learn that she is the maker of the curse rather than its victim. She cannot believe that she forgot this. Arden didn’t want to tell her because she is so unlike a devil and because he didn’t want her to have to shoulder the responsibility for what she cursed them with. After Lundenburg, he spent seven days and nights on hot coals. Then, his sister choked and died anyway, so he sought out Evelyn and killed her. However, killing her also killed him. 

In the next life, he was spirited back to the Underrealm the moment he turned 18. Evelyn also returned, with no memory of what happened before, and she was terrified. The Mother told them that their souls belonged to her and that, now that they were 18, it was time for them to begin reaping. The Mother is sustained by others’ suffering. If Evelyn and Arden refused to reap, they would again be subjected to the coals. However, he realized that if he killed her, he would die too, and they would start the cycle again; thus, they could simply keep doing this in every life and thereby avoid reaping. When they met again in Northern Song, Arden realized how loving Evelyn truly is when she took on his punishment even without the memory of her guilt and what she did to him.

Evelyn says that they should allow themselves to return to the Underrealm. She should be able to kill the Mother because their souls are connected, just as Arden’s is connected to Evelyn. Arden suggests that they could just keep doing this forever, but she wants to try to kill the Mother, thinking of all the other souls they could save.

They have five hours until they turn 18. Evelyn realizes how inconsequential they are in the grand scheme of the universe. They may feel like their lives are everything, but they are “nothing.” She always thought that Arden was the villain, but she is. They kiss, and it grows more passionate. Arden and Evelyn have sex, consummating their yearning and 1,000 years of love. They count the moments until they are yanked away from themselves.

They return to the cold, bone world of falling ash: “All around was stark white and absolute black” (300). Evelyn and Arden are gray-silver, smudgy and indistinct. Evelyn snaps off a bone fragment from the landscape. A voice in her head says that she cannot kill her own mother, and it mocks her for continuing to believe in love. Evelyn says that love is the only thing worth believing in. She feels her tether, so they follow it. The lure becomes more intense until they come upon a horrible scene with the Mother at its heart.

The Mother looks just as she did in the trenches, and she says that she has felt all that they have for the last 1,000 years. She has been sustained, in part, by their suffering, which she describes as “delicious.” Arden asks about the Mother’s origins, but the Mother does not know; she only knows that she is “suffering, manifest.” Arden realizes that the Mother came to them in the trenches during World War I because her devil numbers are dwindling: The devils who reap can only sustain so much suffering before it destroys them, and she needs new devils to continue reaping. Evelyn asks where she came from, but the Mother will not tell her because “the pain of not knowing tastes so good” to her (311). Evelyn plunges the bone shard into the Mother’s neck, and the woman crumples before flickering back to life. She orders devils to tie Arden to the bed of coals, and a black vapor leaks from his body. This vapor rushes to the Mother’s wounds and heals her.

The Mother admits that she grew addicted to Evelyn’s suffering, which is more potent because she is an extension of the Mother herself. Evelyn realizes that the Mother needs not only suffering but also fresh souls that are unburdened by the weight of pain. Evelyn tells her that there’s no good outcome for the Mother; if she puts Evelyn on the coals, she gets no more souls, and if she sends the pair back into the world, they can just keep killing each other before they reach 18. The Mother proposes a new deal, offering them a life of freedom—they will age and die as humans usually do—in exchange for their love and memories of one another. Evelyn demands that the Mother free Arden. He is horrified, willing to do anything—even reaping—just so that they can be together, but Evelyn doesn’t back down. The Mother drains them of their love, for everyone they’ve ever loved, and it flows into her like a river. However, it’s too strong for her “withered soul,” and she begins to collapse. The Mother screams, dying, and the Underrealm crumbles.

Evelyn, called Daphne in this life, loves Calliope (Arden), a beautiful writer. One day, Arden suddenly seizes, falling to the floor and dying. Evelyn pleads with the gods to save Arden, saying that she would do anything. Suddenly, a dreadful white-haired woman appears and admits that she poisoned Arden so that she could exploit their love. Evelyn realizes that she’s speaking with the devil. The woman says that she cannot raise the dead but that she can make sure the couple reincarnate together indefinitely. They will first spend seven days and nights on hot coals, feeding the woman with their pain, and then they will serve her, reaping souls forever. The woman says that “devils cannot love. But [she] will ensure enough of [their] human hearts remain that the time with [each other] is meaningful” (333). She says that there will be complications because she feeds on their suffering. The woman will raise Evelyn as her child, and Evelyn will have to reap Arden. Arden will remember that life and deal as their beginning, while Evelyn will not remember their origins or the deal because, as the woman says, “There is too much comfort in the why. Nothing tortures the human mind quite like the unknown” (334). Evelyn accepts the deal.

Léon Cazares, a successful clothing designer, now trains as a barista. His life changed when a Welsh actress, Gracie Blythe, wore one of his designs to the Met Gala. He doesn’t know why watching her brings him such comfort or why he feels so attached to her. These “existential tugs” are familiar. He has a vague sense of searching for something, and this is what led him to apply for the barista job. He visited the café a month earlier, and he was overcome with a sense of his life shifting into place: “Hope flickered in his chest” (337), and he felt a belief in something unknowable and unexplained. One day, a man around his age comes in carrying a notebook and a copy of Ten Thousand Years of You, and Léon’s heart reaches for him. He approaches the man, asking if they’ve met before.