“Bepin, I know you hate PDFs. But I’m stuck on the other side, and there’s no paper here. Just screens made of starlight. Don’t be angry. Turn to page 78 of Kipling.”

Bepin Behari closed his laptop. He sat in the dark for a long time. Then he opened it again, typed a reply to Ashoke Chatterji’s impossible email address, and wrote:

Shaking, Bepin scrolled to page 78 of the Kipling PDF. The annotation he’d written twenty-five years ago read: “Ashoke, if you die before me, send me a sign.”