Our Infinite Fates

Evelyn has lived a thousand lives, and in every one, she is hunted by the one she loves most. Arden, her soulmate, reincarnates in each of Evelyn’s lives and makes it his mission to find and kill her before their shared eighteenth birthday. However, by killing one another, they seal their fates as neither can live when the other dies. Their souls are inexplicably bound, and despite knowing their inevitable future, they keep falling in love.

In this most recent life, Evelyn’s little sister Grace has cancer, and Evelyn’s bone marrow is the cure. However, Evelyn will never get the chance to save her sister if Arden kills her before their eighteenth birthday, which is fast approaching. To save her sister, Evelyn decides to face Arden head-on, even though something has changed within him from their last life. She will somehow need to convince Arden not to kill her until the last possible moment, which is made more difficult by the fact that Arden knows the secret of why they must die while Evelyn has been kept in the dark for generations. To save Grace and possibly even herself, Evelyn will need to confront Arden once and for all, so they can have a real future together and enjoy a life truly lived.

Readers will be inspired by Evelyn, who, despite encountering continuous loss and the worst of humanity’s history, has a heart that remains vulnerable. Her belief in humanity and love is unchanged. The part that Arden most loves about Evelyn is that “they love over and over and over again, even though it can only ever end in tragedy. They love softly, and fiercely, and openly, and it’s the bravest thing [he] know[s]. The most human thing [he] know[s].” Evelyn is selfless, empathetic, and creative. She feels others’ pain as if it were her own and would not hesitate to put herself on the line to protect another. Her pure love will surely affect readers, and Evelyn’s experience will teach them to find and share love in their own lives.

Evelyn’s story would not be complete without Arden, her sister Grace, and her mom. Grace is stubborn, morbid, a dreamer, and charming. Their mother is strong and gentle, having been through so much grief, but raising two lovely girls despite it. Finally, Arden is a stunning patchwork of centuries of experiences, or rather, the same soul gaining new depth with every life lived. Arden loves poetry, collecting words from every language he’s spoken, and caring for nature. These three enrich Evelyn’s life and give her the strength to fight against her seemingly predetermined fate, where she and Arden must fight, die, separate, and reunite all without Evelyn understanding why. Without them, Evelyn would not be herself. Steven beautifully captures the complexity that makes up a person through her exploration of Evelyn’s thoughts and the glimpses of Arden’s and Evelyn’s past fundamental and complicated experiences in the interlude chapters.

Our Infinite Fates is, at its core, a celebration of life and love, transcending the supernatural and the constant cycle of death. Evelyn continues to love and find happiness because “big joy and small joy are the same.” When she was reborn in France, she was on her way to France’s tennis championship before WW1 started, but she feels the joy from that moment was the same as reading her little sister a bedtime story. Evelyn takes things as they come and enjoys the small moments that life presents. A person doesn’t need an all-encompassing love like Arden and Evelyn’s to know love or to share it with others. Additionally, the author makes a point of keeping love all-inclusive, as Arden and Evelyn love each other’s souls and not their physical form. Arden tells Evelyn that he feels more like a boy inside, but Evelyn says she feels like neither gender, just herself. They both experience same-sex love in multiple lives and heterosexual love in other ones. Additionally, Evelyn and Arden are reborn in many different cultures and circumstances across the centuries, and Steven uses that to spread knowledge and inclusivity of other cultures and peoples.

The conclusion to Our Infinite Fates is sweet and hopeful, as Evelyn and Arden are reborn with no knowledge of each other, but they still find each other in their new forms. Their journey is one of insurmountable grief and pure selfless love. Love, like Evelyn said, will come back no matter the form or time. Our Infinite Fates teaches readers about an irrefutable fact about humans, that “to love was to live, and to live was to die.” However, it celebrates that humanness in each person and encourages readers to continue living hopeful, vulnerable, human lives.

Sexual Content

• Evelyn and Arden meet in El Salvador, and as they fight, Evelyn ends up straddling Arden. “He groaned blearily as I straddled him, knees planted either side of his waist, and some traitorous part of me throbbed at the feel of his body beneath mine.”
• Evelyn and Arden lived in Siberia. In this life, they are in love and sitting together out in the woods. They kiss but then stop because they are too cold. “We angled our bodies together, and as his lips brushed mine. . .”
• Another life is recounted, this time in Nauru. Evelyn describes their relationship now that they are both girls. “We’d both been born girls, in this life, and I adored the softness of it, all sweet tongues and gentle edges. . . stealing kisses beneath the stars, from lacing our fingers together like ribbons in plain sight.”
• Arden has a nightmare in Nauru, and Evelyn tries to comfort them. “I pressed myself against her back, burying my face into the thick dark hair at her neck, wrapping an arm around her gentle waist. Warmth spread through me, halfway between pleasure and ache. . . the gentle tug in my lower belly was becoming harder to ignore.”
• Evelyn, in her current life in Wales, recalls her time with Arden in their other lives. Evelyn “thought of sweet, stubbled kisses in a rank trench. Of our bodies folded around each other on a salt-licked fishing trawler. Of thick fur bedding in darkest Siberia, of my head on a broad chest, of forehead kisses and laced fingers.”
• Evelyn meets Arden again in their Algerian life. Arden comforts Evelyn. “The sensation of his body against mine after seventeen long years brought a familiar yearning, an insistent tug behind my ribs and below my belly.”
• Evelyn describes her early crush on Dylan, her mother’s farmhand, who turns out to be Arden. “The flutter in my lower belly, the love he had for the earth. . . they were hard to dismiss as adolescent lust and simple coincidence.”
• When they were soldiers in the trenches of World War I, Arden and Evelyn comforted each other and kissed. Arden “pressed his lips to the top of my head, not caring who saw. . . It was a wild furnace in which romantic love was often forged and, as the war raged on, many were becoming more brazen about it.”
• After meeting Arden in Wales and realizing he wants to kill her, Evelyn is not upset but rather desperate to hold Arden. She recalls intimate moments they had in other lives. “But I didn’t. I ached for him. I ached to go to him, to feel his heartbeat against mine, to press my face into his neck and just sob and sob and sob. Memories came to me as visceral images: a head on my shoulder as we lay beneath a goat-hide tent in the desert; two ravenous bodies pressed together in a steaming hammam.”
• Evelyn and Arden cross paths in Austria-Hungary, and Evelyn has missed Arden intensely. “I wanted to nestle my face into his neck, to breathe in the papery soft skin there. I wanted to talk, to touch, to share.”
• Evelyn and Arden are two girls who have been committed to an asylum in the United States. Arden returns after undergoing cold water therapy. “Her nude figure came sprinting back down the corridor towards my cage. . . A thick snare of pubic hair, her legs bowed and angular. Eyes lupine, feral.”
• Evelyn, in the asylum, manipulates a nasty guard who wants to sleep with her. To escape, Evelyn steals his keys. “I crawled on hands and knees towards the place where he knelt, playing up the helpless prisoner angle. Sure enough, the very tip of his tongue brushed the corner of his lips, and I knew I had him. . . I reached out a filthy hand and stroked his cheek, tracing a fingertip down the dull ridge of his jaw. . . ‘Do you want me?’ he asked, reaching a hand through the cage and cupping my breast.”
• Evelyn tells the asylum guard, Howard, she’ll sleep with him tomorrow, but she plans to escape by then. “‘Tomorrow,’ I whispered, grabbing at his crotch just hard enough to hurt. . . After a long, lecherous stare, Howard got to his feet, adjusted the rigid bulge in his pants.”
• Evelyn’s mother tells her about her own experiences when she was about eighteen, “I was having sex in car parks at your age.”
• Evelyn recalls her time in Constantinople, where her and Arden were in a public bath together. “I remembered something suddenly and vividly – our naked perfumed bodies, both of us male, a rough hand at my waist in the sweet steam of the hammam, a desperate tongue flickering over mine, the desire so raw and intense that my entire body was flooded with heat.”
• Evelyn again recalls their lives in Constantinople. “I tried not to think of our naked bodies pressed together in an Ottoman hammam, hot and breathless and desperate.”
• In Norway, Arden saves Evelyn from angry villagers, and she kisses him. “I pulled my head back from his neck, cupped his rough, stubbled face in my hands, and kissed him.”
• In Constantinople, Arden has been selected to join the Sultan’s harem and is being prepared for the role. Arden says, “The High Porte has been grooming me rather heavy-handedly.”
• Before Arden becomes a part of the sultan’s harem, Evelyn and Arden want to have a moment for themselves. “His grip on my ribs tightened, desperate and raw. . . As our lips finally touched. . . every inch of me shivered before igniting into flame, and his tongue flickered over mine and I moaned. My hand went to his hip. . . and as the coarse breath slipped from his throat, there was a gathering in my lower belly. A pulsing of desire. . . I was almost dizzy with the need to feel him inside me.”
• Evelyn and Arden are in Wales, about to turn eighteen, and they finally decide to make love. Evelyn “fumbled with the belt until it was undone, then slid open the top button of his jeans and rested my hand on the flat plane of his lower stomach. . . When he softly, so softly, tugged down my jeans, my underwear brushed against me and I shuddered, sighed, yearned.” This is described over three pages.

Violence

• In the prologue, Evelyn and Arden are getting married in an earlier life, but Arden still kills Evelyn. “Without pause, the bride swiped her marital blade across his throat, opening a mouth-like slit from which blood choked and gurgled. He grabbed for breath, but none came.”
• In El Salvador, Arden finds Evelyn and puts a knife to her throat. Evelyn fights off Arden. “I slammed my head back as hard as I could into his face, crunching his nose with a bloody spurt. He grunted and fell backwards, the knife slipping away from my throat. . . The blade slit his throat right as we both tumbled into the pool. Body thrashing, he choked on the water and his own gurgling blood.” They both die.
• In one life, Evelyn’s father is killed by a drunk driver. “Pinned against a stone wall, crushed until blood wept from his eyes, until everything in him ruptured and burst.”
• When Evelyn was around eight, she would start to remember some of her past lives, including “a knife to the chest, a garrote round my neck, poison in my heart – and I would remember.”
• Evelyn is in the hospital, thinking about why she hates needles. Then she remembers that she “once had [her] torso blown open by a grenade.”
• Evelyn is nervous that Arden could be anywhere and kill her with, “A knife in my back, a bullet in my head.”
• In their Siberian life, Arden says he loves Evelyn even after she kills him with “the crossbow at Mount Fuji. Right through the eye.”
• In Nauru, Evelyn and Arden are both girls in love. Evelyn remembers all the violence they endured when they were of the same sex throughout the years. “Loving someone of the same sex wasn’t without its challenges, of course – throughout history we’d faced the constant threat of flogging and branding, castration and execution.”
• Evelyn kills Arden in Nauru before he can do it to her. “[Evelyn] pushed [Arden] forward with all my might. The shudder ripped through me as her chest was impaled on the coral. We died right as the sun fell below the edge of the world.”
• Evelyn remembers their deaths in Siberia, “and how it felt to be slowly, fatally poisoned.”
• In Evelyn’s life in Algeria, her father “was shot on the beach.”
• Evelyn is stuck in the trenches of World War I, and her “existence had become barbed wire and stacked sandbags and stepping over the lifeless corpses of your friends. It was reeking mud and unwashed bodies, the metallic tang of gunpowder and blood.”
• Arden and Evelyn meet in the trenches where they “sustained several days of harsh enemy fire,” and suffer “big losses and bigger grief.”
• Evelyn runs onto the battlefield where a “grenade detonated, and I was torn apart.”
• In Wales, Evelyn is on a date with a man named Ceri, whom she thinks is Arden. Thinking he’s Arden, Evelynants to tie him up and stop him from killing her. “While he was still facing the other way, I swung at his head. Not so hard that the blunt force trauma would kill him, but enough that the flat side of the shovel would knock him clean out before he realized what was happening. Thunk. He fell straight to the ground. I thought of fallen soldiers and blood-soaked trenches, discarded helmets and blank stares, and, for a moment, I felt like I might throw up.”
• Evelyn ties the innocent Ceri up, “wrapping his arms behind it and tightly securing his wrists with another rope.” Ceri is starting to wake up after being knocked out by Evelyn, “The body starting to shift sluggishly. The innocent body I had knocked unconscious and hauled here like an animal.” She discovers he is not Arden and lets him go.
• In Austria-Hungary, Arden talks about his father, a “decorated hussar. . . I mean he committed horrific atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and they love him for it.”
• Evelyn remembers how she died in her last life in India: “As Arden withdrew the inevitable knife, her final words had been: ‘Until we meet again, my love.’”
• Evelyn, fed up with Arden and their cycle of pain, kills him. “I pulled out the gold pistol tucked in my breast pocket and shot [Arden] neatly in the head.”
• Arden makes fun of Evelyn and her kidnapping attempt and references the procedures they endured in the asylum, “A very sane course of action. It’s a real shame that lobotomy in Vermont didn’t take.”
• Evelyn is in the asylum, Allum, which has become a place of violence. “Once Allum’s founders realized the money that could be made on their cattle, the asylum quickly became an abattoir. It hired less and less qualified staff, who employed brute force in lieu of true medical expertise. It fell victim to chronic overcrowding – naked, unwashed patients stuffed into every corner of every room.”
• Evelyn describes the cruel “therapies” she and Arden had to suffer through. “The ice baths from which you never truly warmed up. The rotational therapy, in which you were strapped to a chair suspended from the ceiling and spun around over a hundred times in a single minute. The starvation.”
• Arden tries to get them out of the asylum and into the next life by killing Evelyn. “A sharp medical instrument in [Arden’s] outstretched hand . . . [Arden] was only inches away from plunging it into my throat.” Evelyn doesn’t die.
• Evelyn “watched an orderly take [Arden] away, thrashing like she was being led to the gallows, all the way to the northern wing. She came back a few hours later, but she never truly came back.” After trying to kill Evelyn, Arden is taken away. It is implied that she had a violent surgery, such as a lobotomy.
• After escaping the asylum, Evelyn has a vision “of pleading and begging so animalistic I couldn’t tell where it came from. Pain so large it took on a form of its own. Pain so absolute it was like the darkest pitch of night.”
• Back in Wales, Arden handcuffs Evelyn to his bed to keep her from running away, and Evelyn is reminded of the asylum. “Grunting as the cuff pulled awkwardly at my wrist. . . In a second I was back in that awful asylum, restrained like a feral beast, prodded and dehumanized and humiliated, frozen and starved and drugged. Arms strapped to waists in starched white straitjackets, patches of drool on the collars.”
• In the Dutch East Indies, Arden finds Evelyn and Evelyn “awoke to a garrotte at [her] throat.”
• In the Dutch East Indies, Arden slams into Evelyn, and they fall off the ship they are on. “The brutal harbour edge came to meet our fragile skulls.” They both die and then reincarnate.
• Arden saves Evelyn from angry villagers in Norway who want to brand her a witch. “The man wielding the leg irons was knocked out with a single blow to the back of the head.”
• In a bookstore in Wales, Arden sees a book cover and remembers his life during the Siege of Jerusalem. “We poisoned the wells and cut down the trees surrounding the city, but nothing we did could hold back the tide of Crusaders. Seeing so many of my people slaughtered.”
• Arden tells Evelyn about one of his nightmares, in which he killed her at their wedding. “I still see your throat opening like a bleeding mouth whenever I try to fall asleep.”
• In the Mali Empire, Evelyn learns that her best friend is Arden and that he will kill her like all her other lives. “A stone to the temple in Samarqand, a rope round my neck in Al-Andalus, a pillow over my face in deepest Iceland.”
• In Northern Song, Evelyn is a prince and sacrifices herself to save Arden’s father. Evelyn “threw [herself] to the ground beneath the bamboo, and as the pain rained down on [her] back I knew, somehow, somewhere, I had felt such agonies before; had felt the skin and flesh on my back scream out, felt the furious stripes of pain all the way to the bone.”
• Arden tells Evelyn how they were tortured and forced to reap souls. “We were put on the hot coals until we obliged.”
• While talking to Arden about killing each other, she suddenly remembers killing Arden in Argentina. “Arden’s throat, narrow and feminine, straining and bulging against my calloused palms.”
• In the Underrealm, Evelyn tries to kill the Mother, the person responsible for her and Arden’s lives. “The bone shard plunged into the back of her neck. There was no spurt of blood, but rather a puff of pale-grey mist emanating from the wound; the same immaterial fog that slicked around her ankles. Wild arms grappled at me, then she weakened like a rag doll. I wrenched the makeshift blade free of her neck and then plunged again, this time into the back of her shoulder. Wrench, lift, bone into her heart.”
• The Mother orders her servants to put Arden on a bed of hot coals. “Arden’s back was slammed against the hot coals, and coiling bonds appeared at the corners of the terrible bed. The servants secured them around Arden’s wrists and ankles. The coals glowed a thousand times brighter than they had before. . . And Arden was pressed bare against the source.”
• In Evelyn and Arden’s original life in Greece, the Mother poisons and kills Arden. “A cruel froth foaming at her wine-red mouth, her limbs shuddering and smacking against the ground like a crazed puppet, her eyes devoured by their own bloodied whites.”

Drugs and Alcohol

• In Siberia, Arden poisons Evelyn with “cherry liqueur, spiked with sleepy poison.” They both die.
• Evelyn describes her need to talk to Arden again because she has felt so alone without his conversation: “I needed more, like an addict craved the poppy.”
• While in the asylum in America, Arden is drugged. “Her ferocious eyes glazed and vacant from whatever experimental drug they’d pumped into her.”
• Another patient in the asylum has also been drugged. “He’d been dosed with a different drug. . . but the effect was largely the same. Less drool, but nothing behind the eyes.”
• In Wales, Evelyn learned she “was allergic to general anesthesia the hard way. At the age of six, I’d gone to have a ruptured appendix removed and ended up in anaphylactic shock.”
• In Evelyn and Arden’s original life, the Mother uses poison to kill Arden.

Language

• Profanity is used frequently. Profanity includes fuck, shit, bullshit, damn, and hell.

Supernatural

• Evelyn and Arden’s fate of reincarnation is due to Evelyn making a deal with the Mother, a mysterious figure who feeds off suffering and love. To save Arden, Evelyn promised they would reap souls after turning eighteen. As long as they die before eighteen, they can continue to reincarnate and not reap souls.
• At Evelyn and Arden’s wedding, the officiant’s “eyes glowing like crucibles. Her lined face was washing itself smooth, and her nails lengthened, thickened, blackened.” The officiant turns into the Mother, who wants to drag Evelyn and Arden to the Underrealm.
• Evelyn ponders who the women that appeared on the battlefield in World War I could be: “a forest witch, a bog demon, some ancient god we had angered long ago.” The woman had “sheets of white hair [that] fell around her cool face, black nails curling away from her fingers like withered fossils.”
• In Evelyn and Arden’s second life, Evelyn is forced to reap a soul or be tortured herself, so she makes an offer to Arden to save his sister in exchange for his soul. “If you agree to let me save your sister, you will be taken to the Underrealm. You will be nailed to burning coals for seven days and seven nights. Your pain will feed the Mother, and allow her to grow stronger. You will not die. . . And then, for the rest of your mortal days, you will serve the Mother as I do. You will reap souls.”
• In one life, after turning eighteen, Evelyn and Arden are pulled to the Underrealm, where the Mother lives. “There was a slow falling of ash from an imperceptible sky, rows of jagged white trees, and a dark, desolate ground that sprawled out like endless tundra. Everything was too stark, too smooth, the ground like black glass and the trees like pale marble.”
• Evelyn and Arden encounter the Mother in the Underrealm. She was “sitting atop a natural dais of raised ground, her throne, too, was made of bones. The shards had been unnaturally twisted around each other into the shape of roses, their stems woven together like braids. A curious substance swirled around her feet, a dark, metallic fog, as though the evil were seeping out of her in noxious whorls. A dozen hooded figures swanned around her, spectral and almost floating as they sank to her feet in prayer. Devils.”
• After trying to kill the Mother, Evelyn sees that the Mother is healed and learns that “Arden’s suffering. Not only could it sustain the Mother, but it could also heal her.”
• The Mother makes one final offer to Evelyn and Arden. She offers freedom from being reaped if they offer her all their love. Suffering sustains the Mother, but love is a far more potent substance that the Mother can survive on. Before this moment, the Mother has been living off Evelyn and Arden’s love and suffering for centuries: “The substance that poured from my chest was shimmering, ephemeral, the color of pearls and golden barley and every sunrise I had ever seen.”

Spiritual Content

• Evelyn shares with the audience her personal belief system, rooted in love. “In truth, a part of me believed that everyone I’d ever loved would come back to me again in another life, in another form. They wouldn’t necessarily know that we had met before, and nor would I, but that energy would still thrum between us, that recycled love, that historic bond.”
• In France, Evelyn meets a psychic whose words Evelyn still believes in: “lost souls were drawn to the love still felt for them by the living.”
• Evelyn does not have a religion, but she has a belief system. “And so, in the absence of any abiding religious convictions, this was the one blind faith I had: that love was a physical force, and it was never wasted. Once it was called out into the universe, it would echo back to us forever.”
• In Constantinople, Evelyn and Arden discuss their beliefs about God. Arden says their fate defies every religion, but if he had been born in Constantinople originally, he would have devoted himself to Allah, “Not just in fate, but…in God, I suppose. If I had been born here and only here, I think I would devote myself to Allah. The teachings are beautiful, and I often find myself swept away on their current. But I was not born only here. And what happens to us … it defies the teachings of the Qu’ran.”
• What happens to Evelyn and Arden cannot be explained by any belief system. “Well, the fact we reincarnate, for a start. We do not lie in our graves awaiting our Day of Judgement. And there’s the mechanics of it all. For Muslims – and Christians, too – the soul is breathed into the body by God at some point shortly after conception.”

by Annamaria Lund