"I love you too," she says, leaning into Herian's embrace. "And I don't know. I mean... I think anyone who didn't live in a Circle has less of a right to an opinion about it, in some ways, but I do sometimes wonder if they took a real thing, that you actually need to be careful about, and used it to justify a system that was more about making sure people don't have to actually deal with mages in their everyday lives than about keeping people safe."

Maybe not! But Cosima's seen enough to wonder. And it's not as if she has no context for systems of segregating one group from another.

"There's all kinds of reasons we might not have ever met. But I think that's part of what's beautiful about the universe, you know? It's this improbable mixture of order and chance. And here we are."