The rose star had learned a new trick.
It slipped between the streamers of Orya's mantle, stayed out of sight while she turned, and appeared beside her other shoulder. When she put out her hand, it drifted just beyond her fingers.
She let it. She liked a thing that could surprise her.
Below her bare feet, pink rings circled a dark world. They were narrow enough to make a path, although she seldom touched them. Their pull held her a little above the dust. She went around the largest, letting its slow tilt bring the stars into different arrangements overhead.
A cluster was rising beneath the dark skin of her left wrist. She felt the tiny pressure of its lights. One would emerge when she slept; the others might remain there for many turnings. Her body held such unfinished lights everywhere: a blue knot beneath her ribs, a scatter along one thigh, two gold points that had been traveling toward her fingers for so long she had stopped expecting them.
The rose star had come from her shoulder. Since then it had grown, changed its habits, and acquired a pale trailing edge. She had kept it through more turnings than she could count.
It darted under her hood.
“That's mine,” she said, pulling the rose cloth forward.
There was no face behind the hood for it to illuminate. The light fell into a darkness continuous with her body, then came back through the cyan lining. Orya could feel the brightness against her. She lifted the hem, and the star escaped.
Farther along the ring, a little blue dream-light had begun to fade. She caught it before it could go.
Perhaps a small world. She wanted something cool beneath her feet, with a rough edge that would catch the trailing threads of her mantle. Everything on this side of the rings was too smooth.
She took one thread from the hem and looped it around the light. Closing the loop made the blue glow gather. It thickened, darkened at its center, and settled into a round grain of matter. She pressed her thumb into it. When she lifted her hand, the little world kept the curve, with a rough ridge where the matter had risen around her thumb. Dust moved toward it. A fine ring formed, trembled, and held.
Orya opened her hands. The new world dropped into its orbit. Its pull brushed her soles.
She tried it, turning the little world with her toes until the ridge came underfoot. It was satisfactory.
The thread had left a hole in her mantle. She ran her thumb along its edge. Making cost something. She could have a light still able to become many things, or the particular thing she made from it. She had never found a way to have both.
The rose star hovered beside the new ring. She offered it the empty loop between her fingers, without closing it.
It wandered away.
Outside her sky, the keeper turned the glass sphere between two hands.
A dark world had just appeared inside, surrounded by a pink ring. The woman lowered one foot toward it. Her perforated mantle flowed behind her in rose and cyan.
She had used another possibility.
The keeper watched the light leave that part of the sphere. They had learned to recognize the moment when it became useless to them. Once a dream had settled into matter, no question could be read in it.
At their wrist, the message bead flashed again. Within its pale surface, a narrow vessel hung beside a blue star. The star's outer light was breaking into great uneven bands. One passage led beyond the bands; another cut between them. Their daughter had enough power for one attempt.
Her last message repeated. Their daughter's voice stopped after the first word. They heard her take a breath and begin again.
One more orbit. Then I have to choose.
The keeper folded the edge of their cyan hood away from the sphere. Rose light from its lining crossed the glass. Inside, a brighter rose light moved beside the woman.
They needed that one.
It had been kept unspent long enough to hold an immense branching pattern. Smaller lights could answer whether a seed would grow, which enemy would arrive first, where a storm would break. Their daughter's vessel was already inside a failing star's reach. Finding a way out required a light with room for many more consequences.
Across the keeper's people, living readers waited with their hands above dark bowls. Every gift of sight their houses claimed had come through this glass. The keeper had supplied light for harvests, marriages, battles, births. Questions had become harder. The readers kept coming back.
The keeper knew what lived inside the sphere.
They had seen Orya make worlds. They had watched her sleep above the rings with her hands folded under her hood. They had enclosed her horizon while she slept, bending the distant reach of her universe into glass until they could hold its whole night between their palms. When she woke, the stars still rose. There had been no visible wall for her to distrust.
Unspent possibilities were readable through that closed curvature. Each light's branching paths lay open at once. With their pulse against the glass, the keeper could draw a question through those paths and take its answer out.
They had told themselves they took nothing she had made. Most dreams were never used. A possible world left unmade could instead save an existing one.
The rose light passed close to Orya's wrist.
The keeper placed two fingertips against the glass.
Show me the passage on which her vessel comes through.
The rose star stopped moving.
Orya was still turning with the ring, but the star held in one place. A fine strand drew out of it toward an empty part of the sky.
She caught the strand.
A thread in her mantle tightened too.
She knew this pull. Sometimes she woke with a light missing and a new tear among the old perforations. Sometimes it happened while she was awake: a star stretched, narrowed, vanished. She had thought the sky needed some of its lights back. She had never liked how it chose.
“Leave this one.”
The strand pulled harder. Her mantle drew tight across her shoulder. Below, the small world turned past the place where she could have put her foot.
She wound a loose streamer around her wrist and let the pull carry her beyond the rings. The star traveled ahead, held at the end of its narrowing ray. She followed with one hand closed around that ray.
Her other palm struck something smooth.
There had never been anything here.
She spread her fingers. The surface curved away beneath them. The star's ray ran straight into it.
Then a vast blue shape moved on the far side.
Orya recoiled. Her mantle swept across the rose star. Under a fold of intact cyan lining, its ray went slack.
She clutched it to her.
The surface remained. Beyond it, something enormous withdrew.
For a while she stayed there, with the hidden light warming the fold against her wrist. She could see the rings far below. They looked smaller from here, but they were all there: the old broad one, the three she had made together, the broken ring she had never managed to join.
She eased the lining aside to look at the rose star.
Its pale edge lifted. The ray drew out again. Across the curved surface, a dark fingertip settled exactly where it ended.
Orya wrapped the star up.
The pull stopped.
She kept the fold closed, with both hands over it.
The answer dissolved before the keeper could read it.
They had glimpsed two passages, then a third opening beyond the star's falling light. The routes broke apart when Orya covered the source.
They turned the sphere. The intact fold of her lining moved with her, keeping the rose light hidden.
The message bead flickered. The vessel had begun to drift toward the bands.
The keeper tried two smaller lights near the opposite curve. Together, perhaps, they might show part of the route. They pressed their pulse into the glass again.
A blue light below Orya stretched.
She turned toward it, still holding the rose star under her mantle. Its ray reached another place in the curved surface. A second dark finger waited there.
The blue light narrowed to a point. As it vanished, a thread came loose from her hip and passed through a hole in the cloth. She felt it go.
On the other side, the finger brightened.
Orya looked down at her mantle.
She remembered where she had taken the thread for the rough little world. She remembered which loose ends had become the great pink rings. There were other holes she could not account for. Now she watched one of them widen.
She pulled the mantle across the blue light beside it. The cloth spread into a broad rose sheet, cyan beneath, with loops and ragged openings all through it.
Light shone through an opening.
The waiting finger moved.
She folded the cloth again, trying to cover that place, and exposed another. The mantle had too little left in it. Her own creations had used some; something beyond the sky had taken the rest.
It was still taking.
Orya pressed her hand against the smooth curve. On the far side, a palm opened.
It had five fingers. Its shape was hers, enlarged beyond any world she had made. Beyond it rose a cyan hood with a dark hollow where a face might have been.
Another person.
The sphere turned slightly. Orya's worlds swung beneath her.
A second hand came up on the other side. Together they held the curve that enclosed every ring, every alien star, all the distances she had thought were hers to cross.
She put both palms against the glass.
The keeper looked in at her.
They knew she could see them.
Her head followed their hand. When they moved a finger toward the rose light, her hands closed over it. When they moved toward another light, she spread her torn mantle across its path.
The message bead burned blue at the keeper's wrist.
“I need it,” they said.
Nothing of their voice entered the sphere. The woman stayed against the glass, her own hands making a small dark shape inside the larger one.
They could turn her universe, carry it, draw exposed light through its closed lens. To reach into the cloth she held against her body, they would have to open the seal. The branching paths would lose their focus. Whatever they took then would be only light.
The keeper held the sphere still.
The rose star glimmered briefly between Orya's fingers. She looked down at it.
She could keep it hidden.
She could hold it against her for as many turnings as she liked, while the rest of her sky emptied through the holes. She could make it a world and keep that world. Its motion would then be the motion she gave it, following an orbit she chose.
She drew the fold back a little.
The star slid across her palm. Its pale edge swept her thumb. It had become larger while she kept it, rich enough to make a world far greater than the one with the rough edge.
She had wanted to see what it would do next.
Above her, the huge hand moved toward its light.
Orya closed the cloth again. Through a hole beside her shoulder, a gold point stretched toward the glass.
She caught that point in an intact corner of the mantle. There was almost nowhere left to fold.
Below her, the rings kept turning. The rough little world moved faithfully along the course she had made for it.
Orya took a long thread from the lower hem.
She laid its end against the curved surface. Her familiar making-loop had given small worlds their shores. Here the glass already offered a closed shape, around the whole of her sky.
The keeper's hand remained beyond it.
She touched one finger to the star beneath the lining, and felt its wandering light.
Then she pressed it into the loop against the glass.
For an instant the rose light spread everywhere. It ran across her dark wrists, along the lights beneath her skin, up into the empty face of her hood. She kept the thread against the curve.
The first grain of matter darkened beside her fingers.
It spread thinly along the glass. Dust caught in it. Orya fed more thread from the mantle, following the curve with her hands. The forming surface took the glass's shape, closing around the stars within.
The keeper's fingertips disappeared behind it.
She followed the growing edge. Where it reached a distant blue light, she drew the light inward before the matter closed. She gathered the gold point, then the small scatter she had always watched above the oldest rings.
One side of the sky was complete.
At the keeper's wrist, a band of blue light swept across the vessel.
The keeper turned the sphere, bringing a finger toward a still-exposed light. A remaining clear reach opened beyond Orya's shoulder. She carried the thread to it. Rose brightness still trembled in the new matter, all that remained of the moving star. She let it spread into the last uncovered curve.
The edges met.
Orya lifted her hands.
She could still see every surviving light. Beyond them, her new world had a dark inner surface, smooth enough to hold the shine of the rings.
No light passed out.
The keeper held a dark sphere between two hands.
They moved it until the message bead's blue glow fell across the glass. Nothing of the inside appeared.
To reach the lights now, they would have to open the seal and pierce the surrounding world Orya had made. The closed lens would be gone before a single path could be read. All the hands waiting over all the distant bowls had nothing to receive.
Their daughter called again.
This time the keeper answered.
“I don't know.”
They could feel the sphere's weight. Their palms could still turn it. It gave them no sign of where the woman stood, or what she would do.
Orya went back to the oldest ring.
The last thread she had used left a long opening in the rose mantle. She drew what remained around her shoulders and tucked its cyan edge beneath the clasp.
Her dark feet hovered above the pink dust. Lights moved slowly under the skin of her legs. The little rough world came past; she let her toes brush its ring.
She put a hand out beside her shoulder.
Nothing darted beyond it.
She held the hand there for a while.
Far above, the inner world was smooth and black. She knew another person stood beyond it, holding the glass. She could not see whether their fingers were still waiting.
The universe tilted.
Orya lowered herself toward the ring until its pull steadied her. She waited for the turning to finish, then opened both hands beneath the stars that remained.