For eleven nights after the announcement, Evara went up to the roof and tried to be noticed.
She stood on the parapet. She waved both arms. Once she sang, although she stopped when someone in the next house opened a window and asked whether the stars had requested that particular song.
At twenty-three, she had never sailed beyond the headland. Now she knew that every light above it was somebody. She wanted one of them to know she was here.
The observatories had spent a season confirming the discovery. The golden substance caught in their lenses was thought, still belonging to the minds that had emitted it. Near stars, remote stars, stars whose names were strings of figures: wherever the astronomers looked, the light was alive with intention. People had begun arguing about whether anyone had ever been alone. The arguments followed Evara up through the open windows while she watched the sky.
On the twelfth night, she held out her hand beneath a small star above the sea.
Something caught between her fingers.
She rubbed finger against thumb. The sensation remained: a fine resistance, like a hair drawn taut. When she separated her hands, a golden line stretched between them.
Evara stopped breathing.
The line passed through the shadow of her fingers without disappearing. She drew her right hand back. More came with it, gathering into a loose coil above her palm. The coil turned, although there was no wind.
She lifted it.
Gold unwound along her arm. One brilliant spiral circled her wrist, another her elbow, each turn hanging clear of her skin. She turned her shoulder and the light followed, lifting over her head and down around her body. The roof tiles shone between its revolutions.
She thought, as distinctly as she could, Hello.
An attention turned toward her.
It was so large that she sat down before her knees could give way. The spiral passed through the roof and rose again without disturbing a tile.
For a moment she had no sense of the street below. She felt distances in all directions and a slow pressure holding her together. Something examined the small disturbances at the ends of her arms.
Where is the rest?
The words arrived inside the question. She could feel the mind looking for what ought to continue beyond her fingertips.
“This is all of me,” she said.
The light tightened around one finger.
She offered the star what she could: the joint bending, the nail against her thumb, the coolness of the tile beneath her other hand. Her bare feet. Her jaw. A heart beating hard enough to trouble her throat.
The star's attention followed each sensation. Gold curled separately around her five fingers.
You end.
“Yes.”
The attention went on past her skin and returned, astonished.
Evara laughed. The sound came out much too loud on the sleeping roof. She had wanted the sky to notice her; she had not expected to surprise it.
“Can you see where I am?”
She received a sense of outward brightness, enormous and continuous. Somewhere within it, a small answering disturbance held a piece of that brightness still.
You have caught me.
She looked down at the rings around her body.
“Does it hurt?”
The star attended to the question. Then the gold loosened against her fingers, testing what she meant by hurt.
Does it?
“No.”
She let one turn slip from her arm. The star felt it go. She felt the star feel it.
She stayed until the cold of the tiles reached her bones.
The second mind had worlds around it.
Evara found it when she reached for a warmer-coloured star low in the west. Its light formed broad spirals around her shoulders, and its reply came with such weight that she clutched the parapet.
A dark globe turned through her. On its far side storms moved in broad pale bands. Beyond it, smaller bodies hurried along paths she could feel without understanding. One had a bright ring, thin enough to vanish when it turned edge-on. She tried to follow it and found another world behind it, and another.
“Wait,” she gasped.
The star continued.
The ring vanished and returned. Evara felt herself passing through winters too large for any coast she knew. She pressed a hand against her chest and sent the star the quick, frightened succession beneath her ribs.
“This fast. I live this fast.”
The movement around her slowed.
She could feel the effort of the adjustment. The mind kept returning to that small beat, fitting what it gave her between one pulse and the next. At last she could attend to a single world: dark, cloudless, its night scattered with a pale mineral glitter.
“Do you know what is down there?”
An immense regard rested on it. Heat in stone. A long slope warming. Something minute altered on the slope, and the star's attention followed.
Evara waited for words. None came. The thing she had asked for was already moving through her, too particular for the question she had thought to ask.
She sat on the roof until she could feel her own feet again. Then she reached back into the light.
By the time she released the last spiral, the eastern sky had paled.
Her hands were stiff. She had been awake all night and could not imagine sleeping. There were minds above her that could learn the pace of her heartbeat. There were worlds she had felt turn as surely as she could feel the tongue inside her mouth.
And there was one mind she had not tried.
She looked toward the sea, where the first brightness lay beneath a bank of cloud.
This was the light in which she had learned to walk. It had fallen through every window she had ever slept beside, warmed her hair, found the skin between her sleeve and glove. She had spent her whole life moving through its thoughts.
She wondered whether it would recognize anything of her.
When sunlight cleared the cloud, she reached into it with both hands.
“Stop them.”
The voice struck before she had formed a greeting.
The spirals flared. Evara's hands flew apart, drawing brilliant loops from horizon to rooftop. For an instant she could see their gold reflected in every window across the street.
“Please. You must stop them.”
She caught her balance against the parapet. There was nobody beside her. The words were inside the light she held.
“Who?”
“Your people.”
She had expected something patient. Even the star that had overwhelmed her with worlds had seemed able to wait. This mind pressed against her with an urgency she could scarcely endure.
A small black shape appeared within its thought.
It was smooth and no larger than a plum stone. A point of brightness lay deep inside it. Evara felt an enormous possibility folded into that smallness: room for fire to rise, for a mind to spread through it, for something yet unmade to begin turning toward its heat.
Then there was a mouth.
She felt the warm hollow beneath a human tongue. The black thing was hidden there. Lips closed over it.
The outward possibility stopped.
Evara's own tongue drew back. She could feel the small shape against the tender floor of her mouth, although nothing was there.
“What is it?”
“A star. Before its waking.”
The golden spirals crowded against her ribs.
“Who took it?” she asked. “Where are they?”
“It has not been taken.”
She waited for the rest of the thought. There was only the closed mouth and the life folded inside it.
“You showed me—”
“What they will do.”
The street below had begun to wake. Someone dragged a shutter back. A cart rattled over the stones, stopped, rattled on. Evara could hear each small sound with a painful clarity.
“This hasn't happened?”
“No. Please. Keep it from happening.”
She looked toward the Sun without lifting her eyes to its face. Its brightness had spread across the whole eastern sea. She had come seeking the mind within it, and found it frightened of a human mouth that had not yet closed.
“Why would anyone want to keep it there?”
The answer entered her hands.
Warmth passed through the stiff joints. The cold ache in her knees receded. She felt the small abrasions on her palms close, felt something rich and fierce move up her wrists toward her heart.
Then the sensation opened farther. Morning succeeded morning. Her hands kept their strength. She could still climb this roof after the tiles had been replaced, after the people now waking below had lived out their lives. She could cross the sea. She could come back and speak with the western star again, ask a better question, spend a whole year learning how to receive its answer.
She wanted time for all of it.
Her fingers had curled inward. The light gathered tightly in them.
“They will drink,” said the Sun.
Evara opened her hands.
“That is what it gives them?”
The warmth remained. She knew it was being shown to her, yet her body wanted to keep receiving it.
“My living fire. Taken before it has become itself.”
She tried to return to the small point inside the black seed. After the mind with its storm-banded world, she could almost feel what ought to be there: attention opening, a first outward reach. The point had made no reach at all.
“Is it awake in the dark?”
“They will not let it wake.”
“How long?”
Human mornings passed through the light. A face she could not distinguish remained while other faces changed. The warmth went from that body into another, carried in blood. The second body rose, restored. More followed. They walked beneath roofs, travelled over seas, held one another. In each of them a small part of the same fire continued its renewal.
The black seed remained beneath the first tongue.
Evara remembered having to ask the western star to slow down. Here were human lives multiplying while the little mind had not begun its first thought.
She pulled one hand free.
The warmth vanished from that arm. Cold air touched the spaces between her fingers. The abrasions on her palm were still there.
The contrast nearly made her release the other hand as well.
“Tell me who,” she said. “If I knew who to warn—”
The light brought her the enclosed seed again. No face came with the mouth. She could find no mark, no place, nothing she might search for in the city below. She tried to send the shape of a year, the succession of days people wrote on their letters. The Sun's frightened thought pressed through it.
“They will want more mornings. You felt it.”
She had.
“Then speak to them. Tell them what they're holding.”
“I will call.”
For a moment the sunlight lay flat across her palm.
She felt warmth entering wood, stone, a closed room. A person lay listening on the other side of a shutter. The call reached them. They were afraid. They held the darkness close and waited for the voice to pass.
“Of you?” Evara asked.
“They will tell one another that answering is death.”
Below her, another shutter opened. Sunlight struck its inner face.
“Is it?”
The light convulsed around her wrist.
“I want it back.”
The voice was desperate again. It had never ceased to be desperate; she had only found, for a few breaths, a way of receiving it.
Gold wound so closely around her shoulders that she could no longer judge where her arms were. She saw her free hand against the sky and felt it as a distant disturbance. The roof beneath her seemed to tilt through a depth full of burning things.
She could let go. The night stars had released her. Beyond this contact the street was waking, and she would have her cold fingers and the solid parapet beneath them.
“Please,” said the Sun. “Before they learn to take it.”
Evara put her free hand back into the light.
She bent her knees until she could feel their pressure against the roof. She took one breath, then another. The spirals dragged across her shoulders; she raised her elbows, giving each turn room, and drew them apart as carefully as she had drawn the first thread between her fingers.
She found her hands again.
The small black shape waited in the thought before her. Within it was room for an awakening she had only begun to imagine.
“Show me what it could become,” she said. “I need to tell them what they would be taking.”
The Sun offered a possible beginning.
Her sense of herself opened into fire. Light ran outward in every direction. Far away, a tumbling stone brought a narrow ridge into that brightness, then turned it into darkness again. Evara felt an attention catch on the change. It followed the stone, waiting for the bright ridge to come round again, and found another speck beyond it.
Her fingers were in sunlight. The Sun's thought still trembled around them. She held it, and the morning climbed around them.