The seams of the shell glowed all night, and at first light, Lorn’s dawn came over the Reach.
Mara did not see it. She was in the cradle, at the bottom of the lamp, with the heart in front of her and the gauge on the wall and Sera beside her, holding the long steady hold that notebook II called for after the last load: a new heart must hold its loads unchanged through its first dawn and the hour after. Do not adjust. Do not test. Watch. So she watched, and missed the dawn.
She heard it.
Nemi had the link open in the school, at the warm room’s window, and she had turned it up so that the whole dome could be heard, and through it, faint and tinny on the cradle’s rail, Mara heard Lorn’s Reach see its sun.
First silence. A long silence, the silence of a great many people holding their breath at once. Then a single voice, a child’s, high and startled: Look. Then another. Then a sound Mara could not make out at first, a kind of murmur that rose and rose, and it was people on the terraces, Nemi said afterward, the terraces that climbed the dome’s walls in steps where the crop domes stood. People had come out onto the terraces in the dark to watch, because the light in the shell’s seams had been visible from the Reach all night, a glow along the edges of the sky like the…
