“Thank you,” Ala said—guardedly. “Did you carry these things up through the Regulant court? I guess you must have.”

“I did,” I said. “Why?” Though I already knew why.

“This one here is Saunt Chandera’s Bane, isn’t it?”

“Saunt Chandera’s Bane makes a weird-looking blossom around this time of year, which I have decided is beautiful.” I was getting ready to make an analogy to Ala’s appearance but faltered, wondering how to phrase the part about her being kind of weird-looking.

“But it’s one of the Eleven!”

“I’m aware of it,” I said, getting a little tense, as she had broken into my analogy only to start a dispute. “Look, I put it there because it’s forbidden. And this thing between you and me—this mess that I made—is all about something else that’s forbidden.”

“I can’t believe you carried this right up the stairs under the nose of the Inquisition.”

“Okay. Now that you mention it, it was pretty stupid.”

“That wasn’t the word I was going to use,” she said. “Thanks for bringing these.”

“You’re welcome.”

“If you sit next to me I’ll show you something I’ll bet you never expected,” she said. And here I was pretty sure there wasn’t a double meaning. By the time I’d gotten myself seated in Tulia’s former spot, Ala had already climbed to her feet—she could stand up in here, at least—and padded over to the trapdoor, which Tulia had left open. Ala closed it. She sat next to me and extinguished her light. It was totally dark in here now. Totally dark, that is, except for a single splotch of white light, about the size of the palm of Ala’s hand, that seemed to hover in space just in front of us. I didn’t imagine that this was a coincidence; the girls had been sitting here because of the splotch of light. I reached out and explored it with my right hand (the left, curiously, was beyond use, as it had somehow ended up around Ala’s shoulders). There was a plank leaning against the wall, with a blank leaf pinned to it, and the light-splotch was being projected against that leaf. Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see that the splotch was round. Perfectly circular, in fact.

“Do you remember the total eclipse of 3680 when we made a camera obscura so we could see it without burning our eyes?”

“A box,” I recalled, “with a pinhole at one end and a sheet of white paper at the other.”

“Tulia and I have been spring cleaning up here,” she said. “We noticed these patches of sunlight moving around on the floor and the walls. They were shining through from an old opening up high in the wall, over thataway.” She squirmed as she pointed invisibly in the dark, and somehow ended up closer to me. “We think it was put there to ventilate the place, then boarded up because bats were getting in. The light was leaking in through chinks between the boards. We fixed it—almost.”

“That ‘almost’ being a nice neat little pinhole?”

“Exactly, and we set up the screen down here. We have to move it, obviously, as the sun moves across the sky.”

Ala could insert the word obviously into an otherwise polite sentence like nobody’s business. I’d spent more than half of my life being sporadically annoyed by it. Here, finally, I let it go. I was too busy admiring the cleverness of Tulia and Ala. I wished I’d thought of this. You didn’t need a lens or a mirror of ground and polished glass to see things far away. A simple pinhole could serve as well. The image that it cast was faint, though, and so you had to view it in a dark room—a camera obscura.

Apparently Tulia had told Ala everything about the tablet, about Sammann, and about my observations. But it seemed like years since I had cared about that stuff as much as I cared about fixing my mess. In fact, as we sat there in the dark together I was finding it difficult to muster even the least bit of interest in the sun. It was shining. Photosynthesis was safe. There were no major flares, and only a few spots. Who cared?

It was even harder to care a few minutes later. Kissing was not a subject taught in chalk halls. We had to learn by trial and error. Even the errors were not too bad.

“A spark,” Ala said—muffled somewhat—a while later.

“I’ll say!”

“No, I thought I saw a spark.”

“I’m told it’s normal to see stars at times like this—”

“Don’t flatter yourself!” she said, and heaved me aside. “I just saw another one.”

“Where?”

“On the screen.”

Somewhat bleary-eyed, I turned my attention to it. Nothing was on that page except the same pale-white disk.

And…

a spark. A pinprick of light, brighter than the sun, gone before I could be certain it was there.

“I think—”

“There it is again!” she exclaimed. “It moved a little though.”

We watched a few more. She was right. All of the sparks were below and to the right of the sun’s disk. But each one was slightly higher and farther to the left. If you plotted them on the page, they’d form a line aimed right at the sun.

What would Orolo do? “We need a pen,” I said.

“Don’t have one,” she said. “They’re coming about once a second. Maybe faster.”

“Is there anything sharp?”

“The pins!” Ala and Tulia had used four stick-pins to fix the page to the plank. I worried one loose and let it tumble into her warm little hand.

“I’m going to hold the plank still. You poke a hole in the page wherever you see a spark,” I said.

We missed a few more while we were getting ourselves arranged. I knelt to one side, bracing the plank against the wall with my hand, holding its base steady with my knee. She threw herself down on her belly and propped herself up on her elbows, her face so close to the page that I could see her eyes and the curve of her cheek in the faint illumination scattering from the page. She was the most beautiful girl in the concent.

I saw the next spark reflected in her eye. Up came her hand as she poked it on the page.

“It would be really good if we knew the exact time,” I said.

Poke. “In a few minutes this is,” poke, “going to migrate off the page, obviously.” Poke. “Then we can run out and look at,” poke, “the clock.” Poke.

“Notice anything funny about these sparks?” Poke.

“They’re not instant on-off.” Poke. “They flare up quickly,” poke, “but fade slowly.” Poke.

“I was referring to the color.” Poke.

“Kind of blue-y?” Poke.

A sudden grinding noise nearly gave me a heart attack. It was the belfry’s automatic mechanism going into action. The clock was striking two. At this time it would have been traditional to plug one’s ears. I didn’t dare; Ala would have assailed me with that jabbing pin. Poke…poke…poke…

“So much for knowing the time,” I said, when I thought she might be able to hear again.

“I made a triple hole on the spark that came closest to the stroke of two,” she said.

“Perfect.”

“I think it’s been curving,” she said.

“Curving?”

“Like—whatever makes these sparks isn’t moving in a straight line. It is changing its course,” she said. “It’s obviously flying between us and the sun—it’s passing right across the sun’s disk, at the moment. But the line of pinholes doesn’t look straight to me.”

“Well, assuming it’s in orbit, that’s really weird,” I said. “It ought to go straight.”

“Unless it’s in the act of changing its course,” she insisted. “Maybe these sparks are something to do with its propulsion system.”

“I remember now where I’ve seen that shade of blue before,” I said.

“Where?”

“Cord’s shop. They have a machine that uses plasma to cut metal. The light that comes from it is that shade of blue. The same as a hot star.”

“It’s passing off the edge of the sun’s disk,” she said. Then: “Hey!”

“Hey what?”

“It stopped.”

“No more sparks?”

“No more sparks. I’m sure of it.”

“Well, before I move this thing, make some pinpricks around the edge of the disk of the sun, so we know where it stood in relation to all this. Between that and the time—we can find this thing!”