The wound we had seen from the outside of the opera house had provided scant evidence of the damage suffered by the building. The center of its mosaic dome—a stylized scene of Morrow cavalry riding to Ambergris’s defense during the Silence—had disappeared, the shards of its dissolution having simply vanished, assimilated, replaced by an intense green that shed its light in waves upon the stage. The green had eyes, or so it seemed, for it manifested itself as a series of circles or nascent fruiting bodies.

My breath caught in my throat. My neck grew sore from staring up at it. You could see through the green to the stars in the sky beyond, as if the green were no more substantial than gauze, than fog, and yet it sparkled and spun, each particle of it, as it shed the light that allowed us to see as we found our seats.

Lacond noticed that I could not look away from it, even as I sat down.

“Nothing you haven’t seen from the outside in,” he said as kindly as he could. His bulbous eyelids twitched, the cigar working up and down between his teeth, caught in his grouper-like lips. The sweet spicy smell of the cigar calmed me. “A fungal bomb that misfired, like we said. It hit the glass and stone of the dome and formed a substance … well, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. An interesting effect. And stable. It’ll stay there for a long time, or at least for the next four hours.” He laughed.

“Almost a piece of New Art all by itself,” Sybel said, grinning.

“Beautiful,” Duncan said, staring up at it. “Absolutely beautiful.”

“Horrible and shocking, I would have thought,” Mary said—a distant murmur, a whisper lost in a current of air.

“Quite a climb up there that would be,” Sybel said. “I think I could do it, though.”

“You’d climb a rainbow if you could,” I said, earning a half-hearted scowl.

I tore my gaze from the ceiling. I had to. Otherwise my thoughts would have remained up there, trapped, during the entire opera. (It stunned me to see such a thing aboveground. It reinforced a thought that had come to me more and more frequently during the war: if that which belonged belowground came above- ground, why should I remain aboveground? I was like a sailor who falls overboard and reaches for the light, only to find that the light is false, and he has descended into even greater depths.) And yet, haven’t we all seen things much stranger since the beginning of the Shift? Thinking of that ceiling now, I’m oddly unmoved. I’ve been undone by too many miraculous sights, both holy and unholy.