“Don’t flatter yourself. We need to ration food just as carefully as we ration the water.” I turn around, wanting to stash the jar, only to realize I have nowhere to put it. Asher holds his jacket open, showing me a spacious pocket stitched into the inside of the garment—probably where my knives had been stowed. I hand the jar over begrudgingly.

He’s still smiling. I turn my head to the stars because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’s almost made me smile, too.

“You can see Ation this time of year,” he says, nodding up at the sky.

The constellation seems brighter than usual, or maybe it’s just that I rarely see her without a fire or a torch glowing nearby. The goddess’s head tips down to watch us, her dress sweeping behind her like a flowing river.

“She’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

“Are you serious?” I glance at Asher. His cheeks are awash with starlight, his eyes wonderstruck. “She deserted us. They all did.”

“The blue and green stars appeared last summer, though,” he says. “Signs of fertility. They both passed by Feder—straight through his armor. And this spring I heard someone say there was a yellow comet over the North Star. And a star shower over Ation.”

“So?”

“Comets are sparks of life, and a star shower means rain.”

“And Ation is the goddess of earth and a shower fell above her. I know what it means.”

“But you’re not hopeful,” he says. It’s a statement, not a question.

I shrug.

“Delta, the signs couldn’t be clearer. This means a rebirth is coming.”

I stare at him incredulously. “You really believe that?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“Teleios is the goddess of water, and a comet or star shower hasn’t touched her in Old Fang’s lifetime,” I point out. It’s the same argument I made when Ma grew excited about the signs Asher mentioned, but she also said that a sign of rain over the goddess of water meant nothing. It was like saying that the sun is hot or water is wet. It was a sign of rain over earth that we needed, and when it appeared, stars streaked above Ation’s bowed head for nearly two days. A week earlier we had seen a comet flying by the North Star, and a week before that, the blue and green stars—unnamed gods that always appear without warning, often with decades of absence in between—had lit up the sky.

Their message was clear: hope, a rebirth, the return of the gods.

I wonder, sometimes, if I could have convinced Ma to move to Powder Town that winter, had those colored stars not passed through Feder’s shield. We were getting desperate, but once she saw those signs burning in the night sky, any doubt she had when it came to her faith had vanished.