Tara’s mom had first warned her to keep hidden. Tara had brought her a fallen star, crackling in her hand. The sky hung thunder-dark overhead, but not so dark as Ma Abernathy’s face. Tara’s mother never hit her, like most Edgemont parents hit their children. Tara had never squirmed on her village schoolroom seat from switch marks. Nor had Ma Abernathy honed a scalpel of guilt like the mothers of her classmates at the Hidden Schools. Concern was her tool.

Tara’d run out into the rain, age ten, beneath a tornado-dark sky. She heard whispers on the wind and singing in the stars, and talked back, sang up, calling to the voices until the storm came, all spinning noise and fire, a solstice festival in the sky. She chased the voices into the fields, through sheets of rain, through broken whipping cornstalks, clothes plastered to her skin, hair a tangle of heavy rings. Then the thunder spoke, and a star fell. She caught it in her hand and brought it home.

Her mother met her on the cornfield’s edge in the thrashing rain, as wet through as she. Her father had run into the fields after Tara and hadn’t yet fought his way out. Tara held the star. It danced as it burned. She didn’t know her mother’s story then, didn’t know about Alt Selene and the siege from which Ma’s people fled, didn’t know that to her mother the fire Tara held was a weed with roots in the guts of their history. Tara only knew that the light sang, and made her blood sing too.

Let it go, her mother said. Let it go and don’t pick it up again.

Tara closed her hands and the fire entered her. Water steamed from her skin and she felt herself burned dry. She fell into her mother, and looking up saw only fear. She was sick for a week afterward, and her parents waited until she got better to talk to her about the future, about small towns and discovery, about hiding. About being anyone but who she was.

“I will ask a question of my own,” Shale said.

Tara waited.

“Aev stopped you from binding me at the tower this morning. Yet with your glyph, you could have found me yourself, or cursed me from afar, without her knowledge. Why didn’t you?”

“Because Aev didn’t want me to,” she said. “And because it’s so easy for me to catch people, to force them. Too easy for me to think it’s right. But I’m still not certain I made the right decision. You’ve brought us to a dangerous pass.”

They flew for a while in silence.

“I have enough,” she said when she did. “Let me down.”

“Where do you live?”