Teo did. “You claim creation myths are true.”

“Not the way you think, in that if we went back a few million years we’d see them all happen in sequence. But we can’t go back in time—at least I’ve never heard of a Craftsman who managed it yet.”

“Or a Craftswoman.”

“Or a Craftswoman.” Their reflections swelled and distorted as they approached. “What happened a million years ago wasn’t important to my fathers and mothers on this island. Or to yours in Dresediel Lex or in old Quechal-under-sea. They had to do the work of being human father to daughter, mother to son, one family at a time, and part of that was explaining to themselves what being human meant.” She stepped into her reflection. The mirror rippled to admit them. Silver tickled her throat when she breathed, and ice ran through her veins instead of blood.

“Where are we?” Teo asked, and it seemed to Kai that she said the sentence in reverse order, or sideways somehow, as if each tick of her mind’s clock had spread to overlap the surrounding ticks.

“And this is the story we told,” she said. “Once, there was darkness. All that was and wasn’t, in the same place and time. The Mother hung curled in the tight space of the first moments, and there she gave birth to Makawe and his sisters. That time-place was too small for them, so they pressed against its borders until they burst through, and found themselves atop a mountain above stretching water. But sunlight was too harsh, so they returned to darkness. Humans came next, rays of light rising out of the Mother. To hide from the sun we clad ourselves in mud, and shaped that mud into our bodies. It dried, and we were trapped within. Some the mud fit, and some it didn’t.”

The mirror broke, and they broke with it, and when Kai put herself back together she was leaning against the wall of a lava tube with Teo beside her. Shadows surrounded them, no deeper than any shadows anywhere. The light, though, at the tunnel’s end, looked different, honey-thick and amber colored.

She waited for Teo to speak, but the woman wouldn’t, or couldn’t. So Kai continued. “That’s how we saw our world. Ground created by gods’ desire for freedom. Bright light and oceans, and human beings who climbed out after. But the story implies a source: the pool, the gate to the darkness under the world.”

“There’s fire beneath the world, not darkness. I’ve seen it.”

“Dig down far enough with a shovel or a drill, and there’s fire. But dig down in another way, and there’s the place the gods come from.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You don’t need to,” Kai said. “That’s what they pay me for.” She led Teo out into the amber light, into the caldera.