Once we were done she grabbed my hand and pulled us toward the nearest dune. I suggested we return to her apartment to get some rest, but she said that where there was no day and no night, time ceased to exist, so the concept of rest made little sense. Careful though I was, I still ended up with tiny thorns in my hands, but I didn’t say anything. We started walking up the closest sandy hill. It was no more than thirty meters high, but scaling it in the insane heat required some real effort. Once we reached the top I collapsed with exhaustion, sure I was about to pass out, but she nimbly sat down beside me, folding her legs to her chest and hugging them. “I see you’re quite the mountaineer,” she said, winking through her sunglasses. I tried coming up with a witty comeback, but I was too busy trying to catch my breath.

“Right here, this is the closest a person can get to the sun,” she announced. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of her pants, fished one out, and held it up. The tip instantly lit up as it exited the atmosphere. She stubbed it out in the sand, saying she didn’t smoke, that it was just a game she liked to play.

I lay down on the sand and told her about an experiment I had read about in which people were left in a lit room for an entire week. Almost all of them went completely bonkers. That was what scared me most on this planet, and I didn’t get how it hadn’t happened to her yet.

“Who said it hasn’t?” she asked, and as if to prove her point, lowered her sunglasses and stared directly at the sun. Looked at it without even blinking.

“What, are you crazy?” I yelled at her and sat up, pressing my shoulder against hers. “You’ll go blind!”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she stated. “I’ve been doing this for three years and nothing’s ever happened to me.” She said it was only blinding for a moment, but then you could see perfectly fine. That only candy-ass scientists too scared to ever look up from their telescopes thought otherwise. “I honestly don’t understand how people can spend an entire lifetime under it without looking at it even once,” she said, and before I knew it, she had plucked the sunglasses off my face. “If you’ve ever wanted to find any meaning in life, this is a good place to start.”

I couldn’t stop blinking, could barely see a thing.