“What about you? I bet your mother is looking for you too.”

Neelab shook her head.

“No way. I’m a young woman now. The rules have changed.”

This amused me. “You’re barely a full year older than me. And you’d have to wear heels to look me in the eye.”

“Go ahead and tease, but if I wanted to, I could throw on one of my dresses and join them downstairs and no one would say a thing,” Neelab declared, arms folded across her chest. I loved her too much to point out to her how flat it still was.

“Is Neelab with you?” Mother called, as if she’d forgotten that Neelab and I had been inseparable since I had learned to walk. “It’s past time for her to turn in too.”

Neelab avoided my eyes then. She hated to be wrong almost as much as I relished being right.

My best friend and I had ducked into the presidential library so I could thumb through a text I’d discovered last week. The Book of Fixed Stars was written a thousand years ago by an astronomer named al-Sufi. Like me, he’d been fascinated by constellations, stories written in a pen of light. I’d drawn the velvet curtains so I could match the constellations on the page with the stars of the night sky. One by one, I found them and marveled that time hadn’t stolen a single flickering gem.

“I’m here, Madar,” I replied, glancing at the pages splayed before me. Al-Sufi had sketched the serpentine tail of Draco, a fork-tongued dragon, circling Ursa Minor. I had read, but had yet to confirm through observation, that it was visible all year long from Kabul’s latitude.

Our months were named after constellations, and soon it would be the month of Saur, or Taurus. I drew lines between stars and saw the bull’s swordlike horns piercing the sky. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled to picture the giant beast leaping down from the heavens and galloping on this land.

Mother poked her head between the French doors of the library.

“There you are. It’s getting late, girls,” she chided, gently. “Sitara, I need you to stay with your brother so I can go downstairs. They’re serving dinner soon, and it won’t look right if I’m not at your father’s side.”

“But Kaka Daoud told us we could—”

The man I called Uncle Daoud was Neelab’s grandfather. For the past five years, he also happened to be the president of Afghanistan, and he granted us almost unlimited access to the presidential library with its irresistible floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.