“What do you think it was?” I asked Dagny. We were sitting on the couch, with a bowl of cloudberries and a cup of sweet honeyed cream between us, and we munched on the berries dipped in cream.

Bryn had put Halsey on Dagny’s laptop, and she’d moved the bistro table and coffee table to the side of the room so she could use the space to shadowbox. She liked to work out when she was stressed or bored or anxious.

“Maybe a meteor,” Dagny said, but she sounded unconvinced.

“But you don’t think so?” I pressed.

“Honestly?” She glanced over at Bryn, bouncing around and punching the air. “I don’t know if I should say.”

“You can trust Bryn,” I said defensively.

Bryn lowered her fists but seemed mostly unfazed. “I can keep my mouth shut. But I can also go out for a run if you’d like more privacy.”

“No, no, I don’t mean you.” Dag shook her head. “I mean . . .” She sighed and lowered her voice to a whisper. “The Ögonen. I don’t know how much they can hear or see.”

The Ögonen were the trollian beings that served as the guardians of Merellä. They were tall and sinewy with strange semi-opaque skins. The most alarming thing was that they had no mouths, but they had powerful psychokinetic powers that they used to cloak the citadel and hide it from the humans.

“Why don’t you want them to hear?” I asked quietly.

“Because I think they’re the ones that did it,” she said. “Look, I’m not saying they did anything wrong per se. But I don’t know why they did it, so I’d rather them not know that I suspect them until I figure out why.”

“Why do you think it’s them?” I asked. Bryn had gone back to fighting the air, and when she kicked quickly not too far from my head, I flinched.

“I don’t know,” Dagny admitted. “It’s a feeling I had. There’s something strange going on with them.” She popped a handful of berries in her mouth and stared off as she thought, absently touching her half-burnt eyebrow.

“What do you mean by strange?” I asked.

“I’ve lived in Merellä for a long time, minus the Lost Month, and I hardly ever saw them around,” she explained. “If they were outside their roof atriums, they’d be in groups, maybe five or six of them, and they’d be walking from the Mimirin to the edge of town where they live. They never socialized or tried to communicate, and I always thought that was because that’s how they liked it, since it’s difficult to communicate. They don’t have mouths, and they eat sunlight.