“I don’t know. Didn’t I just say no one had been there for hundreds of years? But something will be using it.” Flicker sighed. “Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll be able to kill it. Come on.”

Flicker pushed off the boulder and started climbing again. After a short scramble up a narrow rock shelf, the slope leveled out a bit, and they could walk more comfortably. Ahead, Alice could see a narrow band of darkness, rapidly expanding as they moved toward it.

Oh, she thought. So they do have day and night here . . .

Between one step and the next, she’d emerged from under the overhang of the cave roof and into the open. Her eyes went to the sky, and stayed put while her mouth hung loose and her thought trailed off in wonder.

It was a perfect dark night, darker than even Geryon’s estate, miles from the lights of Pittsburgh. There was no moon, and the stars were ablaze, rank on rank of them, glittering across the heavens like diamond dust spilled on black velvet. But it wasn’t their clarity or number that made Alice stop in her tracks. They were moving.

Not the slow, night-long rotation of stars on Earth, the imperceptible rise and set of constellations. Here the brilliant pinpricks crawled visibly across the sky, making a great, stately circular sweep around a point halfway between the overhead and the horizon. It felt like looking into a giant whirlpool, a huge, endlessly spinning vortex, and for a moment Alice felt a queasy vertigo, as though she were going to fall up and drown in the void.

Then her perspective shifted. The stars didn’t move, they’d taught her that in her lessons. The world did, spinning on its axis. She’d never felt it spinning before, but she did now, watching the steady procession of the heavens. Her stomach flip-flopped, and she forced herself to look at the ground before she threw up.

“It used to take me like that, sometimes,” Flicker said, coming up beside her. He glanced up at the stars, unconcerned. “I thought you humans lived out in the open, though.”

“It’s not being in the open,” Alice said, keeping her breath slow and regular. “The stars here are . . . wrong.”

“Really?” Flicker looked at the sky again. “What are they supposed to be doing?”

Apparently Flicker’s memories of Earth weren’t that extensive. Alice shook her head, steeled herself, and looked around. The wheeling stars tugged at her gaze, but as long as she didn’t stare upward, she didn’t get the sick falling sensation in the balls of her feet. She swallowed.

“It’s . . . hard to explain,” she said. “How long until dawn?”