Finally, she said, “I thought we were walking to our deaths and I was content to do so as long as it was by our own choice, and of our own mastery of our selves. I would have stopped at any time and laid down and closed my eyes, but Ao kept going, and I would never have left her. We were so young, you see. My menstrual bleeding started about a year later, so maybe I was thirteen or fourteen, and she was about the same. It’s so wide, this Pall. We walked along the causeway until we could no longer see the nameless land. The world was nothing but the road and the mist. I began to understand the world was different from how I had thought it was. For one thing, there is land beneath the Pall, not an abyss. Just ordinary land, with the Pall a low-lying mist stretched over it. But it wasn’t just that. It was something I felt in my bones. Or maybe in the egg that nested in my heart.”

“The viper.”

“I felt something vaster than the sky. Something that reached into places I couldn’t touch, that no one could touch. The world echoed, and it was silent. It was small, and it was beyond measuring. And a whisper reached into my heart.”

She remembered the exact moment. Standing on the road with the sea of deadly Pall around them and yet somehow in a cocoon woven of peace. Ao asleep, curled up on the roadbed, with her head on a sack now empty of food. Dear Ao, smiling in her sleep, because even in the midst of this lonely, doomed passage, she was the happiest she had ever been.

The stars had shone in all their brilliance, beautiful but out of reach. Sparks had glittered in the Pall like the welcome lights of villages where a hungry, tired person might find a meal and a bed. A warm wind had spun a draft along the stubble of El’s scalp, where her hair was starting to grow out and itch. And the itching was funny, really, because she hadn’t expected it. In all her life that she remembered, her hair had never gotten even this finger’s width long. The shadow of a wide-winged sea bird had sailed overhead, gliding north with majestic ease. A waning half-moon shouldered up over the horizon in greeting. Ao gave a little snort of a snore, then a sigh as she settled back to sleep. It was all so miraculous. It was beautiful. It meant beauty was reachable if a person thought to see what was right around them.

The voice whispered, Joy is your calling.

All this, Elen said, and then she fell silent. By the ache in her heart, she couldn’t be sure whether a wound had been ripped open or healed shut.