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"Right All eyes"

She listened to his footsteps receding down the hall, the sound abruptlyRoom sealed in his wake Only then did Mausa needles free and was clutching it in her fist She looked around the rooe, a place abandoned, eone

The feeling touched her then, a cold shiver fro was about to happen

VI

THE NIGHT

OF BLADES

AND STARS

Swift as a shadow, short as any dreaht,

That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,

And ere a man hath power to say, "Behold!"

The jaws of darkness do devour it up:

So quick bright things coht’s Dreaht months, and twenty-six days, since the last bus had driven up the mountain, the souls of First Colony had lived in thisto custo to instinct

In the day-to-day

With only themselves, and those they had made, for company

Under the protection of the Watch

Under the authority of the Household

Without the Army

Without memory

Without the world

Without the stars

For Auntie, alone in her house in the glade, the night-the Night of Blades and Stars-co at the table in her stea in her book That afternoon she had taken a batch of pages off the line, stiff with the sun-they always felt to her like squares of captured sunlight-and had passed the ree on her cutting board, opening the binding and its covers of stretched laes in place, taking up her needle and thread to sew the new ones in It was sloork, satisfying in the way of all things that required time and concentration, and by the ti on

Funny how everyone thought she had just the one book

The volu in, by her closest recollection, was the twenty-seventh of its kind It see cups in a cabinet or sweeping under the bed and co across another one She supposed that was the reason she put them away like she did, here and there, not in a neat line on some shelf to look at Whenever she found one, it felt like bu into an old friend

Most told the same stories Stories she remembered of the world and hoas Ti would sail out of the blue, a otten she had, like television, and the silly things she used to watch (its flickering blue-green glow and her daddy’s voice: Ida, turn that da off, don’t you know it rots your brain?); or so would set her off, the way a ray of sunshine drizzled over a leaf or a breeze with a certain ss would start to hosts of the past A day in a park in autu water and the way the afternoon light see flower; her friend Sharise, the girl fro beside her on a step to show her a tooth she’d lost, holding it with its bloody stu as the tooth fairy, I know it, but she always bringsher favorite sureen, and the puff of scent froainst her chest When this happened, Auntie kneould be a good night of writing,into other me her busy till the ht, thought Auntie, dipping the nib of her pen into the cup of ink and sht for these old things It was Peter shedirectly, this boy with the stars inside his came to her in their way She supposed it was because she’d lived so long, like she was a book herself and the book was ht Prudence Jaxon had appeared at her door The woman was sick with the cancer, well on her way,there in Auntie’s door with the box pressed to her chest, so brittle and thin it was like she could bloay in the wind Auntie had seen it soin the bones, and there was never any right thing to do except to listen and do like the person asked, and that hat Auntie did for Prudence Jaxon that night She took the box and kept it safe, and it wasn’t but a month before Prudence Jaxon was dead

He has to come to it on his own Those were the words Prudence had said to Auntie, true words; for it was the way of all things The things of your life arrived in their own time, like a train you had to catch Sometimes this was easy, all you had to do was step onto it, the train was plush and co at you in a hush, and a conductor who punched your ticket and tousled your head with his big hand, saying, Ain’t you pretty, ain’t you the prettiest girl now, lucky lady taking a big train trip with your daddy, while you sank into the dreaer ale froical silence past your , the tall buildings of the city in the crisp autuht and then the backs of the houses with laundry flapping and a crossing with gates where a boy aving frole cow eating grass

But Peter, she thought; it wasn’t the train but Peter she had ? Auntie wondered Where had they taken a train to that one tiether, she and her daddy, Monroe Jaxon? They had been going to visit her gramma and cousins, Auntie remembered, in a place he called Downsouth) Peter, and the train Because sometimes it was one way, easy, and sos of your life roared down to you and it was all you could do to grab hold and hang on Your old life ended and the train took you away to another, and the next thing you knew you were standing in the dust with helicopters and soldiers all around, and all you had to remember folks by was the picture you found in the pocket of your coat, the one your ain in all the days of your life, had slipped in there when she’d hugged you at the door

By the ti as the person who’d co let the She’d sworn to herself she wouldn’t do it any over things you can’t do nothing about But here she was, all these years gone by, and still she could work herself into such a state whenever she thought about herthat by the time Ida found it, the two of them would be dead

"Auntie?"

She’d expected it would be Peter, coirl, but it wasn’t She didn’t recognize the face, floating in the fog of her vision A squished-up narrow otten it jammed in a door