entirely awake. “You are Zorya Polu…” He hesitated. “The sister who was asleep.”
“I am Zorya Polunochnaya, yes. And you are called Shadow, yes? That was what Zorya Vechernyaya told me, when I woke.”
“Yes. What were you looking at, out there?”
She looked at him, then she beckoned him to join her by the window. She turned her back while he pulled on his jeans. He walked over to her. It seemed a long walk, for such a small room.
He could not tell her age. Her skin was unlined, her eyes were dark, her lashes were long, her hair was to her waist, and white. The moonlight drained colors into ghosts of themselves. She was taller than either of her sisters.
She pointed up into the night sky. “I was looking at that,” she said, pointing to the Big Dipper. “See?”
“Ursa Major,” he said. “The Great Bear.”
“That is one way of looking at it,” she said. “But it is not the way from where I come from. I am going to sit on the roof. Would you like to come with me?”
“I guess,” said Shadow.
“Is good,” she said.
She lifted the window and clambered, barefoot, out onto the fire escape. A freezing wind blew through the window. Something was bothering Shadow, but he did not know what it was; he hesitated, then pulled on his sweater, socks, and shoes and followed her out onto the rusting fire escape. She was waiting for him. His breath steamed in the chilly air. He watched her bare feet pad up the icy metal steps, and followed her up to the roof.
The wind gusted cold, flattening her nightgown against her body, and Shadow became uncomfortably aware that Zorya Polunochnaya was wearing nothing at all underneath.
“You don’t mind the cold?” he said, as they reached the top of the fire escape, and the wind whipped his words away.
“Sorry?”
She bent her face close to his. Her breath was sweet.
“I said, doesn’t the cold bother you?”
In reply, she held up a finger: Wait. She stepped, lightly, over the side of the building and onto the flat roof. Shadow stepped over a little more clumsily, and followed her across the roof, to the shadow of the water-tower. There was a wooden bench waiting for them there, and she sat down on it, and he sat down beside her.
The water-tower acted as a windbreak, for which Shadow was grateful. The lights of the city smudged the sky with yellow, swallowing half the stars he had been able to see from the open country. Still, he could see the Big Dipper and the North Star, and he found the three stars of Orion’s belt, which allowed him to see Orion, which he always saw as a man running to kick a football—
“No,” she said. “The cold does not bother me. This time is my time: I could no more feel uncomfortable in the night than a fish could feel uncomfortable in the deep water.”
“You must like the night,” said Shadow, wishing that he had said something wiser, more profound.
“My sisters are of their times. Zorya Utrennyaya is of the dawn. In the old country she would wake to open the gates, and let our father drive his—um, I forget the word, like a car but with horses?”
“Chariot?”
“His chariot. Our father would ride it out. And Zorya Vechernyaya, she would open the gates for him at dusk, when he returned to us.”
“And you?”
She paused. Her lips were full, but very pale. “I never saw our father. I was asleep.”
“Is it a medical condition?”
She did not answer. The shrug, if she shrugged, was imperceptible. “So. You wanted to know what I was looking at.”
“The Big Dipper.”
She raised an arm to point to it, and the wind flattened her nightgown against her body. Her nipples, every goose-bump on the areolae, were visible momentarily, dark against the white cotton. Shadow shivered.
“Odin’s Wain, they call it. And the Great Bear. Where we come from, we believe that is a, a thing, a, not a god, but like a god, a bad thing, chained up in those stars. If it escapes, it will eat the whole of everything. And there are three sisters who must watch the sky, all the day, all the night. If he escapes, the thing in the stars, the world is over. Pf!, like that.”
“And people believe that?”
“They did. A long time ago.”
“And you were looking to see if you could see the monster in the stars?”
“Something like that. Yes.”
He smiled. If it were not for