The Globe That Drank Sunrises
"Why is it cold in here?" Dara asked. She had her palm flat against the garden bay wall, and the wall felt like a window in winter. River floated at her elbow, whiskers drifting, tail curled the slow way water curled. Above the seedling trays hung the warm-lamp: a glass globe on a silver stem. It should have been the colour of honey. It was grey. Dara breathed out and watched nothing much happen, but the cold sat on her arms like a hand laid there. The seedlings had folded their leaves shut, twelve small green fists, waiting. River bumped the globe with their nose. It did not even flicker.
Dara unhooked the globe and held it in both hands. It was as cold as a stone lifted out of a river, and about the same weight, which was almost no weight at all up here. She remembered how it worked, because she had watched it work a hundred times without looking properly. The globe drank sunlight. It drank slowly, through the round window in the long corridor, and then it gave the light back all night as warmth. It had simply run dry. River turned a lazy circle around her head. "Then we fill it," Dara said. "The sun comes back every ninety minutes. It has to come back."
They took the globe to the corridor window, which was the biggest round window on the station. Below them Earth turned, blue and patient, with cloud laid over the ocean like wool pulled thin. The station hummed. The floor was cool through Dara's socks and her fingers had gone pink at the tips. She wedged her feet under the rail so she would stay where she wanted to stay, and held the globe up against the glass. River settled on her shoulder, warm as a folded scarf, and watched the dark edge of the world. Far off, that edge began to go pale. Dara held her breath and did not move.
The sunrise came all at once. It ran along the rim of Earth in a thin white line, then spilled, and the whole corridor filled with light so bright that Dara's eyelashes made shadows on her cheeks. The window grew warm. Her knuckles grew warm. She turned the globe over and over so every part of it could drink. For two whole minutes the light poured in, and then Earth swung them gently back into the dark. Dara looked down. The globe was grey. The same grey as before, exactly, with no thread of colour anywhere inside it. "Oh," she said. River pressed a paw against the glass.
She could have put it back on its stem and gone to find a blanket. Instead she stayed at the window with her feet hooked under the rail. There were things to watch while she waited. A storm sat coiled over the sea like a sleeping animal. A river she did not know the name of caught the light and went silver for a moment. Lightning flickered inside the clouds, small and soundless, and River's eyes followed every flash. Ninety minutes is a long time and also not very long. Dara counted rivers instead of minutes. When the pale edge came again, her hands were already up against the glass.
The second sunrise was the same as the first, and so was the globe afterward: grey, cold, ordinary. Dara turned it slowly in her hands and could not find one speck of light in it. Her arms ached from holding them up. River nudged the globe out of her fingers and caught it against their chest, hugging it with both front paws the way an otter hugs a stone. "One more turn, and then one more," Dara said. She said it mostly to her own hands. River blinked at her with their whole sleepy face and did not let go of the globe, and the two of them waited for the light again.
This time River held it. They floated in front of the window with the globe tucked under their chin, fur lifting, whiskers spread wide, and when the sun came they shut their eyes and hung there in the middle of all that brightness. Dara watched the light move across River's pale muzzle. When the dark came back she leaned in close, close enough to fog the glass, and she saw it. Deep inside the globe there was a speck. One small warm speck, the size of a poppy seed, the colour of a candle seen through a curtain. Dara laughed once and clapped a hand over her mouth. River glowed back at her, pleased.
So they passed it between them, sunrise by sunrise. River held it through one pass, hugged tight; Dara held it through the next, arms braced, feet under the rail. The speck became a line. The line became a thread, and the thread wound itself loosely around the inside of the glass like something growing. On the sixth pass her shoulders burned and she had to swap arms twice, and the thread did not seem to widen at all. That happened. She held it anyway. On the seventh pass the globe was no longer cold against her palms, and she noticed it the way you notice a fire two rooms away.
They lost count somewhere after nine. Dara ate a handful of crackers at the window, and the crumbs drifted off and went wherever crumbs go. River dozed with one paw on the glass and woke for every sunrise, every time, without being asked. "One more turn, and then one more," Dara said, and River pushed the globe back into her hands. Earth went gold, then rust, then blue, then dark. Her fingers had stopped being pink. They were warm now, properly warm, warm all the way through, because the glass was warm and the warmth came out of it steadily, like breath, like something that had finally learned how.
When the globe was the colour of honey the whole way through, they carried it home. It was too warm to hold for long, so they went hand to paw to hand along the corridor: Dara ten metres, River ten metres, Dara again. The light moved with them and slid along the white walls. It made River's wet-looking fur shine copper. It threw two round shadows, one girl-shaped and one otter-shaped, that swung slowly over the ceiling and down again. Dara went carefully at every turn. She had not carried anything so gently in her life, and she did not want to learn what a dropped sun would sound like.
The stem was waiting where they had left it. Dara lifted the globe with both hands, felt it click home, and pushed off the floor so she drifted backward to watch. Light spread over the seedling trays. It fell on the soil and it fell on her, and the cold that had been sitting on her arms all evening got up and went away. Then the leaves began to move. The twelve small fists opened, one and one and one, until the trays were full of flat green hands turned up toward the light. The air smelled of wet earth and something faintly sweet. River rolled over in the middle of it, belly up, and sighed.
The soil was dry, so Dara found the watering bulb and squeezed it once over the nearest tray. A drop came out round and wobbling, and floated, and turned. It caught the honey light and carried a tiny sunrise inside itself all the way down. River touched it with a whisker. The drop shivered, gathered itself back into a ball, and went on. "One more turn, and then one more," Dara said, squeezing gently, and the drops went out across the trays one after another, unhurried, each one glowing, each one settling at last into the dark soil where it soaked in and was gone.
Afterward she hooked her ankles into the hammock straps beside the trays, which was not where anyone was meant to sleep, and which was warm. River curled in the crook of her arm with their tail over her wrist. Below the floor, below everything, Earth kept turning, and somewhere down there another morning was already starting without them. The globe held its steady honey glow. Dara watched the last drop she had made drift slow above the soil, wobble, touch, and settle in. Then her eyes closed. The leaves stayed open. The warmth stayed, and stayed, and the garden was quiet all the way through.
