The World Has Developed a Second Sunrise

How it begins

Vera Murray was halfway through the night watch when the second sun rose in the west.

Her shift log lay open beside the instrument panel, awaiting the usual sentence about clear visibility and nothing remarkable.

She checked her compass. Then she checked whether anyone had put something ambitious in the coffee.

The compass was correct. The coffee was merely terrible.

Across the dark plain, a pale gold circle climbed above a mountain that had never been there before. Its light fell sideways through the observation tower, revealing a door in a wall Vera had leaned against for twelve years.

Someone knocked from the other side.

Vera set down her cup.

The knock came again, patient but increasingly hopeful.

"Who's there?"

"Elias Bell. Is this still the northern navigation station?"

"It is on my side."

A pause. "That's encouraging."

She opened the door with her hand near the alarm rope.

The man beyond it wore a travel coat covered in pale dust. Behind him, a road curved toward a city whose towers shone in the new light. People were emerging onto balconies. A dog barked with the outrage of an animal whose morning had been mishandled.

Vera looked from the city to the blank plain on her own map.

"How long has that been there?"

Elias followed her gaze.

"About nine hundred years. How long have you been calling it empty?"

Below the tower, the first bells began ringing in her capital. Not the morning bells. The warning ones.

Vera had used the stars to guide caravans, rescue lost travelers, and prove that a merchant was lying about where he'd spent a winter. She had trusted the sky because it seemed beyond anyone's ability to edit.

Now two shadows stretched from the same cup.

Elias looked at the alarm rope.

"Before you pull that," he said, "could I show you something your maps have been leaving out?"