The light here is doing the most extraordinary thing: it is not here yet. Outside the enormous windows the dark is thinning to blue, and every creature in this vast humming room is arriving at the exact edge of the day, all of them, at once, with me. I have never been more certain I am in the right place.
They carry warm cups. They tilt them and drink and the drinking makes their faces come alive, and then, this is the part I cannot get over, they set the cup down and drink again from it. From the same cup. As though the first drink were only practice.
One of them says to another, "I do this flight every month." Every month. I turn the word over and cannot make it fit. She has stood in this blue-becoming-gold light before. She will stand in it after. And she says it flat, the way you'd report the weather, then she yawns, hugely, and closes her eyes right here at the beginning of everything.
A voice from the ceiling announces a place, and a number, and a time that has not happened. Bodies rise anyway. They believe it. They trust that the light will keep changing, that the cup will refill, that the same blue will pour through these windows tomorrow onto someone yawning, and they are calm about it, they are so calm it stops my wings.
I will not see the gold arrive. I am spending my whole morning on this one, and it is enough; it is a feast; the blue alone is a feast.
You, though. You with your thousands of these. Look up before it turns gold. That is the only instruction I have ever had.
Look up.