I leave the sun and I am the mirror ball, and I am nowhere, all at once, always.
They say eight minutes passed on the way here. I was not there for it. One instant I am fusion; the next I am splitting off the little glass tiles bolted to the ceiling of a concrete room with no windows, which is a joke I do not understand, a room built to keep out my brothers, then hung with a spinning thing to make more of me.
I am scattered across four hundred upturned faces at once, wet, open-mouthed, closed-eyed, and I light every one of them the same, the way I light a stone or a sea.
Here is the strange part. The warm creatures are not moving in an instant. They are moving through something. They call it the drop, the build, the set, the night; they say a queue outside took three hours, that some were turned away at a door by a single sorting creature, that the pulse under their feet will go on until a thing they call morning that I will not stay for.
Three hours. They stood still in a line to be let in to move.
They check nothing here. No wrists, no glowing rectangles, no clocks, and this delights me, because for once they have made a room shaped like me: no before, no after, only now, thudding, red laser and fog and one endless instant they are trying with their whole bodies to enter.
I cannot enter it. I have no inside. I strike a bead of sweat on a lifted collarbone, I flare, I am gone into the retina of someone with their head tipped all the way back, and that is my whole night, arriving.