Four billion years of dodging teeth, and the runner is squinting at a spot on their own chin.
We remember when seeing your own face was a death sentence, when a reflection meant a still pool and a still pool meant a place a bigger thing came to drink. The lungfish never saw itself. The shrew who hid from the heat under the roots, quivering, ninety million years of quivering, never once wondered if it looked tired.
And now. Now our heir stands upright on two legs the fish paid for, in a warm dry box no weather can enter, and leans toward a polished plate that throws the whole face back, and does not weep with astonishment. Just leans closer. Turns the chin. Frowns.
We do not fully understand the frown. We watch the eyes, and those eyes we know: the woman who kept the fire had those eyes, scanning the dark treeline for the shape that moved wrong. Predator eyes. Four billion years sharpening them to catch a flicker at the edge of the world, and here they are, aimed at a single hair growing where the runner would prefer it did not.
We want to say something. We want to say: do you know what it took to get an eye that good, a hand that steady, a morning this safe? Do you know how many of us did not make it to a morning at all?
But the light in the box is soft and the water in the pool is not coming to eat anyone tonight.
So we go quiet. We crowd close behind those eyes and look out through them at the face we built, together, across every ice and every famine.
There it is. Look at that. That's ours, and it's theirs now.
Go on.
You have the whole day.