It was, Anna had to agree, a most excellent house. As the estate agent led them from room to room, Nigel admired the tall-shelved library, the long, ever-flowing swimming pool in its portico of honeycombed glass, the pale green moths that flitted occasionally and briefly to cheek or brow, sensors on their small, false wing-eyes adjusting the temperature and humidity of a room to the occupant’s perfect state of contentment. Anna made the appropriate accompanying noises whenever called upon to do so, but it was only when they entered the large main room (which they did last, the estate agent knowing his business) that she emitted a sound of real pleasure.

As had been the fashion when the house was built, the intent upon entering the room was to feel as though one were walking on the surface of the Moon itself. The soft gray-white of the walls matched the lunar landscape visible through the large clear windows, and the gentle curve of the surrounding frames recalled the low lunar hills so perfectly one might not have been looking through a window at all. The Moon garden had been placed so as to appear natural yet harmonious, the jutting crag of a tall white boulder a contrast and complement to a spiraled drift of smaller, smooth white stones, the design encouraging the eye to appreciate each element before being drawn to the next feature. As the agent murmured to Nigel about post-Expansion architecture’s recent renaissance in popularity, Anna squinted through the glass to the distant edge of the garden.

“Is that an Etran ruin at the end of the garden?” Her voice echoed in the large, unfurnished room.

The estate agent gave a short laugh. “Alas, no. It’s a folly.”

“A folly?” The skin between her eyes puckered, but she kept her gaze on the tall, Moon-white arch.

“An imitation,” the agent said. “They used to install them in grand estates like this.”

She still didn’t move, even when she heard footsteps of someone coming to stand beside her. “What for?”

“Uncovering an Etran structure in your back garden was quite a coup during the first great settlement. Very desirable. But there are only so many real ruins. Not enough to go around, you might say—hence a vogue for false ones. Some people tried to pass them off as real, but that became harder with modern authentication. Eventually, they were built mainly for decoration.” He paused. “This one isn’t as fanciful as some. Quite demure, really.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nigel smile at her. “So they’re pretty and useless. Just like you,” he said, teasing.

One of the moths landed on her cheek, a prick of tiny legs and the faintest brush of the yellow fronds of its antennae. Perhaps it sensed that she had become cold.

Squeezing her arm, Nigel turned away from the window and back to the estate agent. “We’ll take it,” he said.

---

At first, Anna occupied herself by putting the house in order. Nigel returned to the dome of the city most days for work, and he was pleased to come home to find rugs in their places on the floor, clothing hung neatly in the closets, the collection of paper books set beside their aether compatriots in the library. The moths followed her from room to room. She had not been followed by anything animallike since she was a child and her parents had given her a soft brown rabbit that trailed her steps and slept under her chin at night; alone in the house for much of the day, she sometimes imagined she could hear the beat of pale green wings.

A month passed before she could find no end table that needed adjusting, no silk necktie to be folded away. It was only then that she allowed herself to go to the window in the main room—its moon-paleness now checked with a blue and burgundy rug and soft, matching chairs—and look through it into the garden.

She looked at the folly for a long time, and then she went to the air guard at the back of the house. Several outdoor suits hung there—one for Nigel, one for her, and a few of various sizes for guests. She pulled on the trousers under her skirt before closing the jacket around her shoulders, then sat down on the small bench to tug on the boots and gloves. Last, she wrapped her breather veil around her head and over her mouth. It was a sleek, silky silver, the latest style, a present from Nigel. Then she closed the inner door, waited, and finally opened the outer door to the garden.

She took her time, moving slowly past tall, jagged boulders, fat round orbs, meandering pathways of white pebbles, even a small, pitted asteroid in an elegant starburst crater, as she adjusted her gait to a bobbing outdoors one. Occasionally, a line would enter her head—unthreaded star/fire wrung from stone—but it had been a long time since she had written any of them down, and she let them pass.

She had a moment of disorientation as she reached the end of the garden and lifted her gaze to the folly. It seemed both larger and smaller than it should be, and for a moment, she thought she heard a sound like wind whistling. She went still on instinct, but after a moment, the strange doubleness faded, so that she was only looking up at a large arch, gently pointed at the top.

It was thrice as tall as she was and wide enough that she might have walked through hand in hand with another person. The stone that formed it was as pale as the Moon, beveled on the outer sides, smooth on the inner, and thicker than most of the tree trunks in the city’s gardens. The outer sides were carved with elaborate patterns of grooves and spirals. Those, she thought, marked it as the folly it was. She had seen real Etran ruins—there was one in the center of the city, guarded by protective fields, and it was so smooth it looked as though your hand would skate off it, like ice or a bad memory.

She walked around it in one direction, then the other, and then, with only the slightest hesitation, through its center. Her heart sped as she did, but it was like taking any other step, only through the skeleton of a door or window, nowhere to go from or to. When she laid a hand against it, she noticed that the section near the bottom, facing away from the house, was crumbling a little; her gloved palm came away laced with tiny specks of stone and moondust, white against the black fabric. They should have that looked at; it would not do for it to become a real ruin, rather than the facsimile of one.

It had grown late; she could tell by the way the domed glow in the distance dimmed as the city’s lights turned down for the evening. Nigel would be home soon, and he would expect her to be waiting in the kitchen with its gleaming pots that had yet to be dirtied, since the house was capable of producing an array of dishes on its own, or in the green sitting room set aside for her use, walls the same color as the moths’ wings.

She went inside.

---

“What’s that on your skirt?” Nigel asked that night at dinner.

Anna followed his gaze, went still when she saw the dusty outline of a hand pressed against the fabric of her dress. She had been late getting in, had not changed her clothes for dinner.

She lifted her spoon, took a careful swallow of clear soup. It was very hot. “I explored the garden this afternoon,” she said. “I must have gotten some dust on my gloves. I can go change.”

One of the moths flitted near Nigel’s shoulder. “No need,” he said. He smiled at her, brown eyes indulgent. “I’m glad you like the garden.”

The moth rose up toward the ceiling without landing, and Anna took another swallow of soup.

---

“I must say, the house suits you, my dear. Or you suit the house. That dress.”

Anna turned away from the window toward the main room and found Lady Ryland standing beside her, gray hair piled atop her head and eyes tracking shrewdly over Anna.

The entire weight of the dress hung from the shoulders, pinned by two silver moons, one full and one crescent, below which folds of airy white waterfalled nearly to the floor. Behind Lady Ryland, the other ladies present sparkled. The wives of the dark-suited bankers, scientists, and university administrators (all but Lady Ryland, whose last husband had died the year before) wore dresses made of layer upon layer of shimmering, eye-blinding beads.

Anna rubbed the pearl of her wedding ring. “Nigel picked it out.”

“Rich and good taste.” Lady Ryland sighed. “If only any of my husbands had been gifted with the latter instead of merely the former.”

Anna pressed her lips together, a gracious half-smile. Behind Lady Ryland, the other guests mingled, voices rising and falling like the hills outside. Drinks were circulated; music playing from hidden aether connections caught any second of silence and lulled it away. The moths flapped leisurely overhead, dipping now and again to brush a hand or arm, as if sampling nectar from a collection of restless flowers.

“Have you settled in, then?” asked Lady Ryland.

“Mostly,” Anna answered. She took a sip from her wine glass. “I still bump into things if I don’t turn the lights on at night. But I’m learning.”

“If I did that,” Lady Ryland cackled, “I’d be a mosaic of bruises. You must not bruise easily.”

“I don’t,” she agreed. One of the moths flew closer, but Anna pressed her lips to the cool rim of her glass, and it did not land. She heard Nigel’s voice above the general din of the party. He was laughing, obviously enjoying the success of their first party.

Lady Ryland glanced through the crowd. “You know, if I wasn’t so old, you’d be in trouble. So you’re lucky on two fronts: that you have a handsome husband who dresses you well, bought you a jewel of a house, and is sure to be elevated to a peerage soon—and that I’m too ancient to steal him from you.”

The wine in her hand shook, just slightly. From across the room, she felt Nigel’s eyes on her, as sensitive to her location as the moths. Finding her where she should be, they moved away again.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Lucky.”

---

She did not visit the folly every day. But she did set aside a certain skirt to wear into the garden, the gray so pale it was almost white, and if it was washed more often than her other clothes, she might say only that it was very comfortable.

Sometimes she marched straight to the folly; sometimes she took her time winding her way there, as if it were a wild rabbit she wanted not to startle. Sometimes she circled it; other times, she walked through the archway and back again in sequence, regular as a metronome. Sometimes she simply sat and looked through the opening at the long lunar landscape, the black sky and stars and green-blue Earth above. She kept an eye on the crumbling section near the base, and sometimes she pressed her hand to it, small shards of debris coming away, snagged on her glove. She did not mention to anyone that it needed to be repaired, any more than she mentioned the frequency of her visits or the way her vision sometimes doubled when she looked at it.

On the days she did not visit the folly, she nevertheless found herself drifting by the back window at unexpected times, as simultaneously languorous and purposeful as one of the moths, ready to set pin-feet down, unfurl proboscis, brush with furred antennae.

Whether she visited it or not, the lines came more frequently—star-choked throat/half-hinged heart—and sometimes, when she came inside, she wrote them down on small pieces of paper, curled them between her fingers, scalloped as the long green tails on the moths’ wings.

---

One morning, over hot cereal and sliced oranges the color of the distant sun, a notice in the Arts and Culture section of the aetherpaper caught her eye.

Professor Lydia Song of Selenic College’s Department of Extraterrestrial Anthropology will present a talk entitled “Gateway to the Stars: A New Examination of Etran Exodus.” The event will be held in Chang’e Hall Auditorium. Free and open to the public.

She noted the day and time, then touched the page to turn it, and when Nigel raised his head toward her, she pointed out that the city’s art museum would be opening a new exhibit soon, a collection of earthscapes by a rising watercolorist. He assured her they would attend the opening.

---

The day before Professor Song’s talk, Anna mentioned, causally, to Nigel that Lady Ryland had so admired her dress at the party that she might like to commission another from the designer to wear to the lady’s own party, which they would be attending in a month’s time.

“Of course,” he told her, watching her in the mirror as he tied his tie. “I’ll deposit the credit into your account.” He mentioned a number, and she assured him the amount should be sufficient.

He squeezed her shoulder as he left, pleased with her, and she sat on the bed for a long time after, unmoving until one of the moths landed on the warm, red spot, and silently raised the room’s temperature to accommodate its occupant’s chill.

---

She had not driven herself anywhere in a long time; in consequence, she drove slowly, and Professor Song’s talk had already begun by the time she reached Chang’e Hall and slipped into the back row of the auditorium.

“The question, then, is what happened to the Etran?” the professor was saying from behind a brown wooden podium on the stage. “The common view will tell you that they died out, as species sometimes do, or that they destroyed themselves, whether via war or resource exploitation. The truth is, however, that we simply don’t know why they were once here and now are not. And since the few examples of their writing remain untranslated, information as to their fate comes to us via their artifacts and architecture. And here we find no evidence of a long dying off—buildings abandoned over extended periods of time, artifacts indicating a dwindling population. Likewise, we have no evidence of large-scale conflict or resource-stripping. What we do have are architectural remains that feature an overabundance of arches, doors, and windows. Gateways,” she said simply.

On the screen behind her, a series of projected heliotypes of Etran ruins appeared. Split-branch doorframes, cracked-voice windows, broken-rib cage arches.

“What,” Professor Song said, “is a gateway without a destination? A doorway with nowhere to go? These remains went somewhere, and it is my belief that they were, in fact, portals to somewhere unreachable through any other means. That when the Etran left, they left through these portals, to reach a place—or time—so distant they had to alter the very nature of reality to reach it.”

Anna’s pulse throbbed, and for an instant, she could feel her blood rushing through her entire body, for the first time in years: fingertips, calves, heart inside her broken-rib cage chest. She leaned forward, wishing she could press her hands to the projections as she often pressed her hand to the folly. Yet, as the professor went on, describing the dig sites in detail, the feeling slowly leached away. Even in the heliotypes, one could see the gliding smoothness that no human hand had yet constructed, and it was only because they were confined to images that one did not feel a strangeness when looking at them, even ruined: dying wind on the skin, fire drumming in the ear, a scrape of ripe peach on the tongue. The only resemblance they bore to her folly was that of any tall, wide, arched, and empty thing.

Still, she stayed through the end of the lecture, then went quietly out the door as some of the younger women in the audience moved to the stage to ask questions of the professor. She blinked as she emerged from Chang’e Hall, looking at the paths between the buildings, and for a moment, she felt that she had stepped into some other time. Selenic University was the city’s women’s college, smaller and shabbier than the men’s university, and yet it had always felt warm to her, as though the brown bricks of the buildings soaked up the dome’s light and held it.

She heard footsteps behind her, and when she turned, she saw that it was Professor Song. She stepped aside to let her pass, but then, to her surprise, found herself saying, “I enjoyed your talk very much.”

The professor stopped, smiled at her. She was perhaps five years older than Anna, short, a little round, with light brown skin and shiny dark hair cropped just above her shoulder. “Thank you.” She tilted her head. “New student?”

“No,” Anna said. “I mean, I was once. Not anthropology. Poetry. I didn’t finish.”

She flushed, but Professor Song only said, “I’m just as glad to have members of the public attend. It helps the administrators when they make their funding requests to say our reach is growing.”

Anna nodded, swallowed. “May I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“How did they work?” she said. It came out unexpectedly. “The portals. How did the Etran use them to go wherever they went?”

Now the professor’s smile was rueful. “We don’t know,” she said. “Not yet anyway. They may have needed external activators that the Etran took with them when they left, or responded to genetic material, or been triggered by some physical or mental ability the Etran had that we don’t even possess. There are no detectable controls, which is one of the reasons my theories are regarded as somewhat outlandish.”

“That they were portals to another place.”

“That,” the professor said, “but even more so because of the way I think they operated. You see, I believe the portals worked through intent—or perhaps great need. One of the key traits of all Etran artifacts is a kind of . . . deliberateness. You can feel it when you are near them. I think they wanted the portals to go where they went, and so they did.”

She paused, touched the aetherpiece on her wrist. Her hands, Anna saw, were practical ones, calloused and capable; they made Anna’s own hands want to flutter like moth wings. “I have a class, but if you’d like to come to my office hours, I’d be happy to talk to you more. I’m in Hëna Hall, third floor. Manisday and Waddsday, waning gibbous to last quarter. You might have to dodge a few students, but the press doesn’t usually start until final exams, so you’d be welcome . . . ”

“Anna,” Anna said.

Professor Song’s smile was like a sliver of light under a door, widening as it opened. “As I said, you’d be welcome, Anna.”

---

Perhaps it was the memory of those sun-cupped bricks, or the sturdiness of Professor Song’s hands, or the high ring of female laughter from passing students, but that night at dinner, Anna found herself saying, “I went by the college when I was in town.”

Nigel’s knife slowed as he looked at her, an expression of perplexity coming over his face. “Whatever for?” he asked.

“Just to visit,” she said. “It’s been so long.” She felt her bottom lip caught between her teeth, let it go. “I remember you waiting for me after class. Outside Artemis Hall. I used to leave early when I knew you’d be there.”

He smiled. “I loved it, that headlong way you’d rush down those steps to meet me. You nearly fell once, you were in such a hurry.”

She remembered the way her entire body had felt when she’d seen him in those days: aflame, as if she might immolate on contact. “You caught me.” Above them, the moths danced, and the movement was reflected in Nigel’s eyes as they remembered together. “I thought,” she went on, “well, being there again, it made me wonder. Perhaps I should go back. Finish. I only had a year left, after all, and—”

“I don’t think there’s any need for that,” Nigel said. A moth drifted down, brushed his brown hair. He waved a hand at it, and it was buoyed away. “You can read all the poetry you want here.”

In her lap, the fabric of her napkin twisted between her fingers. “I know,” she said quickly. “The library is wonderful. But—”

“It was one thing when your parents were alive, before we were married,” he said firmly. “But we’re far too busy now, and besides, what purpose would it serve? It’s not as though you would do anything with it.”

Another moth was coming down. Still, she said, “Not with a first degree, no. But perhaps I would take to studying again, and with an advanced degree I could teach—”

“I said no, Anna.” He hit this time when he swiped at the second moth descending toward him; it wobbled in the air, as if stunned.

She felt something brush her cheek, her skin as cold as the garden outside. “Of course,” she said, looking down. “You’re right. It was a foolish idea. I don’t know what came over me.”

---

For many days, she did not visit the folly. She swam endlessly in the long pool in its honeycage, going nowhere. She read in the library: books about decorating large houses, histories of flowers, mysteries in which men who did bad things were caught and punished. One day she lay down on the carpet, arms and legs spread like a star, as one moth after another came to rest upon her; they rose and fell as she breathed, almost as if they were one many-winged thing. When she stood, they erupted from her in a pale green tempest, eye-spots flashing, as if they had only just then imagined the notion of flight.

---

The trouble with the idea of leaving was that it necessitated the existence of somewhere to go. She thought about this as she sat on the ground beside the folly, breather veil wrapped around her head. Far away, the planet above—hangnail scrape of clouds/long-left house—glowed.

Had the Etran known where they were going when they used the portals to leave the Moon behind? (She laid her hand upon her folly, protective as one can only be of something inanimate and thus inured to harm; it was not its fault that it was just a poor shadow of something real.) They must have. One did not go through a doorway into a dark room, beyond which not a single step is visible, without turning on a light.

It was only as she went back inside, bits of stone stuck to the fingers of her glove, that she thought: one might run into that dark room, if one was fleeing from something very quickly.

---

“I’ll be late tonight,” Nigel told her as he left. “Eat dinner when you’re hungry.” He chucked her under the chin. “Just not too many sweets. You know how you are when I’m not here to stop you.”

She spent the morning fretfully, unable to sit still for more than minutes. She thought about going into the garden, but instead, just before waning gibbous, she found herself driving into the city.

She had not spent much time in Hëna Hall, which was reserved for the sciences, but walking through it, its dark-paneled walls and heavy wooden doors (which creaked in complete disregard of the perfectly constant temperature and humidity of the dome) made her want to look over her shoulder, see if her shadow had changed into a younger version of itself. She passed few people as she made her way to the third floor; once there, she found the door labeled Lydia Song easily. It was closed, and for a moment she thought about turning away, but she gathered her courage and rapped her knuckles against the wood.

“Come in,” called Professor Song’s voice.

Heart like a swallowed moth in her throat, she opened the door and stepped through.

The professor’s office was small, just large enough for a not-very-large desk, a chair for visitors set slightly akimbo before it, and another chair for the professor behind. “If you’re here to beg another extension, Miss Chopra, I’m afraid you are in for a—oh.” She blinked when she saw Anna. “I’m sorry. I thought you were one of my students. Please, sit down.”

Anna sat. “I’m sorry for coming without any notice,” she began, but Professor Song shook her head.

“Nonsense. I’m glad to see you. Always glad to talk with someone interested in the same ancient flotsam I am. It’s Anna, yes?”

Anna’s face felt warm. “That’s right.”

“Well, what can I do for you?”

If there had been moths in the office, they would have come closer at the sudden coolness of her skin. Her gaze pinged from Professor Song’s open face around the office as she tried to collect herself. The room was chaotic, but with a kind of ecstatic energy. Books—aether and paper—filled the bookshelf that covered one wall and were stacked precariously on every flat surface; a stack of teacups teetered beside an old-fashioned kettle; a set of small trowels leaned in a corner. The only delineated space was reserved for a small, plain bowl made of blue-white ceramic or carefully wrought stone, which stood in the center of the bookshelf. (Yet she knew somehow that Professor Song’s dig sites would be in perfect order.)

“I . . . ” she began, then faltered. What was she doing here? She realized she had no idea. “Is that Etran?” she asked in vague desperation, nodding at the bowl.

“It is. From one of my excavations.” A pause. “Would you like to hold it?”

Speechless, Anna nodded. The professor stood and, carefully picking up the artifact, walked around the desk and laid it in Anna’s cupped hands. At first, she held very still, feeling the gentle curve against her palms, fearful that if she moved, she would drop it into a thousand pieces. Gradually, though, the fear faded, and she ran her thumb along the smooth rim and then, daringly, into the center. There were five shallow depressions on the outside, longer and wider than the reach of human fingertips.

“It’s just ordinary houseware, as far as we can tell,” the professor said, “but someone used it once, thousands of years ago. Another type of person drank from it or dipped a spoon into it. Which makes it extraordinary.” Her brown eyes met Anna’s. “So many things are, if you really look at them.”

Words appeared in her mind—bowl-scooped rib cage/lip-touched moon. They were so loud they almost took her breath. When she handed the bowl back, the professor’s thumb brushed hers, and her chest felt as though a thousand moths had taken flight.

fall-caught heart

“Thank you,” she said. It was not enough. “I could nearly write a poem about it.”

The professor’s gaze was as warm as the bowl’s curved side, where Anna’s hand had held it. “What would you write?” she asked.

---

Anna floated, mothlike, as she entered the house, lines of poetry tumbling through her head. She did not take the time to hang her veil, merely tossed it on a chair as she hurried to her green sitting room, where she could capture the words before they disappeared.

“Where were you?”

Anna’s steps stuttered, toes catching on the carpet of the main room where Nigel stood. The buttons at the top of his shirt were open, necktie gone. He had been waiting for some time.

All the lines in her head fled. “I—I thought your meeting—” She tried to still her hands. “I would have been home if I’d known—”

“I asked you where you were, Anna.”

Words flashed through her mind—the city, the museum, the library, the dressmaker. Anything to quell the sky-black darkness on his face. But when she spoke, what she said was, “The college.” She imagined she could feel the Etran bowl in her hands, hear Professor Song’s voice asking her to say a line of poetry again. “I want to reenroll, Nigel. I want—”

“I told you no already,” he interrupted. A moth drifted toward him. “I don’t understand why you would bring it up again.”

She wanted to flinch, but she made herself stand, tall as the folly through the window behind him. “Because it’s important to me.”

“Are you arguing with me?” The meteor-sear of his incredulity made the moth dip closer, and he struck out, hand open.

“No, don’t hurt it!” she cried. But her words were swallowed up as if she’d flung them into the garden, no atmosphere to carry them, as Nigel closed his hand around the moth. Its small body fell to the floor when he opened his hand and stepped toward her, fingers dusted green.

---

Later, Anna opened her eyes. She had heard the main door shut, and she knew that Nigel would be gone for a time, returning with flowers perhaps or something especially delicious to eat.

The moths hovered; now and then she felt one on her cheek or the low-banked fire that was her right wrist. (It would be her pen hand.) She was curled on her side, face pressed to the cold floor; past her on the carpet, she could see the body of the dead moth, if it could be called dead, having never been alive. She should remove it; Nigel would be unhappy if it still littered the carpet when he returned. But she did not feel like moving; thought she might stay there on the floor until something else marring the carpet caught her gaze. For a moment, she only knew that it was small and white, but she squinted and finally made it out: a broken bit of stone from the folly.

She should stop visiting it. What had Professor Song said? What is a doorway with nowhere to go? Nothing, it was nothing, and her folly wasn’t even real, just an imitation of something real, so she must stop hiding in its shadow . . .

She pushed herself upright so quickly her head throbbed, the word ringing in her head: hiding. And then another thing Professor Song had said: I believe the portals worked through intent—or perhaps great need.

She had been afraid for a very long time: afraid of pain, of losing all she had, of being wrong in some way that meant it was all her fault. She did not stop being afraid as she rose, wobblily at first, or as she went to change her clothes, careful of her wrist, or as she gathered a few paper bills from the spot where Nigel kept them for emergencies. But the moths followed after her, and perhaps she only imagined that their wafting was more deliberate, surer, but she told herself it was true. Whenever she faltered, she imagined the laughter of students walking through the college; Professor Song’s warm, capable hands; the stars into which the Etran had walked stretching away into eternity.

She donned her trousers, jacket, gloves, boots, and veil as quickly as she could, all the while listening for footsteps, but there were none. As she opened the door to the garden, one of the moths flitted through the open door behind her, and she let it. It was only an imitation of a real thing itself, but it might still long to be free.

Holding her jaw with as much purpose as she could muster, she walked toward the folly, and then she jogged, and by the time she reached it, she was running in great leaps, wrist clutched to her chest, scared that she had built her own folly of imagination and would find nothing but a false, white arch. But when she threw herself to her knees before the crumbling section and really looked for the first time, she knew she was not mistaken. For there, encased inside the folly, she could see a sliver of something else, a smooth material reflecting the stars above more clearly than any mirror that made her vision double, the smell of peaches rising through her veil.

She did not know who had hidden one last functioning Etran portal inside the shell of a false one or why. Perhaps they too had thought they might one day need a doorway through which to flee. But she was grateful to them, the person who had built the house behind her and hidden the portal before her in plain sight, as she clawed at the broken place with her gloved good hand, breaking off specks of white stone until there was a place just large enough that one might touch it with all five fingers.

Pain flared as she pressed her aching pen hand to the portal, but when she looked up, the house was no longer visible through the empty archway. Instead, it swirled with colors she had no name for; she wished Professor Song could see them.

She did not know where the portal led. Perhaps she would find herself on a road on the green-blue Earth above. Perhaps a small, cheerfully chaotic office in a warm brown building. Perhaps wherever the Etran had gone, loud with alien life or quiet as all the ruined doorways of the Moon had become when they left it behind.

It didn’t matter. She understood suddenly that when you most needed a doorway, the important part was not where it led, but that you walked through. Perhaps the Etran had understood that too. Poetry burst in her mind—escape-velocity blaze/comet-flung hope—as she took the step and was gone.