The people who live in the preserve rise before the emitters do. This is not everywhere true in Coriopolis; in the city it would be eccentric. But along the southern trails there is a practice — older than the preserve, carried over from Earth, from mountain villages whose names are preserved only in family lineages now — of being awake at the hour when it is still proper to call the sky dark, and of walking, then, to a place one likes, and of waiting there.

She had been doing this twelve years. Not every morning. Enough.

The path to Scimitar Falls climbs the west bank through mixed forest. The trees are familiar: alder, some cottonwood, a kind of birch that does not quite read as any Earth birch. In the Coriolis wind the birches speak first. Their leaves are small and thin and the deflected currents pull at them from the west; the alder holds longer. She walked with her hood up against the mist, and the mist was the first thing about the morning that felt itself.

At the falls, there is no need to go to any particular place. She went to the flat stone a little above the basin, where the mist is present but the spray is not, and she sat.

Above her, the gap-sky began to fill. Eighty kilometers of engineered air, and the light came into it from along the spin direction, so that the brightening travelled across the overhead preserve as a moving line — what at home they would have called the hour-hand of the morning, because it swept. She watched it. The falls traced their curve. She did not think she would be able, later, to say what she had thought; only that she had thought it here.