She is not on duty, technically — not on duty in the sense of being rostered, though in the ranger corps everyone understands that being seen at the falls at this hour is a soft kind of on-duty, the kind you do instead of writing it into the log. She has a thermos. She has the coat with the corps patch she has not yet sewn back on since the last laundry. She came the long way, up the west bank, because the short way passes the monitoring hut and she did not want to be asked anything.

The falls are doing what they do. She watches the arc come in under the light.

Coriopolitan — the adjective the corps uses in its internal documents, which she finds faintly embarrassing but has begun to use anyway — Coriopolitan dawns are not quite like anything else. The emitter-cycle in the gap-sky does not brighten uniformly; it brightens along the spin direction, so that first light is a motion as much as a moment, a line sweeping east to west across eighty kilometers of overhead. Depending on where you are standing in the preserve, the line will reach you on its own schedule. At the Scimitar overlook, the line reaches you just after it reaches the lip of the falls, so that you see the arc of the water light up a half-second before you yourself do. Everyone she knows who comes here at dawn comes for that half-second.

She drinks the coffee. The ring-doves are already up — she counts them, because counting is a habit from her training and because she has not thought of a reason to stop. Overhead the light continues along its practiced curve. She considers, and sets aside, what she will say in her report.