The cafeteria at Henry’s school in Ripling had just one solid smell, everything muddied together: food. In the dining room of the hostel in This Place, she can smell the individual things. Onion. Garlic. Potato. Before her father disappeared, had they cooked? Small things. Defrost, brief sizzling. Homesickness snaps her, like rubbing her hands on carpet, then touching a doorknob. She wonders if Ibtihaj knows she’s gone, and the feeling stings more sharply.

But it melts with a hunger pang—the last thing she ate was the bean pie before noon. Now it’s almost sunset, and she has no idea if time works the same way in This Place, but she thinks it doesn’t matter if she’s hungry. Hunger is hunger.

“Do you want to help me clean up?” Ndidi says. She’s already moved over to a long wooden table and is gathering up scraps of onions. Some other kids are mixing and chopping things. “Mr. Javier can make anything. But if you have requests, you have to help out.”

“Does this mean you requested something?” Henry asks, nodding at Ndidi’s busy hands. Henry cups her palms so the other girl can sweep peels off the table into them.

“I almost always do,” Ndidi admits. “His version of egusi soup isn’t as good as my mum’s, but it’s still good good.” She pauses, gazing over at the pots boiling over flames. “I miss home. I didn’t have a chance to cook in Cape Town before I got lost. So this makes me think of Abuja, pounding cassava with my cousins and aunties. The yard would be filled with music and family and people shouting and laughing. Or sometimes just the sound of bugs singing. I’m the oldest. Always having to watch the little ones. I never thought I’d miss it this much.”

Her voice has gotten softer and softer. Henry can barely hear her toward the end. She’s been missing her father for a year. Not from a strange in-between world like this, but from her own home. She knows what missing feels like. She just nods and swallows the lump in her throat.

“What do you eat with egusi soup?”

“Well,” Ndidi says, “I have to say it is not really egusi. They have onions and things here. But no melon, no bitter leaf, no crayfish. But Javier uses other things where it’s similar. At home we would eat it with fufu, all of us together. Do you know fufu?”

Henry shakes her head.

“Well, I like egusi with fufu. Some people eat it with rice. I will eat anything with rice. There’s no rice here.”

She looks as sad about rice as she does about her family. Henry thinks again about cooking at home. The cooking happened together. The eating happened apart. Her father carrying food to the basement with his artifacts and his footage. Henry wonders if she will be here long enough to miss bean pie as much as Ndidi misses egusi and fufu. Listening to her talk makes Henry feel like she’s empty in another way. Like Henry is missing things to miss.

“Here comes the rain,” Javier calls over the sound of knives chopping and water boiling, and everyone stops to listen. It sweeps down over the windows in sheets, and though Henry wishes she were home, she’s grateful that she’s here, inside with other people, instead of out in Quinvandel in the dark wet. But even after they’ve all been sitting at the long tables for an hour, everyone talking and eating the not-quite egusi soup, the thunder doesn’t come.

“Angie’s here!” Wolfson says, sitting up straighter.

Everyone shouts hello as they’re eating, and Angie shoves the door closed against the wind. She wears what looks like a rubbery poncho, and when she slings it off, it leaves a puddle by the door. She comes straight over to Wolfson.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she says. “I heard what happened at the den. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, but they hurt Daughter. I don’t think they meant to, though.”

“I don’t think they did either.”

“What is going on with them?” Wolfson asks. “The bats?”

“I wish I could say,” Angie says. Her frown was soft before, but now it deepens. “Things have been… strange lately.”

“I almost wish it would really storm just to get it over with,” Olga says from next to Wolfson. She alternates between eating the soup—which came out more like stew—and gulping water from a quart-sized jar. The stew is spicy, and Ndidi has been laughing quietly since Olga’s first bite.

“The clouds out over the sea haven’t moved,” Wolfson says.

“So where’s the rain coming from, then?” Javier calls from the stove.

“I don’t see any clouds over us at all.” Wolfson stares out into the night, looking worried. “It’s like the rain’s coming from nowhere.”

“That makes no sense,” Ndidi says. She stands up and joins them at the window, peeking out. “But he’s right. And the clouds out over the sea look even bigger.”

“Mr. Felipe,” calls Angie. “Can you go ahead and set up that telescope when you’re through?”

“On it,” Mr. Felipe says. He stands up from the table, brushing crumbs out of his beard, and everyone watches him eagerly.

“Do you need help, Mr. Felipe?” Ndidi asks.

“Sweet Ndidi.” He smiles. “You’re always the one to offer. No, thank you. I can manage.”

Ndidi looks a little embarrassed. She takes a napkin and wipes the wet mouth of a little kid standing nearby. A moment later Mr. Felipe is peering through the eyepiece.

From where Henry is sitting, she can see his mouth when it turns down into a frown.

“What is it?” Wolfson says quickly.

Mr. Felipe pauses. “I… can’t find the moon.”

“The moon is up inna sky!” the little kid next to Ndidi shouts.

“Yes, Fredrick, it usually is,” Mr. Felipe says, still peering. “But tonight… it appears… not to be.”

“Not to be?” Angie says, sounding puzzled.

“It’s just not there,” Mr. Felipe says.

“The moon can’t just disappear out of the sky,” Olga says. She’s moving toward the telescope like she’s going to look for herself when Ndidi cries out. She’s so close it makes Henry jerk.

“Did you see that?” Ndidi says shrilly. Wolfson had just begun to turn away from the window, but she grips his arm.

“What?” he says, turning back. “I don’t see anything.”

“Everyone back away from the windows,” Angie says, raising her voice. “Now.”

“What did you see?” Henry asks. Her heart has begun to beat faster.

“In the dark,” Ndidi says, leaning closer to the window. “Out there by the market. Like a flash of light.”

The sudden rumble of thunder growls from the sky through the ground, and every person in the dining hall jumps. Even Angie. The building shudders. At home Henry wouldn’t be worried, but she wonders how old this building is. She’s noticed it doesn’t have electricity—Javier and some of the older kids lit torches when the suns began to go down. Some of the torches on the wall flicker from the thunder.

“I guess you saw lightning,” Wolfson says, still peering out into the dark.

“Lightning isn’t on the ground,” Ndidi says, her voice trembling. She has already started to gather Fredrick and other little kids nearby, pulling them back into a corner. She moves like a mother, or an eldest daughter. But a few other people drift closer to the windows, curious, and that’s when Henry sees it too: a glimpse of something white, slicing through the rainy gloom.

Real lightning cracks then, snapping through the sky and splitting a far-off tree. There are gasps, but the sound is swallowed by the next roll of thunder.

“It’s gone now,” Ndidi calls from where she’s herding the little kids. “I don’t see—”

CRASH.

When the glass breaks, everyone screams. Henry is still at the table, but she jumps up and back as shards of glass scatter. The sound of the storm rushes in, howling like werewolves, drowning out the sound of everyone screaming until all Henry hears is the roar of thunder.

And then she sees the beast.

The night is as black as a cave, and the beast is as white as the pale insects that live inside one. But the beast is not an insect. Its massive head fills the whole window, teeth starlit and snapping. White eyes roll in wide sockets, pale blue in the torchlight.

“Back! Back!” Angie screams. “Run!”

Everyone is screaming, Henry is screaming, and by the fireplace the three babies in high chairs wail, and the beast seems to hear, turning its shaggy head in their direction. Its pearlescent teeth twinkle. Henry is frozen, half out of her chair. From this frozen place, she sees Ndidi rush to the babies, and then a chair flies through the air.

It strikes the beast fully across the face, soundless until it hits the floor, one wooden leg cracking. It’s only when the beast slowly turns its eyes on Wolfson that Henry realizes it was he who threw the chair. Angie stands ready with a wooden platter. She passes a torch to Wolfson and holds another herself.

“Wolfson, go with your friends, please,” Angie hisses.

He shakes his head. But there are tears on his face, and his hands must shake, too, because the light from his torch wavers.

“Javier,” Angie calls without looking, “help Ndidi with the babies!”

She throws the platter, aiming for the beast’s eyes, but this time the creature is ready. It snaps its shining teeth, and the platter explodes into splinters. The beast and Angie move forward at the same time, the beast trying to get more of its body through the window and Angie waving the torch. Wolfson joins her, waving his as well.

“Out!” Angie screams, over and over. “Out! Out!”

“Help them!” Henry yells, at no one, at everyone, maybe at herself. But she can’t move.

Ndidi gets the babies, she and Olga and a tall skinny white boy snatching them out of their seats and running for the stairs. The little kids are already ahead, halfway up. It’s Javier who grabs two more torches and dashes up to join Angie and Wolfson before the pale beast, waving the torches back and forth and shouting.

The reflection of the fire turns the beast’s eyes orange and flickering. Javier swings one of the torches in a powerful arc that almost grazes the creature’s snout. It rears back, the bulk of it high above Javier and Wolfson, and for one long terrible moment Henry thinks it’s going to pounce and crush them all.

But the monster lets out one long, ragged scream, and Henry thinks every hair on her body is coated in ice. Then it screams again before pulling back, sending more broken shards of glass showering to the floor. With the window empty of its body, the wind comes rushing in its place, and the torches that kept the beast back are blown out like birthday candles.

“More fire!” Javier shouts. “Light these back up! Rápidamente!”

At some point Henry pressed herself against the wall. Just by her shoulder is another torch, mounted. The nearness of the flames finally thaws at least a layer of the terror in her bones. Her hands shake, but she pulls the torch from its sconce. Then she persuades her wobbly legs to run to the window.

The wind catches the fire when she gets close, almost blowing it out, and somewhere outside she can hear the beast screaming. It sounds like two. It sounds like three. But she focuses her energy on the torch, turning her body to shield the fire. Wolfson meets her, fumbling with his own, and Javier works with Angie to flip one of the long dining room tables to block the broken window.

It keeps out the wind but not the beast’s screaming. They all huddle down, everyone shocked silent. Everyone except Angie, who says, “I’m going to check on the babies.” She stands, but not before she wraps an arm around Wolfson’s shoulders. She whispers something in his ear, and he nods quickly in reply. Whatever she said makes his shoulders relax and sink down. He sniffs.

Angie disappears up the stairs. Henry can’t tell the crying of the beast from the wind. Outside, over the sea, the sky is a clot of clouds and darkness.

There is absolutely no moon.