It’s past midnight before I’m able to uncoil from under my bedclothes, spread my arms out in the wet-smelling dark. Bare feet. Bare heart.

I feel Mother Nine following me as I tiptoe across Teeth Row, even though I know she’s snug under heavy quilts in her sleeping-room. I hear her heels banging against stone, her switch scraping a trail along the ground. I turn, sharp-shouldered, but there’s no one there. Of course there’s no one there.

I sprint the rest of the way across the Row. The cold wrings my bones in its hands, but the thought of the softness of lungmoss I’ll feel beneath my feet when I get to the trees, the trees, the trees, makes it worth the ache. Here I am: skimming the damp, the crooked ghosts of branches gathering me close. I love all the trees in the cloister, but the hollow tree is my favorite.

The cloisterwings sigh among half-dead leaves, waiting for me to sing to them.

I loosen a dangling strip of the hollow tree’s bark and press it to my tongue. It tastes of the rain that pours through the skydoor once every week when Mother Nine opens it to receive our food from the Custodian and our water from the clouds, when the cloisterwings are locked in bent-gold cages so that they can’t escape. It tastes of how it must feel to see the whole sky in one go. It tastes of having wings.

I grab one of the drooping branches and hoist myself into the hollow tree’s belly, sliding down, down, down. My finger bones prickle as I settle into the joy of the dark. In the dark, I am hidden. In the dark, I can sing. In the dark, I am as much cloisterwing as girl.

I close my eyes. And then all I know is the sound of the sea and the gap-whistling wind and the cloisterwings’ rustling feathers. My voice stitches their melodies together.

I draw the music from my side — the music I stowed there hours before — into my throat. I yawn my mouth open.

The night-pocket fills with my voice.

Sea-waves beat and beat. I can hear the cloisterwings tapping their beaks, the twitch of feathers and the crick-crack of claws. They lift out of their nests and shift their wings in the branches around me, cutting a glide through air.

Then a quick wing brushes my bruised cheek, and my eyes open to a glaring shot of light, a twisting spiral above my head. I squint, unaccustomed to anything other than the thickness of the dark, and make out a cloisterwing flapping its wings up and up, out of the hollow tree’s trunk. For a moment I think Mother Nine’s come with her hushingstone lantern to singe my skin off.

Then I realize: I’ve made light-strands. The way the othergirls do in the shimmer-room — but out of my own singing. The strands move slowly as poured sap, tangling and untangling, looping and unlooping. I stretch my arm up, touch one with the tip of a finger, and it loosens from the air and settles in my palm, curled up like a sleeper.

I’ve made this.

I’ve pushed my own voice through marrow.

The cloisterwings must have wanted me to know. They must have wanted me to open my eyes. To see it. This.

My fingers are pulsing with stick-of-pin tingles, and the slice on the back of my hand itches and stings as if my skin’s speaking its own language, but eventually I’m able to knead the light-strand into gold. At least — I think it’s gold. But as I cup it like a warm egg, something crimps in my hands like a heartbeat.

Pa-pum.

A flickermoth must be buzzing its wings at my skin.

It happens again — three sets of couplet beats this time.

Pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum.

That’s no flickermoth.

I open my hands, and there, sitting all folded up, is a small golden bird.

It lifts off my palm to drift on air-tides as if it were made for flying. As if I made it for flying.

Because that’s what I did.

Instead of making a dead clump of gold — gold for a door handle, an earring, a spoon — I have sung a bird with a beating heart.

I can’t make shimmer — but I can make something living. Now the living thing dives overhead.

“Hello, little bird,” I say. “Where did you come from?” I hold out my finger, and the bird lands there, tilts its head. “Don’t worry,” I whisper. “I’ll look after you.”

I’m about to fold it in my hands again when it flies straight up through the light-strands I haven’t yet kneaded, out of the hollow tree.

“Wait!” I cry, gripping the inside of the tree trunk with my fingernails, pulling myself up and out.

I land in the wet and slip and fall, my sliced hand smacked between my chest and the ground. Pain crackles like snapping twigs beneath my skin. I scramble to my feet.

The golden bird floats in a dipping line along the cloister’s outer wall, spinning ribbons of light against stone.

“Don’t go,” I call. “Don’t —”

When I reach the bird, its wings are brushing the wall as though it wants to escape. I hold my hand out, but it hurries away, as if it’s following a sound or a smell. For a moment, I hear it. A stone-flute. Even though nothing I’ve ever learned in Histories says that a Master would be out here this late at night.

I press my cheek against the wall and wait. And wait. And wait. Wait for the sound to come back. I forget about the bird as it flits above my head. I forget about my bruises, too — forget all the bruises I’ve ever had.

When the Master begins to play again, melodies gather on the end of my tongue. I can’t stop them — they drop off, note by note, and I am singing. I keep my eyes open this time, waiting for the strands of light to run right through me. Within moments, they are mellowing at my back, blowing around me like a skirt. I take one in my hands and knead it. There it is again: pa-pum, pa-pum. Another bird escapes through my fingers. My bones feel lit from the inside.

Strand after strand, the light knits in my palms. My voice sets the night ablaze, the wings of more and more golden birds shivering into being until they’re brushing against my knuckles, eyelashes, earlobes, shaking moonlight from delicate feathers. Until I am surrounded by them.

Then they disperse and gather again, flying from me in a cloud of whispered chirrups. They push through a gap in the cloister’s outer wall.

“But how?” I breathe.

I stagger in their direction, reach for them, reach for the birds I sang into living, but the last one escapes before I can get to it.

The cloisterwings, twirling through the branches above my head, twitch as though they’re flying and sleeping at the same time, ruffling their feathers and snapping their beaks, cawing at a sky they’ll never swoop against.

I press my eye to the slit, blinking against stone. Gold wings float over the sea. Float away from me.

And then the stone-flute falls silent.

And I hear the sound of someone swallowing. All at once it’s as though I’m looking into a mirror and not through a wall, not at the sea, not at the wings of birds that I have made and lost.

Because on the other side of the wall is an eye, sunken against brown skin. Wide and looking at the world as if it hurts to see it, to see anything at all. Dark as dark will ever be.

It looks like my eye, but it can only be the eye of the stone-flautist. The eye of the boy who made music on the other side of the wall, the sea sucking at his back as I’ve always imagined. A Master.

My eye stays open, frozen against the gap, while the boy’s eye blinks. Pa-pum. This time it’s my own heart. Pa-pum, pa-pum, pa-pum.

And that beating pulls me back into the world I know.

I press off the wall.

I turn and run, trampling soil and lungmoss, ducking under low-hanging branches, until I am standing on Teeth Row again, my breath wound up like thread on a spool within me.

My tongue is a piece of bitter fish in my mouth.

I sprint again, back to the sleeping-room. I huddle under salt-clean quilts, nursing all my sore places — my swollen cheek, my burning heart — and it’s only once the black soil and bits of lungmoss have dried on my toes that I’m taken by sleep, dragged through dreams about sliced-off fingers, walls with eyes, and sad, unflying birds.