Kisa wrapped her scarf around herself and folded her knees up against the window. The daytime roared outside like an endless fire, but the lights were coming soon.

The black lights.

That’s what she called them, the fuzzy bits of darkness that popped in and out outside by the rose bush. She couldn’t go out in the daytime, her mother said (none of them did, because of the burning), but Kisa hoped and prayed to the nighttime, and it had answered.

What did they feel like? What whisper-y nocturnal things did they say to the gleaming, sunlit bikes that the children rode down the street past her house?

One of the bits of night drifted close. She wanted to hear its words, to speak to it. Kisa glanced down the hall. Her mother and her uncles and her great, great, great, great grandfather Yivk slept at this time. She’d never even seen Yivk, though she’d heard his voice through the coffin. They would not know.

She slid the window up a bit, just a fraction. She tucked her scarf over her hands to avoid any stray beams of sun.

The darkness bobbed as if in answer. “Hey,” Kisa said. “Hey.”

“Where . . . am . . . I?”

“You’re in the day,” Kisa said, through the tiniest opening of her lips. “It’s daytime.”

“Scared.”

“Oh,” Kisa said. “You’re okay. I’m here. I’m a night creature.”

The little darkness blipped in and out. “Lost. I’m lost. The sun. It will find me!”

Kisa bit her lip. She looked back down the hall. Did she dare? The serenade of danger played inside her, a little thrill. “I’ll help you,” she said. “Here. Hop on the scarf.”

She opened the window a little higher, high enough to play the long bit of fabric through the small opening, and the darkness blotted onto it. She pulled the scarf back in, and the little fuzzy sphere slid off and back into the air.

The daylight had touched the scarf, and the warmth of it heated her hands to a sweat. Did the children’s bikes hold this heat? Did the humans laugh because of such fire?

“Oh!” the darkness said, and it sounded familiar now. Like a voice she’d only ever heard through a coffin. “Oh. I know where I am!”

“Yivk!” her mother’s voice said, from behind her.

Kisa shut the window.

The darkness formed into a flimsy outline of an ancient, great, great, great, great old man, with sparkling eyes like lost blips of darkness.

“Yivk, what’ve I told you about going outside?”

Kisa stared at the outline—Yivk. Though insubstantial, he didn’t seem frail. His form bobbed like a dance, like he had just come back from a night out. “You were—you were the darkness? And the rest of you is—” she pointed at the other drifting spheres, still out in that fiery sun-scape.

“And you!” Her mother turned on Kisa. “I can’t believe you opened that window! What if you had burned your hands?”

“But he was out there,” Kisa said. “He was out in the day.”

Her mother took in a slow, deep breath. “Yes. Well. Yivk is foolhardier than most.”

“I’m so old, the sun doesn’t want me no more!” Yivk said. “When you’re my age, you’re too bony for it. Stay alive as long as I have, and you can do what I do.” He patted her on the head, his hand passing through her scalp. “But till then, you stay out of the sun, like your mother says, you hear?”

Kisa grinned. She wrapped her scarf around herself again. Someday, she’d be able to go out there. In the day. In the fire and the sun. She just had to wait.

“I promise.”