. It spoke nimbly, with joy and heart and power.

And by the time you knew the score, you’d rehearsed it so very often that the mistakes were sometimes the only interesting parts left.

Though there could be delight in change. Bowie found this so. In the nest Bowie became a gull, a toad, a coiling snake, a beetle the color of an emerald. Avelot had been fixed in her place as if with a pin, even before she fell into Bogomil’s realm. Bowie was free, might be whoever or whatever he chose. A boy, a girl, a starling, a fox kit

The past was a confusing place, full of bad information and mysteries

The hush of the trampled snow outside was a held breath, as if something extraordinary had happened, was about to happen again.

Bargaining?” Malo Mogge said. “You see the moon in the sky above you and take it for a merchant in the marketplace?”

Bowie put the song into the heads of every infant in the NICU. He impressed the pattern into their dreams. They would know the song all their lives without ever knowing how they knew it. One day many years from now, some would have children of their own and they would sing the song to their children, and in this way the song would replicate itself.

Laura shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see Malo Mogge’s face. Sometimes it was better not to see the faces of your audience. Not to see what was before you. It was one thing to imagine your future and another thing entirely to be told what your life would be. Its limits. The last time she’d sung here, she’d died. She’d had a guitar strap

The woman opened a wardrobe where a white dress hung like the moon on a peg