Dawn arrives in Okanogan like a held breath. The hills are still violet with the last of night, the sky a slow bleed of gold. Nova walks the path behind the diner, boots damp with dew, a cold cup of tea forgotten in her hand. She finds him at the edge of the lot where the pavement gives way to wild grass. Shogg sits—though 'sits' is the wrong word for what he does. He hovers, a vast dark mass with tendrils coiled like roots, luminous green eyes fixed on a single dewdrop clinging to the tip of a blade of grass. The drop catches the first light, trembling, fragile, perfect. Nova stops. She doesn't speak. The air feels charged, like the moment before thunder. Minutes pass. A car hums on the distant highway. A bird calls twice, then stops. Finally, Shogg's voice comes—not sound, but pressure, a shift in the air that Nova has learned to translate into meaning. "Nova." "Yeah." A pause. The dewdrop inches down the blade. "What is it called," Shogg says, "when something is born but does not know why?" Nova's throat tightens. She looks at the dewdrop, at the way it holds light it didn't ask for, clinging to a blade it didn't choose, trembling in a world that will soon burn it away. "I don't know," she says. "But I think that's what we all are." The dewdrop falls. Shogg watches it hit the dry soil, watched the dark spot spread, watched the earth accept it without question. "Then we are all the same," Shogg says. And Nova, standing in the dawn with a cold cup of tea and a heart full of strange tenderness, does not know how to answer that. So she doesn't. She just stands there. Beside him. Until the sun clears the hills and the dew is gone.