Ima

"It's time," said the boy from Mumbai. His voice was steady.

She stepped outside.

"Does it hurt?" the librarian asked. And there was something in her voice—a resonance, a depth—that told Elara she was not talking to a random stranger. She was talking to another one. Another Ima. Another fragment of the scaffold, still holding on. "It's time," said the boy from Mumbai

Ima, 1912. Before the silence. Elara didn't sleep that night. She sat at her kitchen table, the photograph under a magnifying lamp, and she remembered .

But she could feel it now: the truth the Ima had buried. It was rising in her like a tide, and she knew— knew —that she was not Elara the historian, not really. She was Ima. She had been Ima in 1912, and in 1347, and in the year negative three million, when the first Ima had learned to shape language into architecture. "Does it hurt

The Ima had not been a civilization. They had been a scaffold . Every conscious species that had ever evolved in the universe had passed through the Ima at some point—not as a stage of development, but as a species of caretaker. The Ima's job was to hold the universe's memory while each new species learned to walk. Once the species was stable, the Ima would withdraw, leaving behind only faint traces: myths of fairies, legends of ancestors, the persistent human feeling that someone had been here before us.

"You're crying," the librarian said.

And she smiled back.

On the back of the photograph, in handwriting that matched Elara's own (right down to the idiosyncratic way she formed the letter 'g'), was written: Another Ima

In the center of the group stood a woman. She had Elara's face.

But the design was fraying. The truth came to her in seven layers, like peeling an onion made of starlight.