It was the most natural question a boy like him could ask.

It undid her a little, standing there, how natural it was.

She knelt down in the dry grass so that she was level with him, the way she had knelt beside his seat on the worst night of three hundred lives, and she looked at her son, who had slept through the terror she had been built to meet and woken to a world she had helped keep safe for him, and who wanted, more than anything, to go up into the sky she had spent a year and a half unable to look at.

I would love that, she said, and meant it with her whole chest.