6:32

She lay there with everything to say. The sun was coming around the bend. The trucks trundled down the street outside en route to the construction site. They were building a park made with concrete and computers and networks. The enormous underground parking garage beneath it, the terraced concrete and glass domes, the intricate network of lights and sound built into artificial rocks, tree speakers, the nanotube biomesh underfoot. The others slept on. The trouble with past lives streamed through night heads, irrupting in blotted dreams and sharp sighs subsiding in seconds amidst the barely muffled metropolis working its way through walls and windows, eating sunlight from the edges inward, capturing packets of energy and emitting them moments later as stuffed animals, bank transfers, yams baked in their skins atop charcoal-packed oil drums, bringing the world to a head in the only place it still had to go at the end of the night, safely in its crib.