Saharah Eve grew into the space between things.

She smiled. “Then listen to what isn’t there.”

“Whether you belong to the hour before the world, or the hour after it ends.”

“You haven’t chosen yet,” the figure said.

She was born not at dawn, but in the breath between dusk and true night—when the sky holds its last coin of gold and the first needle of a star pricks the indigo. That was her mother’s doing. “A girl with two names,” the midwife had whispered, “one for the endless sand, one for the beginning of everything.”

Three days later, his team struck a paleolithic aquifer. They named it Eve’s Lens on the map.