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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Girl Who Kept Owl Hours
At half past nine in the evening, when most eleven-year-olds in Marigold Creek were being told to brush their teeth, Tilly Wells was eating breakfast.
It was scrambled eggs on toast, which is a perfectly good thing to eat at any hour, and she ate it at the kitchen table of a house they had lived in for exactly four days. Boxes stood everywhere like square guests who would not leave. Through the window, the last purple stain of sunset was draining out of the sky above the ridge.
"Almanac?" said her father, sliding a mug of cocoa across the table.
Tilly patted the fat, rubber-banded notebook beside her plate. The cover said NIGHT ALMANAC in letters she had gone over three times with a silver pen.
Levi Wells was already dressed for work, though work was five hours away. He wore flour on his forearms the way other men wore watches. He had bought the failing bakery on Ash Street for a price that made her mother put her head in her hands, and he had to be at the ovens by three in the morning, which was one of the two reasons the family had moved to a town nobody had heard of.
The other reason was Tilly.
Her condition had a name that sounded like a spell: solar urticaria. It meant her skin decided sunlight was an enemy. Not sunburn — anyone can get sunburn. Twenty minutes of real daylight, even through a car window on a bright afternoon, and Tilly came out in raised red welts that itched like nettles, then a fever, then a headache that made the world go crooked. Twice it had gone further than that. The second time was the summer her family did not talk about, the one they called, quietly and only to each other, the Bad August.
After the Bad August, Tilly stopped negotiating with the sun altogether. No more careful ten-minute walks with a stopwatch. No more visors and gloves and long sleeves in July, sweating and counting. She simply moved house — not the house, but her whole self — into the night, where it was safe.
She slept from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. She did school through a laptop propped on a stack of books. And she wrote the Almanac.
The Almanac was where she kept the constellations she had invented, because the official ones were, in her opinion, boring and already claimed by people who died thousands of years ago. Everyone knew the Big Dipper. Nobody knew the Tuba, which was seven stars in the eastern sky shaped exactly like a brass instrument if you squinted with love. Nobody knew the Bakery Cat, or the Wobbly Chair, or her favourite, the Long Nose of a Dog She Has Not Met Yet, which was four faint stars in a droopy line low over the hills.
"Eat," said her father. "Then go outside. There's a whole night out there and nobody's using it."
That was the thing about her father. Other adults said be careful. He said go outside, because for him the dark was just the shift before the bread.
Upstairs, six-year-old Milo was asleep with his mouth open. He had started at the elementary school within a week of the move and came home every afternoon smelling of cut grass and rubber balls, which Tilly resented in a way she would not have admitted under torture.
Her mother, Alice, came in with grease on her knuckles from the tractor she was fixing for a farm out on the flats. She kissed the top of Tilly's head. "Flashlight's charged. Stay off the county road."
"I'll stay off the county road," said Tilly, already reaching for her boots.
She did not stay off the county road. She went straight up it, because the ridge road was the only interesting thing she had found so far, and because at the top of the ridge, black against the stars, sat a shape she had been staring at for four nights.
It was round. It had a slit down its front, half open, like an eye caught in the middle of a blink.
Tilly Wells had absolutely no intention of going home until she knew what it was.
