Hearts of Glass

Act One They woke her first, the way they always did, because she came up slower and Aaron liked to be awake when she surfaced so hers wasn’t the only face in the room that had missed him too. The waking room was warm. That was the first thing, every time — the warmth, engineered to arrive before consciousness did, so that the body understood it was safe before the mind was there to ask. Mara lay in it for a while with her eyes closed, listening to the small sounds of her own return: the tick of the resorbers detaching, the sigh of the lid, the almost-inaudible hum that she had decided, three wakings ago, to think of as the house breathing. She did not open her eyes until she felt him take her hand. “Hi,” Aaron said. “Hi.” Her voice came out cracked and enormous, the voice of someone who had not spoken in a hundred years and did not, in any way that mattered, know it. “How long.” “Same as we said. About a century.” “Feels like a nap.” “It always feels like a nap.” She opened her eyes.…