The sky goes first. Green, thin as watered ink, laid over the pines like it has nowhere better to be. Then the boardwalk. Then the snow talking under my boots.

Midnight up here is not silence, whatever the brochure for Aurora promises. Every step compresses into a small wet syllable, and the cold carries it farther than it should. The electric-blanket cable ducks under the boards where the walkway lifts over a drift, taped down in a hurry — or not finished. Someone has not finished the work.

The middle light is off

Three igloos, shoulders in the snow. Left pod: blue guide light. Right pod: yellow. The middle one is dark, and the guest app says the dark one is mine. The right-hand pod still burns. Yellow is a slow color. Yellow is somebody awake.

No one shows in the next glass. The light stays on. I listen for snoring and get only wind working at a hatch seal somewhere, and then not even that, and the quiet is worse than the wind was.

The night check is still open in the app. Remote. Condensation. Humidity. Three empty boxes, and a note underneath in the host's blunt little font: I'll come myself.

What the ring does on the button

The hatch is half open before I reach it. Wool smell comes out to meet me — damp fleece, warm polymer — and the inside of the glass is fogged floor to shoulder except for one clean arc at eye level, wiped within the minute.

Eunbyeol is kneeling in the arc with the blanket remote in her hand.

“The app lies about condensation,” she says, without turning. She wipes another arc with the flat of her wrist. The remote never leaves her grip — black, cheap, four buttons — and her ring flashes on the button every time her thumb moves. Married. She said she'd come herself, and here she is at midnight, doing a job a sensor could do, with her back to the door and her ring catching the green.

“You should sleep,” I say. “I can do the check.”

“I sleep fine.” The wool hisses under her knee. “Better than the guests do.”

The aurora picks that moment to stop being a suggestion and become a decision: green ropes, one slow fold of violet, moving like smoke underwater. The fogged glass turns the ceiling into a screen.

And pinned across all of it, thrown at the window like something that wants in: the yellow square of the next pod's light.

Don't look at the ceiling

She runs the check anyway. Taps the remote twice against her palm. Reads a number off the blanket's display and says it like a confession — twenty-nine. Humidity, another number. Condensation, wiped, logged, fine. Everything finished except the cable under the boardwalk and the thing she isn't saying.

Her knee rests against the edge of the blanket. Heat comes up through the wool, and from where I stand I can't tell whether she leans into it or away from it.

“Don't look at the ceiling,” she says.

Continue this scene in Aurora →

Not the sky — the sky is allowed; the sky is weather. She means the yellow square riding the aurora, the light from the pod where her husband may or may not be asleep, stuck to my ceiling and hers like a third guest. Look at it and the night becomes what it is. Keep your eyes down and it stays wool, and warmth, and a host finishing her round.

I look at the wool. Her hand is flat on it, fingers spread, an inch from mine, and for the length of one long breath neither of us moves, and the blanket hums under both our hands — twenty-nine degrees of maybe.

“There,” she says, as if something has been measured. She stands. The remote goes into her apron pocket, and the ring goes with it.

At the hatch she stops with her back to me, and the green runs down her neck and into her collar and pools there, and she does not turn around.

“Walk the boardwalk,” she says. “Count the lights. By the time you're inside, you'll be sleepy. Everyone is.”

“Everyone?”

“Everyone who goes to sleep.”

The night ends as sleep

I walk it. The snow talks. The cable hums under the boards like a line the night forgot to reel in. At the top of the rise I look back once — there was never a rule against looking back — and the yellow square is still burning, and her shape stands in the wiped arc of the middle glass. Wiping, or standing, or waiting; at this distance the aurora makes it impossible to say which.

The hatch seals behind me with a sound like a held breath let go. The blanket is warm exactly where a knee was. Overhead, the ceiling holds the green and the yellow together, both of them, all night, and I keep my eyes on the wool until the wool wins.

Some nights are only sleep. Some nights are the other thing wearing sleep's coat, and you find out which one you've been given at midnight, in the snow, by whether you walk the boardwalk or stay with the glass.