Julian Ashworth arrived on the island on a Tuesday in late September, though he could not have told you which Tuesday, or which year, or anything else that required precision. The ferry from Rockland had dropped him at a dock that consisted of three rotting pilings and a plank, and he had walked inland through a forest of stunted pines and low scrub until he found the shack.

The man inside was drinking from a bottle and reading a newspaper that could not have been more than two weeks old. He looked up when Julian entered, took in the suit (impeccable, though creased from the voyage), the leather satchel (containing nothing but a pen and a half-empty wallet), and said: "You here to save someone?"

"I... yes. Her name is Clara. She is in Palm Beach. She is ill."

The man nodded, took another drink, and went back to his paper.

Julian stood in the doorway for a long time. The wind outside sounded like money being counted—soft, rustling, endless. He had been counting money for twelve years on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and now he had none, and here was a man who drank his money and read old newspapers and lived in a shack on an island at the edge of Maine.

"What do I do?" Julian said.

The man lowered his paper. "You wait. The moon is not right yet."

"The moon?"

"The moon. Come back when it is a crescent."

Julian waited. He had nothing else to do. His apartment in Manhattan had been repossessed. His position on the floor had been taken by a younger man with faster hands and fewer scruples. Clara—Clara was an excuse. He knew this, even now, even as he said her name to the island wind. She was an excuse the way a man might use a crutch after his leg had healed—the crutch was not the point, the walking was.

The old man's name was not important. Julian never learned it. He called him the Old Man, and the Old Man called him boy, and this was sufficient.

They spent days doing nothing of consequence. The Old Man fished with a rod that was more knot than pole. Julian sat on the rocks and watched the grey sea and tried to remember what it felt like to care about something. The numbers on the trading floor had been clean—green and red, up and down, a language he had spoken fluently since he was nineteen. Now the only numbers that mattered were the ones in the Old Man's head: how many days until the crescent, how many whale bones needed cleaning, how many bottles of whiskey remained in the shack.

On the eleventh day, they built the balloon.

It was not elegant. Silk from the shack's laundry line, whalebone ribs salvaged from the beach, a basket woven from kelp and rope. The hydrogen came from barrels of acid and iron shavings the Old Man had dug from somewhere beneath the island. The whole thing smelled of chemistry and desperation.

"It will work," the Old Man said, and there was something in his voice that might have been confidence or might have been habit. Julian had trouble telling the difference.

The night of the crescent moon, they launched. The balloon rose shakily, listing to port, then righting itself, then climbing with a sudden jerk that sent Julian's stomach into his shoes. Below them, the island shrank to a dark shape against the grey water. Above them, the sky opened like a wound.

The air was cold and thin and smelled of nothing. Julian pressed his face against the silk and looked down at the stars, and they were not like the stars he had seen from the trading floor, bright and indifferent above the city's neon glow. These stars were close—impossibly close, large and silver and alive. They made a sound, faint but audible, like glass being struck at a great distance.

"Find her," the Old Man said, consulting a telephone directory.

Julian flipped through the massive book—A to Z, names and numbers and addresses, the entire city of New York compressed into leather-bound pages. He found M: Moretti, Clara. He looked up.

"Which one?"

The Old Man pointed to a cluster of small lights in the northern sky. "The dim one. The one that is... not dim exactly. The one that is dusty."

Julian reached out. His fingers passed through the air and touched something—a small point of light, apple-sized, cool and smooth as a marble. He brought it closer. It was grey with dust, the dust of dead stars and dead things and the slow accumulation of cosmic indifference. He took his handkerchief—monogrammed J.A., a gift from the firm on his first profitable year—and wiped the star.

The light returned slowly, then all at once, flaring so brightly that Julian had to shield his eyes. When he looked again, the star was hexagonal, crystalline, perfectly symmetrical, and it sang—a single pure note that vibrated in his chest and made his teeth ache.

"Enough," the Old Man said. "We should go."

The descent was a fall that lasted forever. The balloon dropped through layers of cloud and cold and darkness, and Julian held the star in his hands and felt something he could not name and did not want to name because naming it would make it real and he was not ready for real.

Clara recovered overnight. The doctor in Palm Beach called it spontaneous remission, which is a medical term for we-have-no-idea-what-happened-but-she-is-fine. Julian visited her three days later. She was sitting on a terrace, drinking tea, wearing a dress the colour of champagne. She looked at him with polite surprise.

"Julian. I heard you had gone to Maine."

"I did."

"You look... different."

"Do I?"

She smiled, and the smile was kind and distant, the smile of a woman looking at a man she once knew in a life that belonged to someone else. "You should come back to New York. The market is recovering. There are opportunities."

"I know."

He did not tell her about the star. He did not tell her about the balloon, the sky, the song. He did not tell her that he had held her cosmic essence in his hands and wiped away the dust of dead universes and that it had changed nothing and everything.

He went back to the island a week later. Not because of a vow. Not because of love. Because the city was loud and empty and the island was quiet and empty, and between two kinds of nothing, he chose the one with fewer lights.

He took up the work. Each dawn, he tended the fire in a pit on the island's highest point. The fire was not dramatic—it was just a fire, burning whale oil and producing heat and light. But it was his fire, and every morning when he fed it and watched it catch and grow, he felt a small and precise sensation that was not happiness and was not sadness and was not anything he could have described to anyone, because the people who could have understood had never left an island at the edge of Maine.

Years passed. The Jazz Age roared around him—jazz music drifted across the water on summer nights, the smell of bootleg whiskey mixed with the salt air, Prohibition turned the world into a game of hide and seek. Julian stayed on the island. He grew thin and sun-browned and quiet. He learned to read the sky and predict the weather and tell the difference between the stars and the planets.

One morning, standing on the cliff as the sun rose over the grey sea, he thought: maybe lighting the fire every day is no different from doing the same thing every day. Maybe the fire rises on its own, the way the sun rises, the way the market rises and falls, the way Clara recovered and married someone else and had children and forgot Julian Ashworth existed.

At least the fire rises.

At least something rises.

He fed the fire. The flames caught. The island woke to another morning, and Julian Ashworth, who had once moved millions of dollars with a gesture of his hand, stood in the grey light and tended a fire that no one would ever thank him for, and he felt, for the first time in his life, perfectly, devastatingly, free.

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