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Yumi walks past the local steamwell just as it erupts: a forty-foot jet of superheated water bursting from the central hole, the spray pelting down onto six concentric rings of elevated bronze trays that funnel the runoff to the village's homes. Water in Torio is rare, concentrated, and collected; rain is scarce, and any prospective river boils off on the searing ground. The narrator pauses to describe the country around her: searing barrens beyond the village where the stone is too hot for plants, hovering wagons drawn by spirit-made flyers, two-tiered houses split between ground-warm and stilt-cool sections, and chained trees that drift on thermals above their planter beds.

With ritual bathing and prayers done, Yumi may now be looked at in public. Her attendants lower their fans. She walks with her practised gliding step toward the place of ritual — the kimomakkin — at the far side of the village, eyes lowered, pushing the murmuring awe of the crowd out of her mind because the reverence is meant for her calling and not for her. Outside the small fenced patch of extra-hot stone, Liyun takes her place with the villagers; three local musicians settle on stools and begin a chant accompanied by drums and a flute. Inside, Yumi kneels on a pair of kneepads in the centre of the fenced ground — among the rocks the villagers have spent months collecting and ranking for shape.

What Yumi does, the narrator concedes, is essentially stacking rocks; what makes it the ancient and powerful art of the yoki-hijo is the precision and improvisation with which she does it. She sets a single oblong stone on end, then a second, then two more leaning against each other on top in configurations that look one breath from collapse. Self-aware Invested beings — call them fay, seon, or spirit — respond to human creativity in some form: order from chaos, beauty from raw materials, something from nothing. The hijo respond to all three at once. Yumi today builds along the artist's sequence — one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, back down — but works it as improvisation, swaying with the drums, eyes half-closed, judging weights and tipping points by feel.

She does not want only to perform. She wants to be worthy of the spirits, worthy of a station she still — in the part of herself she will not look at directly — secretly resents. Over several hours the sculpture rises into a sweeping spiral of dozens of small towers, the whole composition seeming to evoke a turning of wind out of solid stone. She outlasts the musicians, who fall off after about two hours; villagers take naps and trickle back; Liyun herself has to slip out and return. From above or below, the spiral is what it should be: order from chaos, beauty from raw materials, something from nothing. The hijo agree.

They rise out of the warm stone — teardrop blobs of swirling red and blue the size of a person's head — and settle around her, transfixed. Yumi, fingers bloodied where the calluses have scraped through, arms gone from sore to numb to both at once, blinks at them and counts. Thirty-seven. Most yoki-hijo are lucky to summon six. Her own previous record was twenty. She calls for the first supplicant before she can collapse from her own success — a mistake she made and learned from in her early years.

Liyun admits the supplicants in strict order. The first man, twisting his cap, asks for light: his family has had no light at night for six years. Yumi, who was complaining about her own duties this morning, is suddenly ashamed. She apologises for the failure of years she had nothing to do with, turns to the first hijo, asks for light, and projects the image of a small glowing orb in the palm of her hand. The spirit divides, one half a friendly orange glow and the other a dull near-black blue. She hands them to him. The next petitioner asks for a repelling pair to lift her dairy above the ground for cooler butter-making; Yumi coaxes another hijo into two squat statues with grimacing features. The majority of requests are for flyers — hovering devices with insectile wings, paired with handheld paddles to steer them — used by farmers to tend to the crops once the plants float out of reach during the heat of the day.

Each request takes longer and costs more as the spirits drift from her performance. Each one also takes a little something out of her, a draining that recovers slowly. She gets through all thirty-seven without losing one — she has not frightened off a hijo in years, though the supplicants don't know that and wait through every request in worried hope. Eventually the last man bows and hurries off carrying his new spirit saw. Yumi is alone in the cooling evening air, the floating lilies drifting down to her level as the thermals fade. The sculpture will be left to weather; the bindings will hold for somewhere between five and ten years each, with the total session lasting longer because of how many spirits she bound at once. What she has done today is, by every measure, unprecedented.

Liyun comes to congratulate her and finds, instead of a triumphant master of spirits, a nineteen-year-old girl collapsed unconscious on the hot stone, her hair fanned around her and her ceremonial silks trembling in the breeze.