Mira lifts her hand and settles it into the sand figure's palm. The grains close around her fingers — not grasping, more like water finding its level. The cold deepens, but it is the cold of a cellar where things are kept whole. Through her sternum the melody shifts, and the shift carries a picture she has not thought of in years: her mother's kitchen, the ochre walls, cedar resin burning in a clay lamp, the smell of wet stone after rain through an open shutter. The sand figure's core brightens — amber, steady, like a coal finally catching. Then the words arrive, felt rather than heard: You carry what I have been keeping. Its free hand rises, slowly, and moves toward the open vessel still pressed beneath Mira's robe.