Morning came to Neshiyah with the fog standing where it always stood, a gray wall at the town's edge, patient as a held breath. In the hall, the births had gone smoothly overnight—three of them: Yael, Eliana the younger, and Rimon—and the midwives had laid them in a row of cribs, each one red-faced and squalling, their mothers too tired to do more than watch. But when the babies finally slept, each one dreamed the same sentence in a voice like their own: "the fog is just fog." The mothers told no one at first, only looked at each other across the room, and then looked away.

By mid-morning, the town had moved on. At the mill, Kinneret and Nitzan the younger came to blows over a sack of grain that had been left in the wrong place—neither could say why it mattered so much, but there they were, shouting and shoving until Obed the younger pulled them apart. Micah stood by, chewing a piece of straw, and said nothing when Nitzan muttered, "It's this place, it's getting under my skin." Obed let go of Nitzan's arm and looked out the open door toward the fog. "Maybe," he said, "but we've got work to do."

Near the square, Guard Levi fined Zev for measuring the fog. Zev had brought out a long length of rope and a wooden stake, and he was kneeling at the edge of the north road, trying to get a sight line, when Levi came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. "You know the Council's rule," Levi said, not unkindly. Zev stood up and brushed the dirt off his knees. "I was just curious," he said. Levi wrote him out a fine anyway—three silver pieces—and Zev took it without argument. He folded the paper twice and put it in his pocket, then walked back toward the square, his shadow long behind him.

At the eastern edge of town, Malachi the welder was fixing a gate hinge when a bird flew out of the fog—a gray shape, quick and low—and dropped something at his feet. He bent and picked it up: a seed, dark and glossy, shaped like a teardrop. He turned it over in his fingers. It didn't match anything in the town's reference list, and he stood there a long time, the seed in his palm, watching the fog where the bird had vanished. He said nothing about it to anyone until noon, when he showed it to Fernando at the instrument maker's shop.

Fernando took the seed with tweezers and set it on a cloth. He examined it under his magnifying glass, turning it this way and that. "No plant in the list," he said. "That's odd." He made a careful drawing of it in his notebook, labeled it "Seed, source unknown," and put it in a glass jar with a cork stopper. "We'll keep it," he said. "For the archive." Malachi nodded and went back to his work, but he kept glancing at the jar on the shelf across the room.

In the hall, the day took a harder turn. Three elders had died in their sleep overnight: Reuben the orchard keeper at 94, Talia the librarian at 99, Carmel the farmer at 92. The nurse had found them one by one, each with their hands folded on the blanket, each with a calm face. The town mourned quietly; the bell in the square would ring once at dusk, which was the custom for a peaceful death, but three times felt heavier. Garrin Zohar, the Clerk of the Record, stood at the door to the hall with his ledger open, writing down the names and the times. He did not say anything about the fog or the babies or the dreams. He just wrote, his pen scratching across the page, and when he was done he closed the ledger and held it against his chest, as if to keep it safe.

Two more people at the hall came down with the valley fever—Eliana the teacher and Peleg the younger the surveyor. They both lost three days to it, lying in the sick room with wet cloths on their foreheads, talking to people who weren't there. Eliana spoke of a bridge she'd crossed as a child, though she'd never left Neshiyah. Peleg muttered measurements in his sleep—"forty feet, sixty feet, a hundred and ten"—and then went quiet. No one knew what to make of it.

By afternoon, the guards at the edge of town had turned back three people: Dinah at the north road, Yael the younger at the same road, and Rimon the younger at the west road. Each one had walked to the fog line, stood there for a moment, and then started to put a hand out or take a step forward. Each one got the same reminder from the guard—"the Council prefers people to stay at their work"—and each one turned and came back without a word, but their faces were not quite the same as before.

At the river, two people sat by the Lethe doing nothing. Adah came first, and then Yarden the younger joined her. They sat on the bank, not speaking, watching the water move past. After a long while, Adah stood up and brushed off her skirt. "This place was made on purpose," she said, more to herself than to Yarden. "By someone who is not against us." Yarden nodded without looking up. When she came back to town, she repeated the same words to Noa Hadar, who was sitting on a bench by the square, listening to the birds. Noa wrote it down in a small notebook she kept in her pocket, and then she looked up at the fog and said, "But if it's made, who made it?" No one answered.

The oldest of the new babies, Yael, woke from her dream and started to cry. Her mother, still weak from the birth, picked her up and held her, and the baby quieted almost at once. She looked at her mother's face, and for a moment there was something old in her eyes, something that did not belong to a newborn. Then it was gone, and she was just a baby again, blinking at the ceiling. Her mother whispered, "It's all right. It's just fog." The baby did not answer.

Dusk came, and the bell rang once, and then twice, and then a third time. The sound carried over the roofs and out toward the fog, and for a moment the fog seemed to thicken, as if it were listening. Then it settled back into its usual gray stillness. The town went on with its evening chores—lights in windows, the smell of bread from the bakery, a child laughing somewhere—and the fog stood at the edge, patient as ever, holding its secrets in. Nobody said much more that night. They hadn't wanted to say much all day.