She was going nowhere but, for the moment, enjoying the ride.

“I’m sorry to keep asking this question, but I hope you understand,” Valya said. “How are you feeling?”

Even in the dim light, Valya could detect a grown-up change of expression on Camilla’s face. It was almost…reflective. “Somewhere between troubled and giddy.” Then she looked directly at her. “I hope you understand.”

Valya then told Camilla, “You are very well spoken,” and the girl smiled and said, “As are you.” Not You, too.

She even followed up with a question of her own. “You can talk to everyone and you look like you belong. How do you do that?”

So, even in their brief time together, the girl had spotted Valya’s little working trick, the one that gave her so much success as a translator: Whenever she spoke another language, she acted it as well.

“When I was in secondary school, thirteen or fourteen years old, I noticed how, in moving from one language to another, speakers used different gestures, posture, and facial expressions. There was, in my school, a theater instructor named Grigory. He was very young and very handsome.”

“Did you fall in love with him?” That was another question beyond Camilla’s age.

“No,” she said. “He was not likely to fall in love with me.” Not because of age, but sexual preference…Valya did not want to discuss that with Camilla. Things were strange enough!

“But Grigory was so pleased that any student had even noticed, much less bothered to ask about it, that he gave me a master class in the value of these cues to the actor’s art. He told me, ‘Valyochka, voice isn’t just words and volume, voice is where sounds originate in your mouth.’

“Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he said, ‘Valyochka, you’ve watched many American and British films.’ You don’t know this, but almost every student in Russia studies English from the first year in school.”

Camilla had only nodded, again, the gesture of a much older person.

“Part of that education was watching all these movies, and Grigory had done this, too. ‘Valyochka,’ he said, ‘watch one of each again, and this time notice: British English originates in the front of the mouth, American English toward the back. If you speak American English, and wish to sound convincing, not only must you emulate the pitch and eliminate your accent and know the words by heart…you must locate the words in the right place in your mouth.’ Then he smiled—I still remember this—and said, ‘There’s a reason they call a language a ‘tongue.’”

Caught up in her own storytelling—her biggest weakness, aside from unsuitable men, was enjoying the sound of her own voice in any of her languages—Valya didn’t realize that Camilla had stopped two meters back.

“Are we where you wanted to go?” she asked the girl.

Camilla said “Yes,” but her body language and gestures lagged, a sign to Valya that the girl was unsure.

“And what are we to find here?” They were close to the wall of the habitat…which to Valya looked like the rocky face of a canyon rising to the sky. It was shadowed, of course, and relatively smooth…but even in the dim light she could make out different-colored striations.

There were bushes and trees growing here, too, making it difficult to see whether the place where wall met floor looked artificial, or had been cleverly engineered to look “natural.”

Camilla was ignoring the wall and the trees, however. She was walking slowly parallel to the wall, eyes on the ground, like a child at the beach in search of shells. “Are you looking for something?” Valya said.

More uncertainty now. “I…think so.” She stopped. “Here.”

They were standing in an open patch of dirt indistinguishable from that around it, except for the fact that it seemed flat, with a suggesting of circularity. As if there were some kind of plate two meters across embedded in the ground.

“I see,” Valya said, lying only slightly. “And what happens now?”

Camilla smiled. “Now I want to see inside your purse.” She reached toward it.

Valya hesitated. For some reason, she didn’t want to hand over her purse—which was odd, because back on Earth, she would have been happy to show a girl what she carried.

But, as every breath and sight reminded her…she was not on Earth. “Why?” she said. “It’s just ordinary stuff.”

“I’m not entirely sure.” But Camilla still held out her hand. “But I just know I need something other than the clothes we’re wearing…”

She handed over the purse and watched as Camilla opened it and—with a fair amount of reverence, she had to admit—began taking out the items within. Phone. Package of Kleenex. Badges. A pack of chewing gum.

“Ah!” Camilla said, clutching a Chanel lipstick. She handed the other items and the bag back to Valya, then stepped into the center of the “plate” and placed the lipstick there.

“What’s going to happen?” Valya said.

“Something,” Camilla said.

Valya suddenly felt a vibration through her feet and sandals, an electric tingle that lasted less than a second. She smelled something unusual, even by Keanu standards: like plastic burning.

The dirt in the plate rippled once.

The light in the entire habitat flickered several times, bathing the scene in a strange strobelike effect.

Most human beings, in times of great stress or confusion, revert to their milk language.

Not Valya Makarova. When she saw that there were now two lipsticks instead of one, she found herself echoing her former lover, Dale Scott: “Oh, holy shit.”

Camilla seemed equally surprised. Hesitantly, she reached out for the “new” lipstick. “It’s warm,” she said. She handed it to Valya.

“Shouldn’t you keep the new one?”

“My mother told me I couldn’t wear lipstick until I was twelve.”

Valya wanted to laugh. This girl had died and been reborn on another planet! She had just taken part in some type of alien techno-magic! Yet she still remembered some argument with her mother! For an instant, Valya wished she could become mother to a daughter—just to know that one of her parental strictures would sustain itself across time and space, and through death!

“I’m sure that if your mother were here, she would allow you to have it. Besides”—Valya knew there was a risk to this, but felt it was time to confront the subject—“you’ve been dead for two years, right?”

“I’m not sure. Uncle Lucas said so.”

“When did you die?”

Now the girl looked troubled and sad, and Valya felt she had made a mistake. “It was late in February. I had been in the hospital since before Christmas.”

“The year was…”

“End of 2017. Beginning of 2018.”

“And you were…”

“Nine.”

“That was almost two years ago, Camilla. By my calculations, you are going on eleven. And you may wear lipstick. But let me test it first.” Valya kept her tone light, but she was not sure that this Chanel knockoff would be lipstick.

She opened it and screwed it into position…noting that it seemed to have been used to the same degree as her original. It looked and smelled the same—odd to have a whiff of that waxy fragrance here.

She applied it, rolled her lips. “Perfect,” she announced, and presented the lipstick to Camilla, who almost squealed with delight.

Valya knelt to examine the strange circle of dirt, which still showed frozen ripples, like Arctic snow. The original lipstick rested in a bowl-like depression perhaps three centimeters across. Wondering if what she had witnessed was less duplication than transference, she plucked it out, opened it, tested it.

No, it was still the same.

She considered the magic plate and the contents of her purse. “I wonder if it would duplicate my phone,” she said.

She stopped.

Camilla was simply staring at her. The lipstick was in her hand, but the girl had made no move to apply it. “What do you think?” she said.