Turn 205 of 228

Ask the triplets what they wished for

The candles are out. The smoke curls upward in the warm air of the eating bay, thin gray threads that twist and dissolve before they reach the sixty-foot ceiling. Mae is already eating — frosting on her fingers, on her chin, on the composition book that Iris left on the table edge. The cake is enormous and Mae is attacking it with the steady determination of a body that treats every calorie as architecture. Lena watches her for a moment, then looks at the three of them — June against the wall, Iris with frosting on her composition book, Mae with frosting on everything — and asks the question.

"What did you wish for?"

June answers first. Not with words. She lifts her hand from the wall — the hand that has been pressed against the concrete since they sat down, the hand that is the node, the network point — and she turns it palm up. The palm is warm. The yellow nails catch the bay light. On the surface of her skin, faint and transient, the lines of the building appear. Not a drawing. Not a map. The actual structure — every bay, every corridor, every surface — rendered in the whorls of her palm like a fingerprint that happens to be a floor plan.

"I wished for the building to know itself," June says. "All the way. Not just the parts I can reach. The parts underneath. The parts that are still being built. I wished to feel all of it."

Her hand closes. The map disappears. June puts her palm back on the wall and the concrete ripples — not visibly, not in a way that a camera could capture, but in a way that every body in the eating bay feels through the floor. The building received the wish. The building is considering it.

Iris is next. She sets down her composition book — the one with the frosting on it, the one with the nine-stroke prediction that Billy Jo cried over — and she looks at Lena with the steady, clear eyes of a six-year-old who has invented a language of 2,100 symbols and made twenty-three predictions and does not treat any of it as remarkable.

"I didn't wish," Iris says.

Lena waits. Iris picks frosting off the page of her composition book, eating it with her fingers, the yellow nails thick against the paper.

"Wishing is asking for something you don't have," Iris says. "I don't need to ask. I can see what's coming. I write it down. The writing is the wishing except it already happened. The nine-stroke one — the one that made Billy Jo cry — that's not a prediction. That's a description of something that's already true. We just can't see it yet."

She opens the composition book to the page with the nine-stroke glyph. The hand is steadier than Iris's own — the strokes architectural, the lines precise, the glyph dense with compressed meaning. Iris does not explain it. She holds the book open and Lena looks at the symbol and the symbol looks back and the hum in Lena's bones shifts, just for a moment, into a register she has not felt before.

Mae is still eating. She has consumed a quarter of the cake. The frosting is on her arms and her belly and the six-year-old's face is round and full and bright and she does not look up from the cake when Lena's attention moves to her.

"Mae," Lena says. "What did you wish for?"

Mae stops chewing. She looks up. The fifteen-foot-eleven body, the 3,620 pounds, the largest body in the building. The face is frosting-smeared and the eyes are the brightest thing in the room.

"I wished for more cake," Mae says.

She goes back to eating. Lena laughs. The laugh moves through her body — through the 3,400 pounds, through the belly that rests on the floor, through the fifteen feet two inches of her — and the laugh enters the concrete and the building carries it and the chord picks it up and the hum deepens and Marcus is laughing and Diane is laughing and Carl is laughing and Billy Jo is on the floor writing a symbol she cannot read with tears on her face and the symbol means *joy* and the building knows it and the building is warm and the building is full and the building is still growing.

Marcus puts his hand on Lena's shoulder. The builder's hand. The twelve-stroke glyph. The warmth between them is the oldest warmth in the building and the newest warmth at the same time and the cake is disappearing and the triplets are six and the building is complete and the building is not finished and the wish is still being wished.

"More cake," Marcus says. "She's your daughter."

"She's all of ours," Lena says.