Everyone helped gather the driftwood. A great pile was made on the beach, enough for their cooking fires for a month. Still, Jeremiah complained that it was too little. While they worked, Jeremiah sat on the beach next to their fire pit. He took the brittle bones of the fish they had eaten and thrown in the fire and crushed them to a fine dust between two rocks. He took the wood ash from the fire and mixed it with salt water from the sea. He let the large pieces settle then poured the slurry into a pit in the ground where he let it dry into a thin crust. This, too was crushed into a dust. The bone and wood ash was mixed with sand, then salt water added to make a milky liquid.

Trix found clay. The beech was deep sand, and the rocky ground above the cliffs too hard to dig. She found a patch of earth in the crease between the beach and the cliff, a damp hollow at the foot of the cliff where water had been able to pool, and plants grow, and mud collect. She dug down below the dark surface earth and found a slimy grey clay that she pulled up with her hand and took to Jeremiah. They soaked and washed it into a thick soup that they filtered through a piece of cloth to remove impurities. They boiled it on the fire until it was dry, then ground it down into powder, picking out any remaining bits of foreign matter. To this powder, Jeremiah added some sand and water, then kneaded the clay like a dough until it was smooth and plastic.

Now, Jeremiah and Trix sat on the beach, surrounded by their materials. Jeremiah demonstrated how to construct a sphere, taking a glob of clay and rolling it out into a long string, then coiling it around in a circle to make one layer, more layers added on top, each slightly wider. Once he reached half-way, the diameters of the layers began shrinking again, resulting in a sphere the size of a small melon. Trix copied him, struggling to create a pleasing shape, squashing her egg-like failures down and kneading them back into a smooth ball of clay to try again. He refused to help her:

"You must make your own sphere", he said, "It helps with the focus!"

Once they were happy with the initial shape, they used a smooth rock to flatten the surface of the sphere, blending the coils together. They left them to dry by the fire, then they smoothed further, burnishing the surface until it was perfectly smooth and shone dully in the firelight. When Trix was finished she placed her sphere next to Jeremiah's, pleased to see how close in shape they were. They poked a hole in the bottom of the sphere with a sharp stick so that it wouldn't explode during firing, then left it to dry beside the fire again until it rang when flicked with a fingernail.

"Now we glaze it: Wood ash from the fire, bone ash from fish, silica from sand, salt from water, blood from our bodies."

Trix dipped the sphere into the milky liquid, shifting her fingers to allow the whole surface to be covered, then placed it on a bed of dry sea weed. Jeremiah passed her a knife.

"Make a cut on your palm, and add your blood to the surface, that will tie the sphere to you."

Trix took the knife in her one remaining hand, a pointed sliver of steel they had found on Trix and Wilbur's boat. "You'll have to help me, I can't...I only have one hand."

"No, you have to do it yourself!"

Trix took the knife in her teeth and pulled her palm across the blade. It left a line of cold where it dragged against her flesh, then hot blood welled from the wound. She held the palm over the sphere, letting big heavy drops of blood fall onto the damp white glaze until the whole surface was spattered with red.

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Jeremiah dug a narrow pit in the sand, kneeling on his one leg and digging with their boat paddle. They filled the bottom of the pit with layers of wood then placed their spheres in the centre, wrapped in seaweed. On top, Jeremiah built a great mountain of wood, packing it densely together.

"The chemicals in our glaze will burn and react and leave their colours on the surface. The iron in your blood, the sodium in the salt water, the traces of manganese in the clay, the calcium in the fish bones...all of these will meld, react with each other, swim together in a shimmering layer of glass that is formed by the melted silica, then captured forever when the temperature drops and the glaze becomes solid. I always like to think of making an orb like setting off a firework and capturing the result in glass."

"That's beautiful." said Trix, "you can do that just with driftwood in a hole in the sand?"

"Ah, I have never tried before, I have a gas kiln at the school, but the theory is the same. I will try to grow some crystals on the surface, also -- a delicate process, but I feel like they add something. Improve the effectiveness of the orb. A rather non-traditional addition! But something I have been experimenting with recently. I do hope it goes well. Yes. Yes, I'm sure it will! It's all just heat, at the end of the day."

And with that, he lit the pit on fire.

The fire blazed for ten hours. The flames billowing straight up into the sky, tinged with green from the salty driftwood. A sharp metallic smell filled the air around the fire. Every few minutes Jeremiah would cry out for "more heat, more wood" and they would throw another few sticks on the heap, keeping the flames roaring. The centre of the fire was white hot, unbearably bright. Each time she had to approach the fire to add wood, Trix's face felt like it had been boiled, her eyes dry and sore from the blast of heat.

"How hot is it?" Emma had shouted out, ecstatically. Her eyes sparking in the flames.

"At the centre, a thousand degrees or more!"

After ten hours, Jeremiah started allowing the fire to die down slightly before stoking it back up. This is how the crystals would form, he said, they would need to allow the temperature to rise and fall, ten, fifteen, twenty times, to allow the crystal to grow within the glaze. Too high and it would melt back to nothingness, too low and it would not grow any larger. Finally the wood was finished. He called for "more heat, more heat!" but there was nothing they could do, and they collapsed around the fire, and watched it die down, from white to yellow to a deep red, and fell asleep along with it.

When they awoke, the fire was still smouldering. Trix longed to reach in and pull out her glowing red sphere, see how it had changed in the firing. It took another ten hours for the pile to cool enough that Jeremiah said they could safely remove the orbs without them cracking. Trix used a long stick to poke at the remaining coals. She brushed them away, bit by bit, digging away at the ash, until she revealed two black objects. Intact. Spherical. Trix picked hers up. She knew which one was hers, it was obvious, although she could point to no detail to differentiate it from the other black thing sitting next to it in the ash. It burned in her hand, but she didn't put it down. The surface was glassy and smooth apart for a scar of pits and bumps that curled across one side. She took it to the sea and rubbed water over the surface to clear the soot. She revealed a nebula: A swirling black background stained by flashes of orange and green and blue. Tiny red crystals made the stars, each neatly outlined with a line of rosy pink. She turned the orb around in her hand, feeling the different textures on her fingers. As it moved, the colours moved also, and the blacks became purple, and it no longer looked like a starry night, it became a frozen sea, bubbles of blood rising to the surface, caught beneath the ice.

Jeremiah was saying something but she didn't hear what, her whole being was focused on the orb. She needed to try it, right now.