A hand closed over hers on the star.
Another came up beside it, steadying the gilded point. A man was standing on the floor just below the ledge, close behind her, arms raised, and his height did what her toes could not: he pressed, she pressed, and the peg slid home into the socket with a soft, satisfying *chock.*
For a moment neither of them let go. His hand was warm and dry over her knuckles. She turned her head and found she knew him — dark brown hair parted in the middle, a little too long for the museum world, dark grey overcoat, white shirt, a burgundy tie with a small repeating pattern of what might have been keys. Elliot Varga. The conservator from Chicago. The man who had written forty-one pages about her pyramid in the voice of a coroner.
He was looking at her the way people look at something they have studied for a long time and have just seen move.
"I thought you'd left," she said.
"I was getting my coat," he said. "Then I wasn't."
They let go at the same time.
Something beneath them clicked.
It was not the sound of wood settling. It was a deliberate sound, a latch, and it was followed by a ratcheting *tick-tick-tick* from deep in the pyramid's spine, and then, out of the flat crown of the top tier, around the base of the star, a small tower began to rise. It came up the way a held breath comes out: slowly, then all at once. It was red and gold, eight-sided, with a little arcaded gallery and a copper-green onion cap, no taller than a wine bottle, and it lifted the star a full foot higher on its spire and stopped with a sound like a clock striking nothing.
Roz gasped. Elliot said a word in a language that was not English. They both pulled back — she off the ledge, nearly into him — and above them, four stories up, something in the dome went *whump.*
Snow came down.
Not real snow: the store's snow, the fine white flakes of the old machine in the dome that Lucjan's crew ran every December night at a quarter past eleven, for the cleaning crew and the window-washers and nobody at all, because a woodcarver named Benedek Varga had once told Liesl Achterberg that a store should snow even when no one was watching. Tonight it came mixed with the silver confetti stars left over from the gala, and it fell in a soft, endless sift over the boxes and the little trees and the two of them, into her hair and onto his shoulders, catching on eyelashes and not melting.
Roz stood in it with her coat over her arm and her shoes on the floor and snow in her red hair, and summoned the voice she used on bankers.
"Please," she said, "tell me you didn't touch anything."
The corner of his mouth went up. "I was gonna ask you the same thing."
She laughed. She didn't mean to. It came up from somewhere beneath the speech and the shaking hands and the eleven minutes of names, a real laugh, too loud for the rotunda, and the dome gave it back to her.