December 1987, a few days before Christmas. A heavy snow has fallen on the town of Millbrook, and the power is out across most of the county. Luna's neighbor, old Mrs. Harlow, asks her to check on a light she sees flickering at the top of Windfall Ridge — a place where nothing has stood for thirty years. The ridge is a long, treeless spine of land where the wind never stops, and where a farmhouse burned down in 1957, killing a family of six. No one goes up there. But this year, something is marking the spot. Luna hikes up through the drifts, following a pale, wavering glow that seems to pulse like a heartbeat. What she finds is not a house, not a fire, not a person. It is a star — a single, perfect, eight-pointed star woven out of dead twigs and frozen wire, hanging from a rusted hook that was never there before. The light comes from inside it, from something that burns without heat, without sound, without end. And as she stands there, the star begins to turn.