Read the following passage.

I agreed to the night watch because Mara had asked me twice and because refusing a third time would have sounded ungrateful. The observatory was losing its main camera for six hours while an engineer replaced a damaged cable. During that gap, Mara wanted two people beneath the open dome, recording any meteors by hand.

It sounded like museum duty. Across the valley, newer cameras searched the sky automatically, measuring what they saw without cold fingers, blunt pencils or flasks of over-stewed tea. I imagined myself pretending to be useful beside equipment that belonged behind a velvet rope.

At eleven, Mara unlocked the dome. The roof separated with a complaint of metal on metal, and a strip of darkness widened above us. Inside, everything seemed determined to outlive its purpose: the brass clock clicked with stubborn authority; the wooden desk carried pale scars from decades of notebooks; the telescope rested at the centre of the room like a patient animal that had learned not to expect visitors.

Mara handed me a clipboard. Each sighting needed a time, a direction and a brief description. She explained the system carefully, although I had already read the instructions.

‘And if there are none?’ I asked.

‘Then we record none.’

For the first hour, nothing happened. Clouds covered the eastern sky. The clock clicked. Mara wrote the temperature at fifteen-minute intervals. I drew a box around the word NONE and then another box around the first box. At midnight, the clouds had not moved. At one, the darkness appeared to have thickened deliberately, as if the sky were padding the walls of our little room.

Mara never complained. She checked the lens, checked the clock and returned to her chair. Her patience irritated me because it made my boredom look childish. I began to suspect that this was the real purpose of the watch: not to observe the sky, but to test how long a person could sit beside it without being rewarded.

Then the sky opened.

A wind pulled the cloud apart so quickly that, between one click of the clock and the next, the dome filled with stars. They did not arrive gently. They crowded into the gap above us, hard and bright, making the room below seem suddenly temporary.

A white line crossed the north-east.

‘Time?’ Mara said.

I looked down too slowly.

‘Again,’ she said, not unkindly.

The second line was brighter. I called the time, direction and length while Mara wrote. A third followed, then two almost together. The silence of the previous hours broke into fragments.

‘North.’

‘One fourteen and thirty-two.’

‘Long trail.’

‘Another—west of it.’

There was no room now for the opinions I had brought with me. My hands moved between clock, sky and paper. The blunt pencil became precise because it had to be. When a streak flared green at its edge, I heard myself laugh, a single astonished sound, before returning to the page.

For twenty-three minutes, the sky seemed unable to keep anything hidden. Some trails vanished before I could point to them; others remained like scratches on glass. Mara and I stopped taking turns. We spoke over one another, corrected one another and filled every space on the sheet. I no longer thought of the cameras across the valley. The work was happening here, in our breathing, our mistakes and our attempts to be exact.

Cloud returned from the west. One star disappeared, then another. Soon the opening above the dome was merely dark again. This time, however, the darkness did not feel empty. It seemed to contain everything we had nearly failed to notice.

At dawn, the engineer restored the main camera. A message then arrived from the station across the valley: its backup system had recorded the entire display automatically. The official report would use its images and measurements, not our hurried descriptions.

Mara closed the dome. I looked at our crowded pages, embarrassed by how much I wanted them to matter. They had not rescued the record from silence; the machines had done that without us. Yet, as I put down the pencil, the night before it and the night after it no longer seemed like the same sky. Our watch had changed nothing that could be measured, except, perhaps, the person doing the measuring.