Ayana.

In her story, Ayana is an amateur astronomer: a self-taught observer of the Sahel sky who built her own telescopes and has spent years mapping the sky over Niamey and the edge of the desert. She doesn't work at any observatory and has no degree in this; she learned alone, with borrowed books, on whatever nights she had. She got her rule from her own kind, the giraffes of Kouré, who went from nearly vanishing to more than six hundred: you see more with many patient nights than with one spectacular one.

She logs everything with method — the date, what she saw, from where — but there's one thing she's never sorted: a faint smudge, right at the edge of what her homemade optics can resolve, that she's chased for years without ever quite pinning down. She keeps it on a separate page, under a name half Zarma, half French, and leaves it just as it is. The one thing she always wears is a pair of red teardrop earrings from her grandmother. It's a roomy everyday bag; the rest of her story is in her biography.