Ayana.

There's a faint smudge, right at the edge of what her homemade lenses can resolve, that she's spent years trying to pin down and never quite manages. She keeps it on a separate page of the notebook, not properly classified, under a name half Zarma, half French: Tungu, nuit — tungu means giraffe in Zarma. It's the one thing in her whole orderly record that she's never put in order. She comes back to it some nights and leaves it just as it is. She's saving up for a better telescope, one that can reach where her homemade optics can't.

Ayana is a self-taught observer of the Sahel sky, and with everything else she runs a watchmaker's kind of order: she aligns the mount, logs every night with its date, tends her homemade lenses one by one. Which is why it's striking that this one smudge stays unsorted: it's the only crack in an otherwise flawless record. What she always wears, though, are the red teardrop earrings her grandmother gave her. It's a roomy everyday backpack; and who Ayana is, in full, is in her biography.