The moth on the streetlamp had a human eyelid where its wings should have met.
Anwen noticed it while changing the light from amber to white. The new lamps were brighter, cheaper to maintain, and impossible for residents to switch off. The council called the program Safer Nights.
The moth opened its wings. A wet black pupil looked back at her.
She climbed down from the ladder and told Emmet, her partner on the lighting crew, that she was going home sick.
By evening there were photographs from three other streets. Most people called them fakes. Then a man walked into the emergency department with something moving beneath both eyelids.
His wife said he'd fallen asleep beside an open window.
Anwen saw him on the local news. The hospital had covered his face with a cloth. Underneath, the skin rose and fell in small, orderly waves.
"They like it when I close my eyes," he said.
That night, Emmet phoned. He'd found hundreds in the sealed head of a lamp. They had collected in the only unlit space beneath the wiring plate. When he opened it, they went for his face.
He was speaking from his van, keeping his eyes open in the mirror.
"Don't blink," he said, then apologized because he knew that was impossible.
Anwen drove to him. The city was dazzling. White light filled the alleys where there used to be shade. Every tree cast a hard-edged circle beneath itself. The moths clustered inside those circles, folding into cracks, under leaves, into the darkness between folded wings.
Emmet sat with the van's interior light on. There were scratches around his eyes where he'd tried to keep them open. He'd laid his wedding ring on the dashboard so it wouldn't catch his skin.
She took him to the hospital. Staff had moved affected patients into the brightest room. People sat under examination lamps while nurses talked to them to keep them awake.
It helped until they blinked.
Anwen watched a moth cross the room toward a patient's closing eye. It slipped beneath the lid with the ease of a hand entering a pocket. The man screamed. The lid fluttered from inside.
She went outside and stood under a tree. The moths weren't attacking her. They were trying to fit into the small pools of shade left between the lights.
When a cloud passed over the moon, nothing changed. The city had abolished the moon's part in the night.
She called the lighting supervisor and asked him to shut the new lamps off.
"We've had three assaults in that district this year."
"There are people in hospital."
"Then they need light. That's what the hospital's using."
She explained what she'd seen beneath the tree. He told her to put it in a report.
Anwen drove to the control depot. She still had her shift key. The night supervisor met her at the door, already warned she might come.
She showed him the photograph she'd taken inside the hospital. He stared at the folded shape visible through a man's eyelid.
"This could be anything."
Behind him, a moth settled beneath the brim of his cap.
Anwen pointed. He slapped at it. For a moment she saw the eye between its wings open and follow his hand.
He took her to the control desk.
They switched off one street.
On the camera feed, the white pavement vanished. Anwen watched the lighted intersection at its end. Moths streamed out of the traffic-signal housing and disappeared into the newly available dark.
They shut down the next street, then the next.
The lighting supervisor called, shouting. The night supervisor put the phone on the desk and continued working.
Anwen phoned the hospital. A nurse agreed to try darkening an empty room beside the patients. Within minutes, moths began leaving the bright ward. Those still loose in the air drifted through the doorway and settled against the unlit ceiling.
The ones beneath the patients' eyelids stayed.
At dawn, the moths vanished into the remaining shadows under bridges and in the backs of cupboards. The city began arguing about responsibility. Some residents said the darkness had made them feel unsafe. Others asked whether the lamps would be switched on again that evening.
Anwen went to see Emmet.
He could open his right eye. The left remained shut, held by something folded too tightly inside it. A scan showed the wing extending behind the eyeball. They were waiting for a surgeon who wouldn't promise he could save the eye.
"You got the others out?" he asked.
"The ones that hadn't gone in."
He nodded. She sat with him while the day brightened around the edges of the blind.
After a while, he asked her to turn off the bedside lamp. Then the one above the door.
"They aren't touching the outside anymore," he said.
The closed eyelid shifted. Anwen saw the outline of a wing turn slowly beneath it.
"What are they doing?"
"Making more dark. I can't see out of that eye now."
When the nurse came to open the blind, Anwen asked her to leave it closed a little longer. Under the closed eyelid, the wing had stopped moving. Something smaller moved in its place.
