Lío is Spanish for a tangle — a mess, a mischief, a knot you did not mean to tie. Each one got out on a different day and through a different window, took a shape nobody had planned for it, and set itself up out here with its own sky, its own trouble and its own people, who have never once met the people next door.

They agree on nothing. Not the century, not the gravity, not whether the sun is meant to come up. The gold thread running between them is the only thing they share, and if you follow it far enough back it ends in the same bedroom.

Every world is sealed shut, and the shelves keep score on their own: the newest goes first, and the one you keep going back to climbs to the top. Nothing is counted anywhere but on this machine.