What the Melt Kept

The iron ones melted. Aluminum-26 took the beads and left sulfur, and the iron’s rust-story.

Books had the sorting at two to four million years — bodies you can still hold, chondrule-rich, matrix thin.

These earlier ones held only eight to seventeen of the cold dust. Eighty-three to ninety-two of the millimeter fire.

No bead survives that first hour. The preference does — in two tracers that agree without the stone between them.