Maya pressed her nose against the cold glass of her bedroom window and counted seven stars before the biggest one blinked at her.

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Stars do not usually blink — Maya knew that from the dinosaur book that also had a chapter about planets. But this star blinked once, twice, then slowly floated down through the pine tree in the backyard and landed with a soft crunch in the grass.

It was not a star at all.

It was a Triceratops, and she was about the size of a golden retriever, and her three horns glowed like warm Christmas lights.

"Hello," said Maya, who had climbed out of her window onto the back-porch roof without even stopping to put on her socks, because brave people sometimes forget socks.

"Hello," said the Triceratops. Her name, she explained, was Cosmo, and she had been searching every backyard in the whole Milky Way for someone who knew both dinosaurs and stars. "Most people know one or the other," Cosmo said. "You are the first to know both."

Maya thought about this seriously. "I also know that T. rex had tiny arms but could smell things from a mile away," she offered.

Cosmo's horns brightened. "Then you are exactly who I need."

What Cosmo needed was this: somewhere in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a very important meteor had gotten lost. The meteor carried a message from the ancient sauropods — the long-necked dinosaurs who had left Earth millions of years ago and moved to a quiet moon called Verdania — and the message needed to arrive before sunrise or it would dissolve into stardust.

Maya climbed onto Cosmo's back, gripped the frill behind her neck, and held her breath as the yard fell away beneath them. The air turned cold, then colder, then perfectly still in a way that felt like being inside a snow globe before the shaking starts.

The asteroid belt looked like a slow river of rocks. Maya spotted the meteor almost immediately because it was the only one shaped exactly like a Brachiosaurus tooth.

"There!" she pointed.

Cosmo dove, swift and sure, and plucked the meteor up in her armored beak.

They delivered it together. The sauropods on Verdania had necks so long they stretched above the moon's purple clouds, and when they read the message their humming filled the whole sky like a lullaby in a language made of rumbling.

Maya was back in her bed before morning. Her feet were cold — she remembered the socks situation — but she pulled the blanket up and watched the seven stars until her eyes grew heavy.

The biggest one, she was almost sure, winked at her.

She winked back.