“For over a thousand years these walls warded off every attack,” Mrs. Flowers says. “Books were confiscated at the ports and not returned until they had been copied, all by hand of course, and some believe that at various points the libraries inside the city contained more books than all the other libraries in the world combined. And all this time earthquakes and floods and armies came, and the people of the city worked together to fortify the walls even as weeds scrambled up their sides, and rain trickled down into fissures, until they could not remember a time when the walls didn’t exist.”

Konstance reaches to touch the beetle, but the railing frays into pixels and again her fingers pass through.

“You and I will never reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you.”

The walls do not move; the people below do not breathe; the trees do not sway; the automobiles are still; the beetle is frozen in time. A thought, or a reconsidered memory, strikes her: of the ten-year-olds before her, like Mother, who were born on board, who woke up on their Library Days dreaming of the hour they’d set foot on Beta Oph2 and take a breath outside the Argos, the shelters they’d build, the mountains they’d climb, the life-forms they might discover—a second Earth!—and then they come out of their compartments after their Library Day looking different, valleys in their foreheads, shoulders drooped, lamps dimmed in their eyes. They stopped running down corridors, took SleepDrops at NoLight; sometimes she’d catch older children staring at their hands or the walls, or moving past the Commissary slumped and weary like they carried invisible backpacks made of stone.

You, me, your mother, your father, everyone and everything.

She says, “But I don’t want to die.”

Mrs. Flowers smiles. “I know, dear. You won’t, not for a long time. You have an extraordinary journey to help complete. Come, it’s time to go; time moves strangely in here and Third Meal is beginning.” She takes Konstance’s hand and they rise together up from the tower, the city falling away, a strait becoming visible, then seas, continents, the Earth dwindling until it’s just a pinprick again, and they step back through the Atlas into the Library.

In the atrium the little dog wags its tail and paws at Konstance’s leg and Mrs. Flowers looks at her kindly as the huge frayed Atlas closes, rises, and floats back to its shelf. The sky above the vault is lavender now. Fewer books fly through the air. Most of the crew members are gone.