She offers to drive him home. Thirty-three units are in Eden’s Gate now, lining both sides of Arcady Lane, zigzagging up the hillside behind the double-wide. Mostly people from Boise, Portland, and eastern Oregon use them as vacation homes: they park boat trailers in the cul-de-sacs and drive twenty-thousand-dollar UTVs to town and hang college football flags from their balconies and on weekend nights they stand around backyard firepits laughing and urinating into the huckleberries while their kids shoot Roman candles into the stars.

“Wow,” says Janet, “you have a lot of weeds in your yard.”

“The neighbors complain about it.”

“I like it,” says Janet. “Natural.”

They sit on the front step and sip Shasta Twists and watch bumblebees drift between the thistles. Janet smells like fabric softener and cafeteria tacos and says fifty words for every one of Seymour’s, talking about Key Club, summer camp, how she wants to go to college somewhere far from her parents but not too far, you know—as though her future were a pre-plotted exponential curve arcing ever higher—and a white-haired retiree who lives in the town house next door rolls his fifty-gallon trash bin to the end of his driveway and looks at them and Janet raises a hand in greeting and the man goes inside.

“He hates us. Everyone hopes my mom will sell so they can put in new houses.”

“Seemed nice enough to me,” says Janet, and responds to a warble from her smartphone.

Seymour looks at his shoes. “Did you know that every day internet data storage emits as much carbon as all the airplanes in the world combined?”

“You’re weird,” she says, but smiles when she says it. In the last breath before dark a black bear materializes from the twilight and Janet clutches his arm and takes a video as it sashays between the pools of streetlight. It moves between the half-dozen wheeled trash carts standing at the ends of the Eden’s Gate driveways, sniffing sniffing. Eventually it finds a can it likes, raises one paw, and swats it to the ground. Carefully, with a single claw, the bear drags a plump white bag out of the can’s mouth and scatters its contents across the asphalt.

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 64

DAY 21–DAY 45 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

She touches her Vizer, steps on the Perambulator. Nothing.

“Sybil. Something’s wrong with the Library.”

Nothing is wrong, Konstance. I have restricted your access. It is time to return to your daily lessons. You need to bathe, eat a proper meal, and be ready in the atrium in thirty minutes. There is rinseless soap in the lavatory kit your father provided.