Konstance sits on the edge of the cot, head in her hands. If she keeps her eyes closed, maybe she can transform Vault One to Compartment 17. Here, in the space just below her, is Mother’s bunk, her blanket neatly folded. Two paces away is Father’s. Here’s the sewing table, the stool, Mother’s button bag. All time, Father once told her, is relative: because of the speed the Argos travels, the ship clock kept by Sybil runs faster than clocks back on Earth. The chronometers that run inside every human cell that tell us it’s time to get drowsy, to make a baby, to grow old—all these clocks, Father said, can be altered by speed, software, or circumstance. Some dormant seeds, he said, like the ones in the drawers in Farm 4, can stop time for centuries, slowing their metabolisms to almost zero, sleeping away the seasons, until the right combination of moisture and temperature appears, and the right wavelength of sunlight penetrates the soil. Then, as though you spoke the magic words: they open.

Goobletook and dynacrack and jimjimsee.

“Fine,” says Konstance. “I’ll wash and eat. I’ll continue my classes. But then you’ll let me go into the Atlas.”

She dumps powder into the printer, chokes down a bowl of rainbow-colored paste, wipes her face, rakes at the snarls in her hair, sits at a table in the Library and does whatever lessons Sybil mandates. What’s the cosmological constant? Explain the etymology of the word trivial. Use addition formulas to simplify the following expression:

½[sin(A + B) + sin(A - B)]

Then she summons the Atlas from its shelf, grief and anger coiled like springs inside her chest, and travels the roads of Earth. Office towers whisk past in late-winter light; a trash collection vehicle veined with filth sits at a stoplight; a mile farther on, she rounds a hill past a shining fenced compound with guards out front beyond which the Atlas cameras do not approach. She breaks into a run, as though chasing the notes of a faraway song just ahead, something she’ll never catch.

One night, after nearly six weeks alone inside Vault One, Konstance dreams herself back into the Commissary. The tables and benches are gone, and rust-red sand swirls across the floor in thigh-deep drifts. She staggers out into the corridor, passing the closed doors of a half-dozen compartments, until she reaches the entrance to Farm 4.

Inside, the walls have given way to a sunbaked horizon of brown hills. Sand blows everywhere. The ceiling is a swirling red haze, and thousands of grow-racks, stretching for miles, stand half-buried in dunes. She finds Father kneeling at the base of one, his back to her, sand falling through his fingers. Just as she is about to touch his shoulder, he turns. His face is veined with salt; dust fills his eyelashes.