Next come transcripts of prisoner-of-war release interviews dated July and August 1953. A passport with one arrival stamp: London. A deed for a house in Idaho. A commendation for four decades of service to the Valley County Highway Department. The bulk of the stack consists of obituaries and articles detailing how, at the age of eighty-six, on the twentieth of February in the year 2020, Zeno Ninis died protecting five children who were trapped in a rural library by a terrorist.

COURAGEOUS KOREA VET SAVES KIDS AND LIBRARY, reads one headline. IDAHO HERO MOURNED, reads another.

She finds nothing connected to the fragments of an ancient comedy titled Cloud Cuckoo Land. No listed publications, no indications that Zeno Ninis translated, adapted, or published anything.

A prisoner of war, a county employee in Idaho, an elderly man who thwarted a planned bombing of a small-town library. Why was a book with this man’s name on it on Father’s nightstand in Nannup? She writes, Was there another Zeno Ninis? and drops the question through the slot. A moment later the reply flutters down: The Library contains no records of any other individuals by that name.

At NoLight she lies on the cot and watches Sybil flicker inside her tower. How many times, as a little girl, was she assured that Sybil contained everything she could ever imagine, everything she would ever need? The memoirs of kings; ten thousand symphonies; ten million television shows; whole baseball seasons; 3-D scans of the Lascaux caves; a complete record of the Great Collaboration that produced the Argos: propulsion, hydration, gravity, oxygenation—all right here, the collected cultural and scientific output of human civilization nested inside the strange filaments of Sybil at the heart of the ship. The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure. And when she first stood in the atrium on her Library Day, gazing down the seemingly infinite rows of shelves, hadn’t she believed it?

But it wasn’t true. Sybil couldn’t stop a contagion from spreading through the crew. She couldn’t save Zeke or Dr. Pori or Mrs. Lee or anybody else, it seems. Sybil still doesn’t know if it’s safe for Konstance outside of Vault One.

There are things that Sybil doesn’t know. Sybil doesn’t know what it meant to be held by your father inside the leafy green twilight of Farm 4, or how it felt to sift through your mother’s button bag and wonder about the provenance of each button. The Library has no records of a royal blue copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land translated by Zeno Ninis, yet Konstance has seen one inside the Atlas, faceup on Father’s nightstand.