Konstance sits up. Into her mind swims a vision of another library, a less presuming place, hidden inside the walls of her own skull, a library of just a few dozen shelves, a library of secrets: the library of things Konstance knows but Sybil does not.

She feeds herself, scrubs the rinseless soap into her hair, does whatever sit-ups and lunges and precalculus Sybil prescribes. Then she goes to work. She rips apart the one Nourish powder sack that she has already emptied and tears the scraps into rectangles: paper. She takes a replacement nylon tube out of the food printer’s repair pack and chews it into a nib: pen.

Her early attempts at ink—synthetic gravy, synthetic grape juice, synthetic coffee bean paste—are pitiful: too runny, too feathery, too slow to dry.

Konstance, what are you doing?

“I’m playing, Sybil. Let me be.”

But after a few dozen experiments, she’s able to write her name without smearing it. In the Library she tells herself, read, reread, take a snapshot of it in your mind. Then she touches her Vizer, steps off the Perambulator, and writes it out.

Courageous Korea Vet Saves Kids and Library

With the makeshift pen, those seven words take her ten minutes to write. But after a few more days of practice, she’s quicker, memorizing whole sentences from texts in the Library, stepping off her Perambulator, and scrawling them onto a scrap. One reads,

Proteomic analysis of the Diogenes codex turned up traces of tree sap, lead, charcoal, and gum tragacanth, a thickening agent commonly used in ink in medieval Constantinople.

Another:

But if it is probable that the manuscript survived the Middle Ages, like so many other ancient Greek texts, in a monastic library of Constantinople, how it traveled out of the city and to Urbino must be left to the imagination.

A current of red light ripples through Sybil. Are you playing a game, Konstance?

“Just making notes, Sybil.”

Why not write your notes in the Library? Far more efficient and you could use whatever colors you would like.

Konstance drags the back of her hand across her face, smearing ink across one cheek. “This suits me fine, thank you.”

Weeks pass. Happy birthday, Konstance, Sybil says one morning. You are fourteen years old today. Would you like me to help you print a cake?

Konstance peers over the edge of her cot. On the floor around her flutter almost eighty scraps of sacking material. One reads, Who Was Zeno Ninis? Another: Σχερία.

“No, thank you. You could let me out. Why not let me out for my birthday?”

I cannot.

“How many days have I been in here, Sybil?”

You have been safe inside Vault One for two hundred and seventy-six days.

From the floor she picks up a scrap on which she has written,

Out here in the woop woop, like Grandmom calls it, we’ve had heaps of troubles.