Tonight she sits on the edge of the cot, ink-stained and weary, as the light turns leaden. These are the hardest hours, as DayLight bleeds into NoLight. Each time she’s struck anew by the silence beyond the vault, where she fears no living person has stirred for more than ten months, and the silence beyond that, beyond the walls of the Argos, that stretches for distances beyond human ability to comprehend them. She curls onto her side and pulls her blanket to her chin.

Going to sleep already, Konstance? But you have not eaten since this morning.

“I’ll eat if you open the door.”

As you know, I have not yet been able to determine if the contagion persists outside this vault. Since we have established that you are safe in here, I must keep the door closed.

“It seems dangerous enough in here. I’ll eat if you open the door. If you don’t, I’ll starve myself.”

It hurts me to hear you talk like this.

“You can’t be hurt, Sybil. You’re just a bunch of fibers inside a tube.”

Your body requires nourishment, Konstance. Picture one of your favorite—

Konstance plugs her ears. Everything we have on board, the grown-ups said, is everything we will ever need. Anything we cannot solve for ourselves, Sybil will solve for us. But this was just a story they told to comfort themselves. Sybil knows everything, and yet she knows nothing. Konstance picks up the drawing she made of the city on the clouds and runs a fingertip over the dried ink. Why did she think re-creating this old book would unlock anything for her? For what reader is she making it? After she dies, won’t it sit unread in this vault for eons?

I’m falling apart, she thinks, I’m ungluing. I’m a fool on a treadmill, stumbling through the specter of a planet ten trillion kilometers behind me, searching for answers that don’t exist.

From beneath the millstone of her mind, Father stands, plucks a dried leaf out of his beard, and smiles. But what’s so beautiful about a fool, he says, is that a fool never knows when to give up. It was Grandmom who used to say that.

She scrambles back onto her Perambulator, touches her Vizer, hurries to a Library table. On February 20, 2020, she writes on a slip, who were the five children in the Lakeport Public Library saved by Zeno Ninis?

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

AUGUST 2019

Zeno

In late August, twin forest fires in Oregon burn a million acres each, and smoke gushes into Lakeport. The sky turns the color of putty, and anyone who steps outdoors returns smelling like a campfire. Restaurant patios close; weddings move inside; youth sports are canceled; the air is deemed too dangerous for children to play outside.