As soon as school lets out for the day, the library floods with kids with nowhere else to be. Zeno sits at his table behind his haystack of legal pads and sticky notes struggling through his translation. On the floor beside him, a redheaded girl in shorts and Wellington boots pops her chewing gum as she pages through gardening books. A few feet beyond that, a thick-chested kid with a lion’s mane of blond hair is pressing the bar of the water fountain with his knee and using both hands to scoop water over his head.

Zeno shuts his eyes: a headache simmering. When he opens them, Marian is there.

“One,” she says, “these fires have turned my workplace into a juvenile jamboree. Two, the window air conditioner upstairs sounds like someone force-fed it a metal sandwich. Three, Sharif went to Bergesen Hardware to buy a new one, so I’ve got to deal with about twenty sugar-frenzied fiends upstairs.” As though on cue, a little boy rides a tattered bean bag down the stairs behind her and lands on his knees and looks up at her and grins.

“Four, as far as I can tell, you’ve spent the whole week trying to decide whether to call your drunken shepherd ‘illiterate,’ ‘humble,’ or ‘clueless.’ Some fifth graders are here for the next couple of hours, Zeno. Five of them. Would you help me?”

“ ‘Humble’ and ‘clueless’ are actually quite different—”

“Show them what you’re up to. Or do a magic trick, something. Please.”

Before he can concoct an excuse, Marian drags the sopping child from the drinking fountain to his table.

“Alex Hess, meet Mr. Zeno Ninis. Mr. Ninis is going to show you something cool.”

The boy lifts one of the big facsimile printouts from the table and a dozen of Zeno’s legal pages tumble to the carpet like injured birds.

“What is this? Alien writing?”

“Looks Russian,” says the redhead in the boots, standing at the table now too.

“It’s Greek,” says Marian, as she nudges another boy and two more girls toward Zeno’s table. “A very old story. It has wizards inside whales and guard-owls that ask riddles and a city in the clouds where every wish comes true and even”—Marian lowers her voice and glances dramatically over one shoulder—“fishermen who have tree-penises.”

Two of the girls giggle. Alex Hess smirks. Drops of water fall from his hair and strike the page.

Twenty minutes later five kids sit in a ring around Zeno’s table, each studying a facsimile of a different folio. A girl with a bob that looks as if it was cut by a weed-whacker raises her hand, then immediately starts talking. “So okay from what you’re saying, this Ethan guy has all these insane adventures—”

“Aethon.”

“Should be Ethan,” says Alex Hess. “Easier.”