“I will, I’ll eat, I’ll rest. I promise.” She remembers Father working among his plants one day, adjusting a mister, then letting the water spray the back of his hand. “Hunger,” he said, and she had the sense that he was speaking not to her but to the plants, “after a little while you can forget about hunger. But thirst? The worse it gets, the more you think about it.”

She sits on the floor and examines a bleeding toe and remembers Mother’s stories about Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, the boy who wandered the Atlas until his feet cracked and then his sanity too. Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, who tried to hack through the skin of the Argos, imperiling everyone and everything. Who saved enough SleepDrops to take his own life.

She eats, cleans her face, brushes a mat out of her hair, does her grammar and physics, whatever Sybil asks. The Library atrium looks bright and serene. The marble floor gleams as though it has been polished overnight.

When she has finished her studies she sits at a table and Mrs. Flowers’s little dog curls at her feet. With trembling fingers Konstance writes: How was the Argos constructed?

From the flocks of books, registers, and charts that come wheeling around the table, she weeds out all the documents that were sponsored by the Ilium Corporation: glossy schematics on nuclear pulse propulsion technology; materials analyses; artificial gravity; compartment designs; spreadsheets exploring carrying capacity; plans for water treatment systems; diagrams of food printers; images of the ship’s modules being prepared for assembly in low Earth orbit; hundreds of booklets detailing how the crew would be handpicked, transported, quarantined, trained for six months, and sedated for launch.

Hour by hour, the multitude of documents dwindles. Konstance can find no independent reports evaluating the feasibility of constructing an interstellar ark in space and propelling it at sufficient speed to reach Beta Oph2 in 592 years. Each time a writer begins to question whether the technologies are ready, if the thermal systems will be adequate, how a human crew might be shielded from prolonged deep-space radiation, how gravity would be simulated, whether the costs can be managed or the laws of physics can support a mission like this, the documents go blank. Academic papers cut off mid-sentence. Chapter numbers jump from two to six or four to nine, nothing in between.

For the first time since her Library Day, Konstance summons the catalogue of known exoplanets off its shelf. Page after page, row after row of the known worlds beyond Earth, their little images rotating on the pages: pink, maroon, brown, blue. She runs her finger down the line to Beta Oph2 where it slowly rotates in place. Green. Black. Green. Black.

4.0113 x 1013 kilometers. 4.24 light-years.

Konstance gazes out into the echoing atrium, feeling as though millions of thread-thin cracks radiate invisibly through it. She takes a slip of paper. Writes: Where was the crew of the Argos gathered before launch?