“Quietly,” whispers Zeno. “Please.”

“It’s the niece,” whispers Rachel. “We’re forgetting about the niece. If what really matters, like Mr. Ninis said, is that the story gets passed on—that it was sent in pieces to a dying girl far away—why would Aethon choose to stay up in the stars and live forever?”

Olivia-the-goddess crouches beside Rachel in her sequined dress. “Aethon doesn’t read to the end of the book?”

“That’s how he writes his story on the tablets,” says Rachel. “How they get buried in the tomb with him. Because he doesn’t stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He chooses… What’s the word, Mr. Ninis?”

The beating of hearts, the blinking of eyes. Zeno sees himself walk out onto the frozen lake. He sees Rex in the rainy light of the tea room, one hand trembling over his saucer. The children gaze down at their scripts.

“You mean,” says Alex, “Aethon goes home.”

Seymour

He sits with his back against the dictionaries and the Beretta in his lap. A white glare bends through the front windows and sends eerie shadows across the ceiling: the police have installed floodlights.

His phone refuses to ring. He watches the wounded man breathe at the bottom of the stairs. He didn’t find the backpack; he hasn’t moved. It’s the dinner hour, and Bunny will be carrying plates between tables at the Pig N’ Pancake, her eleventh hour of work. She will have had to beg a ride there from the Sachse Inn because he didn’t pick her up. By now she’ll have heard that something is happening at the public library. A dozen police vehicles will have streaked past; they’ll be talking about it at all of her tables, and in the kitchen too. Somebody holed up in the library, somebody with a bomb.

Tomorrow, he tells himself, he’ll be at Bishop’s camp, far to the north, where the warriors live with purpose and meaning, where he and Mathilda will walk through the layers of sun and shadow in the forest. But does he believe that anymore?

Footfalls on the staircase. Seymour raises a cup of his ear defenders. He recognizes Slow-Motion Zeno as he comes down the last steps: a slight old man who always wears a necktie and occupies the same table near the large-print romances, lost behind a molehill of papers, touching them lightly one by one, like a priest seated before a pile of artifacts that hold meaning only for him.

Zeno

Sharif’s shirt is not sitting right on his body, and it looks as though someone has thrown a bucket of ink on him, but Zeno has seen worse. Sharif shakes his head no; Zeno merely bends, touches him on the forehead, and steps over his friend and into the aisle between Nonfiction and Fiction.