Sharif is rigid at the base of the stairwell. The children remain silent upstairs. Zeno bends. The gun barrel is inches from his head. His hand has almost reached the phone when, inside the backpack in his arms, one of the Tracfones taped to one of the bombs rings.

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 65

DAY 341–DAY 370 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

“Sybil, where are we?”

We are en route to Beta Oph2.

“What speed are we traveling?”

7,734,958 kilometers per hour. You would remember our velocity from your Library Day.

“You’re sure, Sybil?”

It is fact.

She gazes a moment into the trillion resplendent tributaries of the machine.

Konstance, are you feeling well? Your heart rate is rather high.

“I feel fine, thank you. I’m going back to the Library for a bit.”

She studies the same schematics that her father studied during Quarantine Two. Engineering, storage, fluid recycling, waste treatment, oxygen plant. The farms, the Commissary, the kitchens. Five lavatories with showers, forty-two living compartments, Sybil at the center. No windows, no stairs, no way in, no way out, the whole structure a self-sustaining tomb. Sixty-six years ago the original eighty-five volunteers were told they were embarking on an interstellar journey that would outlast them by centuries. They traveled to Qaanaaq, trained for six months, boarded a boat, and were sedated and sealed inside the Argos while Sybil prepared the launch.

Except there was no launch. It was just an exercise. A pilot study, a trial run, an intergenerational feasibility experiment that may have ended long ago or may be ongoing still.

Konstance stands in the Library atrium touching the place on her worksuit where Mother stitched a pine seedling four years before. Mrs. Flowers’s little dog stares up at her and wags his tail. He is not real. The desk beneath her fingertips feels like wood, sounds like wood, smells like wood; the slips in the box look like paper, feel like paper, smell like paper.

None of it is real. She stands on a circular Perambulator in a circular room at the center of a circular white structure on a mostly circular island eight miles across Baffin Bay from a remote village called Qaanaaq. How does a contagion suddenly present itself on a ship streaking through interstellar space? Why couldn’t Sybil solve it? Because none of them, Sybil included, knew where they actually were.

She writes a series of questions on slips of paper and tucks them one by one into the slot. Above the atrium, clouds stream through a yellow sky. The little dog licks his upper lip. Down from the stacks fly books.

Inside Vault One she unscrews all four legs off the cot, and uses the frame to pound one end of one of the legs flat.

Why, Sybil asks, are you dismantling your bed?