Don’t answer. Konstance spends hours discreetly sharpening the edge of the cot leg. She inserts the sharpened leg into a slot on a second leg that will serve as a handle, secures it with a screw, makes cord from the lining of her blanket, and lashes the sharpened cot leg fast: a homemade axe. Then she takes several scoops of Nourish powder, runs them through the food printer, and the machine fills the bowl past the rim.

I am glad, says Sybil, that you are preparing a meal, Konstance. And such a large one too.

“I’ll have another after this one, Sybil. Is there a recipe you might recommend?”

How about pineapple fried rice? Doesn’t that sound nice?

Konstance swallows, fills her mouth again. “It does, yes. It sounds wonderful.”

Once she is full, she crawls around the floor gathering her transcriptions of Zeno Ninis’s translations. Aethon Has a Vision. The Bandits’ Hideout. The Garden of the Goddess. She gathers all the scraps into a stack, Folio A to Folio Ω, sets her drawing of a cloud city on top, and, using one of the aluminum screws from the cot legs, bores a row of holes through the left edge. Then she unravels more blanket lining, braids the fibers together to make twine, lines up the holes, and sews the scraps of food sacks together along one edge to bind them.

An hour left before NoLight, she cleans her food bowl and fills it with water. By running her fingers along her scalp, she collects a little nest of hair and wedges it into the bottom of her empty drinking cup.

Then she sits on the floor and waits and watches Sybil gleam inside her tower. She can almost feel Father bundling her in her blanket, sitting with her against the wall of Farm 4, the space around them crammed with racks of lettuce and watercress and parsley, the seeds sleeping in their drawers.

Will you tell some more of the story, Father?

When NoLight comes, she takes the bioplastic suit her father sewed for her twelve months before and pulls it on. Leaving her arms free, she zips it to her chest, the fit more snug now that she has grown, and tucks her handmade book deep inside her worksuit. Then she balances one end of the legless cot, its mattress still inflated, on the food printer and the other on the toilet to form a kind of canopy.

Konstance, says Sybil, what are you doing to your bed?

She crawls beneath the elevated cot. From the back of the printer she unplugs the low-voltage power connection, strips away the thermoplastic sheath, and attaches the wires inside the cable to the two remaining cot legs. Positive to one, negative to the other. These she sticks into the water in her food bowl.