“Pull the handle on the box. You’ll know what to do from there.”

The adults stand. Seymour helps them fit the headsets over their heads and the five Perambulators hum to life.

Once they’re settled atop their treadmills, he walks to the window and looks out at the lake. There are at least twenty places like that north of here your owl could fly to, she said. Bigger forests, better forests. She was trying to save him.

The Perambulators whir and spin; the grown-up children walk. Natalie says, “Oh my God.”

Alex says, “It’s exactly how I remember.”

Seymour recalls the silence of the trees behind the double-wide as they filled with snow. Trustyfriend on his limb, ten feet up in the big dead tree: he would twitch at the crunch of tires across gravel a quarter mile away. He could hear the heart of a vole beating beneath six feet of snowpack.

Pneumatic motors raise the fronts of the Perambulators. They are climbing the granite steps to the porch. “Look,” says Christopher. “It’s the sign I made.”

In the chair next to Rachel’s vacant one, Rachel’s grandson reaches over, picks up the blue book, sets it in his lap, and turns pages.

With her right hand, Olivia Ott reaches into space and opens the door. One by one the children enter the library.

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 65

Konstance

Oxygen at seven percent, says the voice inside the hood.

Turn left out of the vestibule. Past Compartments 8, 9, 10, all the doors sealed. Does the contagion swirl even now through the air in the corridor, waking from its long sleep? Do bodies almost four-hundred-days-dead molder in the shadows? Or are crew members stirring all around her beneath the hiss of the extinguishers: friends, children, teachers, Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Flowers, Mother, Father?

Little nozzles in the corridor ceiling rain their mist down on her. Homemade book stuffed inside her worksuit, homemade axe in her left hand, she spirals outward from the center of the Argos, the booties over her feet sliding through the chemicals on the floor.

Scattered along the corridor are rumpled blankets, discarded masks, a pillow, the pieces of a shattered meal tray.

A sock.

A humped shape furred with gray mold.

Eyes up. Keep moving. Here the dark entrance to the classroom, then more closed compartment doors, past what looks like a glove from one of the biohazard suits that Dr. Cha and Engineer Goldberg wore. Ahead someone’s Perambulator rests upside down in the center of the hall.

Oxygen at six percent, says the hood.

On her right is the entrance to Farm 4. Konstance pauses on the threshold and paws chemicals off her face shield: on every level of the haphazard racks, the plants are dead. Her little Bosnian pine still stands, four feet tall: around its base lies a halo of desiccated needles.