Rain pelts her sweat-soaked hair, her cheeks, her forehead. She kneels in the grasses and listens to it strike her suit, feels it land on her eyelids. It seems so incredibly, dangerously, promiscuously wasteful: water, given from the sky, in such quantities.

The headlamp dies, and only a glimmer emits from the gash she has chopped in the side of the Argos. But the darkness of this place is nothing like NoLight. The sky, webbed with cloud, appears to glow, and the wet grass blades catch the light and send it back, tens of thousands of droplets gleaming, and she peels Father’s suit down to her waist, and kneels in the tundra grass, and remembers what Aethon said: A bath, that’s as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs.

She finds her axe, strips off the rest of the bioplastic, gathers as many seed envelopes as she can find, and zips them into her worksuit alongside her homemade book. Then she limps her way through the grass and rocks to the perimeter fence. The Argos looms huge and pale behind her.

The fence is topped with razor wire and too high to climb but with the blade of her hatchet, working against one of the posts, she manages to chop through a dozen links, bend them back, and squirm through.

On the other side lie thousands more shining wet stones. On each grows lichen in crusts, lichen in scales—she could spend a year studying any one of them. Beyond the stones a roar rises, the roar of something perpetually in motion, seething, changing, moving—the sea.

Dawn takes an hour and she tries not to blink for any of it. First comes a slow spread of purples, then blues, a diversity of hues infinitely more complex and rich than any simulation inside the Library. She stands barefoot in the water, up to her ankles, the low, flat surf moving ceaselessly in a thousand different vectors, and for the first time in her life, the thrum of the Argos, of trickling pipes, of humming conduits, of the creeping tendrils of Sybil—the machine that has whirred all around her, all her life, since before she was conceived—is gone.

“Sybil?”

Nothing.

Far to her right she can just make out the gray outbuilding she uncovered on the Atlas, the boat shelter, a rocky pier. Over her shoulder, the Argos looks smaller: a white bolus beneath the sky.

In front of her, out on the horizon, the blue rim of dawn is turning pink, raising its fingers to push back the night.

EPILOGUE

THE LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

7:02 P.M.

Zeno

The boy lowers his gun. The phone inside the backpack rings a second time. There, past the welcome desk blocking the door, beyond the porch, waits the next world. Does he have the strength?