“Kid? You gone deaf again?” Blewitt has climbed into the box and is trying to lift the man by his armpits, his face wrenched away from the odor, and the man is simply blinking through his broken glasses.

“Z? You planning to pick your nose all day?”

He gathers what information he can. The soldier is Lance Corporal Rex Browning, a grammar school teacher from East London who volunteered for the war, and he spent two weeks inside that box, sentenced to “attitude reorientation” for trying to escape, and was let out for only twenty minutes a day.

“A corner-turner,” someone calls him. “Sectionable,” another says, because, as everyone knows, successfully escaping from Camp Five is a fantasy. The prisoners are unshaven, they’re feeble from malnutrition, and they’re taller than the Koreans—instantly recognizable as Westerners. Anyone who managed to get past the guards would have to pass undetected through a hundred miles of mountains, slip around dozens of checkpoints, make his way over gorges and across rivers, and any Koreans who might take pity on him would almost certainly be denounced and shot.

And yet, Zeno learns, Rex Browning the grammar school teacher tried. He was found a few miles south of camp, fifteen feet up a pine tree. The Chinese cut down the tree, then dragged him behind a jeep all the way back.

A few weeks later Zeno is gathering firewood from a hillside, the nearest guard several hundred yards away, when he sees Rex Browning picking his way along the trail below. Though his frame is skeletal, he doesn’t limp. He moves with efficiency, pausing now and then to pluck leaves from plants and stuff them into his shirt pockets.

Zeno shoulders his bundle and hurries down through the brush.

“Hello?”

Thirty feet, twenty, ten. “Hello?”

Still the man doesn’t stop. Zeno reaches the trail out of breath, and, praying the guards won’t hear, calls, “Such were the glorious gifts of the gods in the palace of brave Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians.”

Rex turns then and nearly falls, and stands blinking his big eyes behind his broken glasses.

“Or something like that,” says Zeno, blushing.

The other man laughs, a warm, irresistible laugh. The grime has been scrubbed out of the folds of his neck, his trousers mended with neat stitches: he is maybe thirty years old. His cornsilk hair, his flaxen eyebrows, his fine hands—in other circumstances, in another world, Zeno realizes, Rex Browning is handsome.

Rex says, “Zenodotus.”

“What?”

“The first librarian at the library at Alexandria. He was named Zenodotus. Appointed by the Ptolemaic kings.”

That accent: library becomes lie-brury. The trees vibrate in the wind and the firewood cuts into Zeno’s shoulders and he sets down his load.

“It’s just a name.”