On the third story, Rosa led her down a long, gloomy corridor. They came to a nursery. This was a large, bright room with smoothly rounded walls and tiny pieces of furniture in glaring red or yellow plastic. The walls were brightly painted with huge smiling faces, and from hidden speakers tinkling music played.

And the floor was covered with infants. “The current crop of one- to two-year-olds,” Rosa murmured.

There were about two hundred babies here, in this one great room. Adults dressed in pale gray uniforms walked among them. The children were dressed in identical blue-and-white romper suits, though some of them had worked free an arm or leg. The children played with each other and the toys that littered the floor, exploring, gnawing. The babies were a carpet of wriggling forms—like worms, Lucia thought oddly, or like stranded fish. She could smell them, a dense, pale smell of milk and piss and poops, and the noise they made was a shrill roar. And when they chanced to look toward her, they all had the same oval face, pale hair, smoke-gray eyes.

The attendants looked young themselves—some of them surely younger than Lucia herself. It occurred to Lucia that there was a pattern of age in the Crypt. She had seen it for herself. In these deep levels most people were young, children and young adults helping in the nursery, and doing basic maintenance. Older women, like Pina, tended to work at the higher levels, the schools and libraries, and in the surface offices. It wasn’t an exclusive pattern; a few people, like Rosa, seemed comfortable everywhere. But still, she thought, the Crypt was like a great onion, layers divided by age, the oldest outside, getting younger as you penetrated deeper—until at the center were the youngest of all, the babies, and, paradoxically, the very oldest, the matres.

But this was another heretical analysis that she must try to block from her mind.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Rosa murmured.

“You do?”

“You’ve mixed with outsiders. I was brought up as a contadino, remember. You’re seeing this through the eyes of an outsider—and you’re thinking how strange this would seem to them.”

Perhaps I was, Lucia thought.

“You don’t have to deny it,” Rosa murmured. “Well, so it would be strange to anybody who grew up in a little nuclear family. It seemed strange to me, until I understood how right it all was . . . Once you were a child like this, Lucia. Once you played in this room, as these children do now.”

“I know.”

“And then, with your year group, you moved through the stages of your life, the crèches and nursery schools, and then your formal schooling on the top story . . . And more children took your place here.”

Lucia shrugged. “Everybody knows about that. It’s the way the Order is renewed.”

“Yes, of course it is. Now come.” She walked on, and Lucia followed.