“Oh yes!” The tardigrade brightened. “Most certainly.” She plunged a paw into her toolbox and handed Lenora a library card. “But not just that. I also need anything you can find about stops along the way, like the Oort cloud, and the Kuiper Belt, and the planets of Jupiter and Pluto—”

“They say Pluto’s not a planet anymore,” Lenora interrupted.

The tardigrade snarled. “As far as we tardigrades are concerned, Pluto is and always will be a planet. End of discussion.”

Cinnamon, from the top of the spaceship, emitted a potent leather scent that indicated her complete agreement.

Lenora saw no reason to argue. She had always thought that Pluto seemed like a perfectly fine planet, whatever the adults might tell her. She took out her notebook. Pluto is, always will be, a planet. This she underlined firmly.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she told the tardigrade. “But first—aren’t you worried about such a long trip through space all by yourself? What if you forget you are in space and open a window?”

“Whyever would I worry about that?” sniffed the tardigrade. “We tardigrades are the hardiest survivors in all the animal kingdom! We are, in fact, the first animals ever to survive the open vacuum of outer space. We can survive one thousand times the radiation level of any other animal—”

Lenora began scribbling wildly in her notebook.

“—not to mention surviving being frozen to absolute zero! We can go decades without food or water. A mere trip to Alpha Centauri is nothing to a tardigrade. We are the ultimate survivors.”

“Marvelous!” said Lenora. She wished she could do any of those things. One of the tardigrade’s many talents might have helped her fix the horrific mess back in her unknown department. But the tardigrade needed her, and so she simply had to think of something.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said to the tardigrade, trying to sound determined and confident. Cinnamon came racing down from the spaceship. Lenora patted the ant on her head. “Take me back to the Unshrinking Room, please.” Cinnamon lowered her jaws obligingly.

As they wheeled away, Lenora’s worries mounted. Her department was a complete wreck from the tornado. However would she find the books the tardigrade needed, assuming they were even in her department to begin with? It would take years of work for only one librarian.

They were back in the streets of Ant City now, surrounded by thousands of other ants streaming in all directions, carrying bits of food, or fleshy-looking things she supposed were eggs, and chunks of construction material … Thousands if not millions of ants, all in perfect order, feeding, building, their countless pheromone trails keeping them in constant coordination, acting as one to maintain their vast and lovely metropolis …