He stopped work and turned one of his hands to carve “Joy to you Maia!” into one of the damp marble blocks of the library wall. As was his custom, he carved the Greek words in Latin letters, which always looked peculiar.

I beckoned him over to where he could carve his responses in the paving stones of the street outside, some of which already bore his side of dialogues, sadly more practical and less philosophical than those that still lined the walks of the Remnant City. I asked him about the glass globes. “Can make,” he inscribed tersely. “How many?”

There were over two thousand of us Amazons, and we all desperately wanted light at night. We were used to it and hated doing without it. Some people had slunk back to the Remnant already for this reason, but most of us were made of sterner stuff. Everyone would want one. “Two thousand five hundred,” I said.

“In return?” he carved.

“What do you want?” I asked. How easily it turned to this, I thought, to trade and barter.

“Thomas Aquinas,” he carved.

“We don’t have it,” I said, surprised. “We don’t have any Christian apologetics. We didn’t bring them. You know we didn’t. We’ll read you anything we have.”

“Ikaros owns forbidden books,” he carved.

“He does? How do you know?”

Crocus just sat there in the fine drizzle, huge, golden, mud-spattered. I’d say he was looking at me, but he didn’t give any impression of having eyes or a head. With a shock of guilt I remembered my Botticelli book, full of forbidden reproductions of Madonnas and angels, with text in English. Of course. Ikaros had given it to me. What else might he have brought here?

“If he has it, then yes,” I said.

“Thomas Aquinas. In Greek,” Crocus wrote.

“If Ikaros has it, I’ll make him agree to translate it and read it to you,” I said. “If not, we’ll read you something else you want.”

“Display sculpture,” he inscribed.

“What? I don’t understand.”

“I make sculpture, for display in Amazon plaza.”

“Oh Crocus, but we’d love that. You don’t have to ask that as a favor. We’d regard it as an honor.”