Good question. I wish I had a good answer, and time is ticking away.

“Do you have any idea who your father and my mother might have been working with?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t have made contact with you.”

Fair point.

“Once, I overheard them talking. Dad said they should meet when your mom was painting the station. Your mom said something like ‘He’s going to hate that.’ Before they said who he was, Dad noticed I was there. That was a month or so before your mom died.”

“How long was my mother in the Stewards?” I ask.

“Eighteen months. She was eased into her ride, so it took a few months before she was brought here and officially made a Steward,” he offers.

A year and a half or a little less sounds about right. That would coincide with the time Mom suddenly stopped wanting me to pursue my art and started spending more time alone.

“Did she have a lot of good friends down here?”

“She wasn’t in the Lyceum all that often that I can remember,” Atlas says. “She spent most of her time aboveground on the station design.”

“So she wouldn’t have gotten close to very many people,” I reason. So far, I had met just a handful of Stewards. Only one of them said he liked my mom.

“This way,” I say as I pull Atlas along through the rows of shelves.

“Where are we going?”

“To find him,” I say. After a few twists and turns, I spot Dewey sitting at the same desk Atlas and I found him at before, his beaten-up brown hat pulled low on his head. Around him people are scurrying through the tall stacks with lists—yelling about books to pull or supplies to get, but he just turns pages of the volume in front of him as if nothing is happening. He stops reading to make a note and notices us standing in front of him.

“More people. It’s like roaches. You deal with one, and more turn up. Lists for editions to pull and send to the vaults are back there.” He waves his hand over his shoulder and hunches over his book. “Data will deal with you. Better hurry.”

“We’re not here to pack books,” I say. “I’m trying to find people who were friends with my mom.”

“There will be plenty of time to bother me about that after the lockdown starts.” He pulls his hat farther down on his head.

“We’re not going to be here when the lockdown starts,” I say.

Dewey pauses turning his page and peers up at me. “Really?”

I nod.

“Well, two less people to worry about.” He yawns, then blinks as if surprised to see that we are still standing in front of him. “If you’re not here to help, at the very least you can let me get back to my work.”

“Dewey,” Atlas says, far more calmly than I feel, “we just need you to answer a few questions. We’re trying to do what my father and Folio would have wanted.”