A man unrolls an orange hose from a truck; a backhoe cuts galleries for culverts; someone yells, “Mike! Mike!” The view from the egg-shaped boulder now stretches up a bare drumlin of shredded forest all the way to the top.

He drops his books and runs. Down Arcady Lane, down Spring Street, south along the gravel shoulder of Route 55, traffic roaring past, running not so much in rage but in panic. All this must be undone.

It’s the dinner hour and the Pig N’ Pancake is packed. Seymour pants in front of the hostess stand and scans faces. The manager eyes him; people waiting for tables watch. Bunny comes through the kitchen door with platters stacked along both arms.

“Seymour? Are you hurt?”

Somehow still balancing five plates of patty melts and chicken-fried steaks on her arms, she crouches, and he lifts one cup of his ear defenders.

Smells: ground beef, maple syrup, French fries. Sounds: the grading of rocks, the driving of sledges, the back-up alarms of dump trucks. He’s a mile and a half from Eden’s Gate but somehow he can still hear it, as though it’s a prison being built around him, as though he’s a fly being wrapped and spun in a spiderweb.

Diners watch. The manager watches.

“Possum?”

Words stack up against the backs of his teeth. A busboy trundles past, pushing an empty high chair on wheels, the wheels going thumpthwock over the tiles. A woman laughs. Someone yells, “Order up!” The woods the tree the owl—through the soles of his feet he feels a chain saw bite into a trunk, feels Trustyfriend startle awake. No time to think: you drop like shadow into the daylight, as one more safe harbor is wrenched out of the world.

“Seymour, put your hand in my pocket. Do you feel the keys? The car is right outside. Go sit in there, where it’s quiet, do your breathing exercise, and I’ll be out as soon as I can.”

He sits in the Pontiac as shadows trickle down through the pines. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four. Bunny comes out in her apron and gets in the car and rubs her forehead with the heels of her hands. In a to-go box she has three pancakes with strawberries and cream.

“Use your fingers, honey, it’s all right.”

The fading light plays tricks; the parking lot stretches; trees become dream trees. A first star shows, then hides itself again. Best friends best friends, we’re never apart.

Bunny tears off a piece of pancake and hands it to him.

“Okay if I take off your muffs?”

He nods.

“And touch your hair?”

He tries not to wince as her fingers catch in his snarls. A family leaves the restaurant, climbs into a truck, and drives away.

“Change is tough, kid, I know. Life is tough. But we still have the house. We still have our yard. We still have each other. Right?” He closes his eyes and sees Trustyfriend cruise over a wasteland of endless parking lots, nowhere to hunt, nowhere to land, nowhere to sleep.

“It won’t be the worst thing to have neighbors close by. Maybe there will be kids your age.”

An aproned teenager crashes out the back door and lobs a plump black bag into the dumpster. Seymour says, “They need big hunting ranges. They especially like high vantage points so they can hunt voles.”

“What’s a vole?”

“They’re like mice.”

She turns his earmuffs in her hands. “There are at least twenty places like that north of here your owl could fly to. Bigger forests, better forests. He could have his pick.”

“There are?”

“Sure.”

“With lots of voles?”

“Tons of voles. More voles than there are hairs on your head.”

Seymour chews some pancake and Bunny looks at herself in the rearview mirror and sighs.

“You promise, Mom?”

“I promise.”

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 61

Konstance

It’s the morning of her tenth birthday. Inside Compartment 17, NoLight brightens to DayLight, and she uses the toilet and brushes her hair and powders her teeth and when she pulls back the curtain, Mother and Father are standing there.

“Close your eyes and put out your hands,” says Mother, and Konstance does. Even before she opens her eyes, she knows what her mother is setting onto her forearms: a new worksuit. The fabric is canary yellow and the cuffs and hems are tacked with little x’s of thread and Mother has embroidered a little Bosnian pine on the collar to match the two-and-a-half-year-old seedling growing inside Farm 4.

Konstance presses it to her nose; it smells of the rarest thing: newness.

“You’ll grow into it,” says Mother, and zips the suit to Konstance’s throat. In the Commissary everyone is there—Jessi Ko and Ramón and Mrs. Chen and Tayvon Lee and Dr. Pori the ninety-nine-year-old mathematics teacher—and everyone sings the Library Day song and Sara Jane sets two big pancakes, made with real flour, one stacked atop the other, in front of her. Little cascades of syrup trickle off the edges.

Everyone watches, the teenaged boys especially, none of whom have eaten a pancake made with real flour since their own tenth birthdays. Konstance rolls up the first cake and eats it in four bites; she takes her time with the second. After she finishes, she raises the tray to her face and licks it, and there is applause.

Then Mother and Father walk her back to Compartment 17 to wait. Somehow she has gotten a blob of syrup on her sleeve, and she worries Mother will be upset, but Mother is too excited to notice, and Father only winks, licks a finger, and helps her blot it out.

“It’ll be a lot to take in at first,” Mother says, “but eventually you’ll love it, you’ll see, it’s time for you to grow up a little, and this may help with some of your—” but before she can finish Mrs. Flowers arrives.

Mrs. Flowers’s eyes are foggy with cataracts and her breath reeks of concentrated carrot paste and every day she seems smaller than the last. Father helps her set the Perambulator she’s carrying on the floor beside Mother’s sewing table.

From the pocket of her worksuit Mrs. Flowers produces a Vizer twinkling with golden lights. “It’s secondhand, of course, belonged to Mrs. Alegawa, rest her soul. It may not look perfect, but it passed all the diagnostics.”

Konstance steps onto the Perambulator and it thrums beneath her feet. Father squeezes her hand, looking sad and happy at the same time, and Mrs. Flowers says, “See you in there,” and totters back out the door, heading for her own compartment six doors down. Konstance feels Mother fit the Vizer over the back of her head, feels it squeeze her occipital bones, extend past her ears, and seal across her eyes. She worried it would hurt, but it only feels as though someone has crept up behind her and pressed two cold hands over her face.

“We’ll be right here,” says Mother, and Father adds, “Next to you the whole time,” and the walls of Compartment 17 disintegrate.

* * *

She stands in a vast atrium. Three tiers of bookshelves, each fifteen feet tall, served by hundreds of ladders, run for what appear to be miles down either side. Above the third tier, twin arcades of marble columns support a barrel-vaulted ceiling cut through its center by a rectangular aperture, above which puffy clouds float through a cobalt sky.