Next comes a recycling toilet, dry-wipes, a food printer still in its wrapper, an inflatable cot, a blanket sealed in containment film, more sacks of Nourish powder—back and forth Father hurries. Please remove blockage in outer door, repeats Sybil, and the stool crumples another centimeter under the pressure, and Konstance begins to hyperventilate.

Father pitches two more sacks of Nourish powder into the vestibule—why so many?—and steps through the gap in the door and slumps against the wall. Sybil says, In order to begin decontamination you must remove the blockage in the outer door.

Into Konstance’s ear the hood says, Oxygen at twenty-three percent.

Father points to the printer. “You know how to operate that? Remember where the low-voltage line attaches?” He rests his hands on his knees, chest heaving, sweat dripping from his beard, and the stool shrieks against the pressure. She manages to nod.

“As soon as the outer door is closed, close your eyes, and Sybil will flush the air and sterilize everything. Then she’ll open the inner door. Do you remember? When you go inside, bring everything else with you. All of it. Once you have everything inside and the inner door is sealed, count to one hundred, and it should be safe to take off the hood. Understood?”

Fear thrums through every cell in her body. Mother’s empty bunk. The tents in the Commissary.

“No,” she says.

Oxygen at twenty-two percent, says the hood. Try to breathe more slowly.

“When the inner door is sealed,” repeats Father, “count to one hundred. Then you can take it off.” He presses his weight against the edge of the door, and Sybil says, The outer door is blocked, the blockage must be removed, and Father glances out into the darkness of the corridor.

“I was twelve,” he says, “when I applied to leave. All I could see, as a boy, was everything dying. And I had this dream, this vision, of what life could be. ‘Why stay here when I could be there?’ Remember?”

From the shadows crawl a thousand demons and she swings her headlamp toward them and the demons recede and her light swings away and the demons lunge right back into place. The stool shrieks again. The outer door closes another centimeter.

“I was a fool.” His hand, as he runs it across his forehead, looks skeletal; the skin of his throat sags; the silver of his hair dims to gray. For the first time in her life, her father looks his age, or older, as though, breath by breath, his last years are being siphoned away. Into the mask of her hood she says, “You said that what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

He inclines his head at her, blinking fast, as though a thought runs out in front of him, too quick to catch. “It was Grandmom,” he murmurs, “who used to say that.”

Oxygen at twenty percent, says the hood.

A bead of sweat clings to the tip of Father’s nose, quivers, then drops.

“At home,” he says, “in Scheria, an irrigation ditch ran behind the house. Even after it dried up, even on the hottest days, there was always a surprise if you knelt there long enough. An airborne seed, or a weevil, or a brave little starflower all by itself.”

Wave after wave of drowsiness breaks over Konstance. What is Father doing? What is he trying to tell her? He rises and stumbles over the mangled stool and out of the vestibule.

“Father, please.”

But his face passes out of sight. He braces one foot against the edge of the door, wrestles out the mangled stool, and the vestibule closes.

“No, don’t—”

Outer door sealed, Sybil says. Beginning decontamination.

The noise of the fans builds. She feels cold jets against the bioplastic of her suit, shuts her eyes against the three pulses of light, and the inner door opens. Terrified, exhausted, biting back panic, Konstance drags the toilet inside, the sacks of Nourish powder, the cot, the food printer in its wrap.

The inner door seals. The only light is the glow of Sybil flickering inside her tower, now orange now rose now yellow.

Hello, Konstance.

Oxygen at eighteen percent, says the hood.

I adore visitors.

One two three four five.

Fifty-six fifty-seven fifty-eight.

Oxygen at seventeen percent.

Eighty-eight eighty-nine ninety. Mother’s unfolded blanket. Father’s hair damp with sweat. A bare foot sticking out of a tent. She reaches one hundred and disconnects the hood. Pulls it off her head. Lies on the floor as the SleepDrops drag her down.

TEN

THE GULL

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio K

… the goddess spiraled down from the night. She had a white body, gray wings, and a bright orange mouth like a beak, and although she was not as large as I expected a goddess to be, I became afraid. She landed on her yellow feet and took a few steps and began picking at a pile of seaweed.

“Exalted daughter of Zeus,” I said, “I beg you, say the magic incantation to deliver me from this form into another, so that I might fly to the city in the clouds where all needs are met and no one suffers and every day shines like the very first days at the birth of the world.”

“What in the world are you braying about?” asked the goddess, and the reek of her fish-breath nearly knocked me over. “I’ve flapped all over these parts, and found no place like that, in the clouds or anywhere else.”

She was clearly a cold-blooded deity, playing tricks on me. I said, “Well, at least could you use your wings to fly somewhere bright and warm, and bring me back a rose, so that I might return to what I was before, and start my journey anew?”

The goddess pointed with one wing at a second pile of seaweed, frozen to the gravel, and said, “That’s the rose of the northern sea and I’ve heard that if you eat enough of it, you’ll feel funny. Though I can tell you right now, a jackass like you is never going to grow wings.” Then she cried, ah ah ah, which sounded a lot more like laughter than magic words, but I put the slushy mess in my mouth and chewed.

Though it tasted like rotten turnips, indeed I did feel a transformation begin. My legs shrank, and so did my ears, and slits emerged behind my jaw. I felt scales sliding across my back, and a slime crept over my eyes…

THE LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

5:27 P.M.

Seymour

Crouched beside the upended shelf of audiobooks, peeking out a sliver of window, he watches two more police vehicles move into place, as though they are constructing a wall around the library. Bent figures hurry through the snow along Park Street, pinpoints of red traveling with them. Thermal scanners? Laser sights? Above the junipers, a trio of blue lights hover: some kind of remote-controlled drone. These, the creatures we have chosen to repopulate the earth.

Seymour crawls back to the dictionary stand and is trying to swallow the swirling panic in his throat when the phone atop the welcome desk rings. He clamps his hands around his ear defenders. Six rings seven eight and it stops. A moment later the phone in Marian’s office—hardly more than a broom closet beneath the stairs—rings. Seven rings eight rings stop.

“You should answer,” says the wounded man at the base of the stairs. The earmuffs keep his voice faraway. “They’ll want to find a peaceful way to resolve this.”