The RV has Montana plates. Hydraulic jacks. A satellite TV dish.

“He went to walk his dog,” he says, “but left the engine running.”

Beside him Janet takes a photo of herself, then deletes it. Over the lake the eyes of Trustyfriend open, two yellow moons.

In the grass at the edge of the marina lot Seymour spies a round piece of granite as big as a baby’s head. He walks to it. It’s heavier than it looks.

Janet is still looking at her phone. A warrior, Bishop says, truly engaged, does not experience guilt, fear, or remorse. A warrior, truly engaged, becomes something more than human.

Seymour remembers the weight of the grenade in his pocket as he carried it through the vacant lots of Eden’s Gate. Remembers putting his finger through the safety ring. Pull the pin. Pull it pull it pull it.

He lugs the stone over to the motor home. Through the buzz of the roar in his head, he hears Janet call, “Seymour?”

No guilt no fear no remorse. The difference between us and them is action.

“What are you doing?”

He raises the rock above his head.

“Seymour, if you do that, I will never—”

He glances at her. Back at the motor home. Patience, Bishop says, is over.

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 64

DAY 46–DAY 276 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

Records flutter down from the shelves and stack themselves on the desk in chronological order. An Oregon birth certificate. A bleached piece of paper called a Western Union telegram.

WUX Washington AP 20 551 PM

ALMA BOYDSTUN

431 FOREST ST LAKEPORT

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR WARD PRIVATE ZENO NINIS US ARMY IS MISSING IN ACTION SINCE 1 APRIL 1951 IN THE KOREAN AREA DURING THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTY DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE

Next come transcripts of prisoner-of-war release interviews dated July and August 1953. A passport with one arrival stamp: London. A deed for a house in Idaho. A commendation for four decades of service to the Valley County Highway Department. The bulk of the stack consists of obituaries and articles detailing how, at the age of eighty-six, on the twentieth of February in the year 2020, Zeno Ninis died protecting five children who were trapped in a rural library by a terrorist.

COURAGEOUS KOREA VET SAVES KIDS AND LIBRARY, reads one headline. IDAHO HERO MOURNED, reads another.

She finds nothing connected to the fragments of an ancient comedy titled Cloud Cuckoo Land. No listed publications, no indications that Zeno Ninis translated, adapted, or published anything.

A prisoner of war, a county employee in Idaho, an elderly man who thwarted a planned bombing of a small-town library. Why was a book with this man’s name on it on Father’s nightstand in Nannup? She writes, Was there another Zeno Ninis? and drops the question through the slot. A moment later the reply flutters down: The Library contains no records of any other individuals by that name.

* * *

At NoLight she lies on the cot and watches Sybil flicker inside her tower. How many times, as a little girl, was she assured that Sybil contained everything she could ever imagine, everything she would ever need? The memoirs of kings; ten thousand symphonies; ten million television shows; whole baseball seasons; 3-D scans of the Lascaux caves; a complete record of the Great Collaboration that produced the Argos: propulsion, hydration, gravity, oxygenation—all right here, the collected cultural and scientific output of human civilization nested inside the strange filaments of Sybil at the heart of the ship. The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure. And when she first stood in the atrium on her Library Day, gazing down the seemingly infinite rows of shelves, hadn’t she believed it?

But it wasn’t true. Sybil couldn’t stop a contagion from spreading through the crew. She couldn’t save Zeke or Dr. Pori or Mrs. Lee or anybody else, it seems. Sybil still doesn’t know if it’s safe for Konstance outside of Vault One.

There are things that Sybil doesn’t know. Sybil doesn’t know what it meant to be held by your father inside the leafy green twilight of Farm 4, or how it felt to sift through your mother’s button bag and wonder about the provenance of each button. The Library has no records of a royal blue copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land translated by Zeno Ninis, yet Konstance has seen one inside the Atlas, faceup on Father’s nightstand.

Konstance sits up. Into her mind swims a vision of another library, a less presuming place, hidden inside the walls of her own skull, a library of just a few dozen shelves, a library of secrets: the library of things Konstance knows but Sybil does not.

* * *

She feeds herself, scrubs the rinseless soap into her hair, does whatever sit-ups and lunges and precalculus Sybil prescribes. Then she goes to work. She rips apart the one Nourish powder sack that she has already emptied and tears the scraps into rectangles: paper. She takes a replacement nylon tube out of the food printer’s repair pack and chews it into a nib: pen.

Her early attempts at ink—synthetic gravy, synthetic grape juice, synthetic coffee bean paste—are pitiful: too runny, too feathery, too slow to dry.

Konstance, what are you doing?

“I’m playing, Sybil. Let me be.”

But after a few dozen experiments, she’s able to write her name without smearing it. In the Library she tells herself, read, reread, take a snapshot of it in your mind. Then she touches her Vizer, steps off the Perambulator, and writes it out.

Courageous Korea Vet Saves Kids and Library

With the makeshift pen, those seven words take her ten minutes to write. But after a few more days of practice, she’s quicker, memorizing whole sentences from texts in the Library, stepping off her Perambulator, and scrawling them onto a scrap. One reads,

Proteomic analysis of the Diogenes codex turned up traces of tree sap, lead, charcoal, and gum tragacanth, a thickening agent commonly used in ink in medieval Constantinople.

Another:

But if it is probable that the manuscript survived the Middle Ages, like so many other ancient Greek texts, in a monastic library of Constantinople, how it traveled out of the city and to Urbino must be left to the imagination.

A current of red light ripples through Sybil. Are you playing a game, Konstance?

“Just making notes, Sybil.”

Why not write your notes in the Library? Far more efficient and you could use whatever colors you would like.

Konstance drags the back of her hand across her face, smearing ink across one cheek. “This suits me fine, thank you.”

* * *

Weeks pass. Happy birthday, Konstance, Sybil says one morning. You are fourteen years old today. Would you like me to help you print a cake?

Konstance peers over the edge of her cot. On the floor around her flutter almost eighty scraps of sacking material. One reads, Who Was Zeno Ninis? Another: Σχερία.

“No, thank you. You could let me out. Why not let me out for my birthday?”

I cannot.

“How many days have I been in here, Sybil?”

You have been safe inside Vault One for two hundred and seventy-six days.

From the floor she picks up a scrap on which she has written,