Going to sleep already, Konstance? But you have not eaten since this morning.

“I’ll eat if you open the door.”

As you know, I have not yet been able to determine if the contagion persists outside this vault. Since we have established that you are safe in here, I must keep the door closed.

“It seems dangerous enough in here. I’ll eat if you open the door. If you don’t, I’ll starve myself.”

It hurts me to hear you talk like this.

“You can’t be hurt, Sybil. You’re just a bunch of fibers inside a tube.”

Your body requires nourishment, Konstance. Picture one of your favorite—

Konstance plugs her ears. Everything we have on board, the grown-ups said, is everything we will ever need. Anything we cannot solve for ourselves, Sybil will solve for us. But this was just a story they told to comfort themselves. Sybil knows everything, and yet she knows nothing. Konstance picks up the drawing she made of the city on the clouds and runs a fingertip over the dried ink. Why did she think re-creating this old book would unlock anything for her? For what reader is she making it? After she dies, won’t it sit unread in this vault for eons?

I’m falling apart, she thinks, I’m ungluing. I’m a fool on a treadmill, stumbling through the specter of a planet ten trillion kilometers behind me, searching for answers that don’t exist.

From beneath the millstone of her mind, Father stands, plucks a dried leaf out of his beard, and smiles. But what’s so beautiful about a fool, he says, is that a fool never knows when to give up. It was Grandmom who used to say that.

She scrambles back onto her Perambulator, touches her Vizer, hurries to a Library table. On February 20, 2020, she writes on a slip, who were the five children in the Lakeport Public Library saved by Zeno Ninis?

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

AUGUST 2019

Zeno

In late August, twin forest fires in Oregon burn a million acres each, and smoke gushes into Lakeport. The sky turns the color of putty, and anyone who steps outdoors returns smelling like a campfire. Restaurant patios close; weddings move inside; youth sports are canceled; the air is deemed too dangerous for children to play outside.

As soon as school lets out for the day, the library floods with kids with nowhere else to be. Zeno sits at his table behind his haystack of legal pads and sticky notes struggling through his translation. On the floor beside him, a redheaded girl in shorts and Wellington boots pops her chewing gum as she pages through gardening books. A few feet beyond that, a thick-chested kid with a lion’s mane of blond hair is pressing the bar of the water fountain with his knee and using both hands to scoop water over his head.

Zeno shuts his eyes: a headache simmering. When he opens them, Marian is there.

“One,” she says, “these fires have turned my workplace into a juvenile jamboree. Two, the window air conditioner upstairs sounds like someone force-fed it a metal sandwich. Three, Sharif went to Bergesen Hardware to buy a new one, so I’ve got to deal with about twenty sugar-frenzied fiends upstairs.” As though on cue, a little boy rides a tattered bean bag down the stairs behind her and lands on his knees and looks up at her and grins.

“Four, as far as I can tell, you’ve spent the whole week trying to decide whether to call your drunken shepherd ‘illiterate,’ ‘humble,’ or ‘clueless.’ Some fifth graders are here for the next couple of hours, Zeno. Five of them. Would you help me?”

“ ‘Humble’ and ‘clueless’ are actually quite different—”

“Show them what you’re up to. Or do a magic trick, something. Please.”

Before he can concoct an excuse, Marian drags the sopping child from the drinking fountain to his table.

“Alex Hess, meet Mr. Zeno Ninis. Mr. Ninis is going to show you something cool.”

The boy lifts one of the big facsimile printouts from the table and a dozen of Zeno’s legal pages tumble to the carpet like injured birds.

“What is this? Alien writing?”

“Looks Russian,” says the redhead in the boots, standing at the table now too.

“It’s Greek,” says Marian, as she nudges another boy and two more girls toward Zeno’s table. “A very old story. It has wizards inside whales and guard-owls that ask riddles and a city in the clouds where every wish comes true and even”—Marian lowers her voice and glances dramatically over one shoulder—“fishermen who have tree-penises.”

Two of the girls giggle. Alex Hess smirks. Drops of water fall from his hair and strike the page.

* * *

Twenty minutes later five kids sit in a ring around Zeno’s table, each studying a facsimile of a different folio. A girl with a bob that looks as if it was cut by a weed-whacker raises her hand, then immediately starts talking. “So okay from what you’re saying, this Ethan guy has all these insane adventures—”

“Aethon.”

“Should be Ethan,” says Alex Hess. “Easier.”

“—and his story gets written down a zillion years ago on twenty-four wooden tablet-thingys, which are buried with his body when he’s dead? Which are then discovered, centuries later, in a graveyard by Dyed-Jeans? And he recopies the whole story onto like hundreds of pieces of paper—”

“Papyrus.”

“—and mails it to his niece who’s like dying?”

“Right,” says Zeno, bewildered and excited and enervated all at once. “Though you should remember there wasn’t really mail, not as we understand it. If there was a niece at all, Diogenes probably gave his scrolls to a trusted friend, who—”

“Then that copy somehow got copied in Constant-a-wherever, and that copy got lost for like another zillion years, only it just got re-found in Italy, but it’s still a big mess because a ton of words are missing?”

“You’ve got it exactly.”

A slight boy named Christopher squirms in his chair. “So switching all this old writing into English is really hard, and you only have pieces of the story, and you don’t even know what order they go in?”

Rachel the redhead turns her facsimile this way and that. “And the pieces you do have look like somebody smeared Nutella all over them.”

“Right.”

“So like,” asks Christopher, “why?”

All the children look at him: Alex; Rachel; little Christopher; Olivia, the girl with the weed-whacker bob; and a quiet girl with brown eyes, brown skin, brown clothes, and jet-black hair named Natalie.

Zeno says, “You ever see a superhero movie? Where the hero keeps getting beat up and it always seems like he—”

“Or she,” says Olivia.

“—or she will never make it? That’s what these fragments are: superheroes. Try to imagine the epic battles they survived over the last two thousand years: floods, fires, earthquakes, failed governments, thieves, barbarians, zealots, who knows what else? We know that somehow a copy of this text made it to a scribe in Constantinople nine or ten centuries after it was first written, and all we know about him—”

“Or her,” says Olivia.

“—is this tidy handwriting, leaning slightly to the left. But now the few people who can make sense of that old writing have a chance to breathe life back into these superheroes so that maybe they can do battle for a few more decades. Erasure is always stalking us, you know? So to hold in your hands something that has evaded it for so long—”