The raindrops are falling much farther below the gap than she expected, but there is no time. She pitches armfuls of seed envelopes out into the dark, then the axe, and drives her body through the rift after them.
Miss Konstan—roars Sybil but Konstance’s head and shoulders are outside the Argos now. She wriggles, catches one thigh on a dagger of metal.
Oxygen depleted, says the hood.
Her legs still inside the structure of the wall, her waist stuck, Konstance takes one last breath, then rips off the hood, tearing away the sealing tape, and lets it go. It bounces, rolls, and comes to rest maybe fifteen feet below, among what look like wet stones and long blades of tundra grass, its headlamp shining straight up, into the rain.
The only way out is to drop. Still holding her breath, she braces her arms against the outside of the ship, pushes, and falls.
* * *
An ankle twists, her elbow strikes a rock, but she is able to sit up and breathe—she is not dead, not suffocated, not frozen solid.
The air! Rich wet salty alive: if viruses lurk inside this air, if they spill from the perforation she has made in the side of the Argos above her, if they are replicating inside her nostrils right now, if all the atmosphere of the Earth is poison, so be it. May she live five more minutes, breathing it, smelling it.
Rain pelts her sweat-soaked hair, her cheeks, her forehead. She kneels in the grasses and listens to it strike her suit, feels it land on her eyelids. It seems so incredibly, dangerously, promiscuously wasteful: water, given from the sky, in such quantities.
The headlamp dies, and only a glimmer emits from the gash she has chopped in the side of the Argos. But the darkness of this place is nothing like NoLight. The sky, webbed with cloud, appears to glow, and the wet grass blades catch the light and send it back, tens of thousands of droplets gleaming, and she peels Father’s suit down to her waist, and kneels in the tundra grass, and remembers what Aethon said: A bath, that’s as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs.
She finds her axe, strips off the rest of the bioplastic, gathers as many seed envelopes as she can find, and zips them into her worksuit alongside her homemade book. Then she limps her way through the grass and rocks to the perimeter fence. The Argos looms huge and pale behind her.
The fence is topped with razor wire and too high to climb but with the blade of her hatchet, working against one of the posts, she manages to chop through a dozen links, bend them back, and squirm through.
On the other side lie thousands more shining wet stones. On each grows lichen in crusts, lichen in scales—she could spend a year studying any one of them. Beyond the stones a roar rises, the roar of something perpetually in motion, seething, changing, moving—the sea.
* * *
Dawn takes an hour and she tries not to blink for any of it. First comes a slow spread of purples, then blues, a diversity of hues infinitely more complex and rich than any simulation inside the Library. She stands barefoot in the water, up to her ankles, the low, flat surf moving ceaselessly in a thousand different vectors, and for the first time in her life, the thrum of the Argos, of trickling pipes, of humming conduits, of the creeping tendrils of Sybil—the machine that has whirred all around her, all her life, since before she was conceived—is gone.
“Sybil?”
Nothing.
Far to her right she can just make out the gray outbuilding she uncovered on the Atlas, the boat shelter, a rocky pier. Over her shoulder, the Argos looks smaller: a white bolus beneath the sky.
In front of her, out on the horizon, the blue rim of dawn is turning pink, raising its fingers to push back the night.
EPILOGUE
THE LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY
FEBRUARY 20, 2020
7:02 P.M.
Zeno
The boy lowers his gun. The phone inside the backpack rings a second time. There, past the welcome desk blocking the door, beyond the porch, waits the next world. Does he have the strength?
He crosses the space to the entry and leans into the desk; power flows into his legs as though sent by Athena herself. The desk slides away; he clutches the backpack, pulls open the door, and charges into the glare of the police lights.
The phone rings a third time.
Down the five granite steps, down the walk, into the untracked snow, into a web of sirens, into the sights of a dozen rifles, one voice calling, “Hold fire, hold fire!” another—perhaps his own—yelling something beyond language.
So much snow pours from the sky that the air seems more snow than air. Down through the tunnel of junipers Zeno runs, moving as well as an eighty-six-year-old man with a bad hip can run in Velcro boots and two pairs of wool socks, the backpack pressed against his penguin necktie. He runs the bombs past the yellow owl eyes on the book drop box, past a van that reads Explosives Ordnance Disposal, past men in body armor; he is Aethon turning his back on immortality, happy to be a fool once more, the shepherds are dancing in the rain, playing their pipes and plucking their lyres, the lambs are bleating, the world is wet and muddy and green.