A thought, or a reconsidered memory, strikes her: of the ten-year-olds before her, like Mother, who were born on board, who woke up on their Library Days dreaming of the hour they’d set foot on Beta Oph2 and take a breath outside the Argos, the shelters they’d build, the mountains they’d climb, the life-forms they might discover—a second Earth!—and then they come out of their compartments after their Library Day looking different, valleys in their foreheads, shoulders drooped, lamps dimmed in their eyes. They stopped running down corridors, took SleepDrops at NoLight; sometimes she’d catch
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