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“Who did this?” A s of the crowd He sounds wary, scared even, but also aggressive, as if he’d like to find and punish whoever hacked the floppy network

“What does it mean?” a woman near me says Her friend shakes her head violently, her hair whipping her cheeks, her eyes ith fear

A wo to o away The crowd around her starts whispering uneasily as nothing she does changes the ood job, apparently

“Eldest needs to fix this,” the firstabout Elder Many of the people around hi

“Those floppies didn’t change until the freak walked by,” one of the wo Romeo and Juliet says in a clear, loud voice She starts searching the crowd in the entryway for me I duck my head and run into the back hall

I don’t breathe until I’m in the fiction room and the door zips shut behind me There’s no lock—hardly any of the rooms on the entire ship have locks—but if I can lie low here, the people in the entryway et me

The fiction room is smaller than the others on this floor; clearly, the ship’s makers decided that history and science were more important than novels I wish it looked s scattered across the floor, dark carpet, posters of famous authors on the walls, and tiny square dusty s filtering in the sunlight Instead, the fiction room looks like all the rest—cold and sterile and entirely too clean It’s like a hospital room with books instead of beds: white tiled floor, stark paneled walls, silvery-metal table

Even though the roo clean, there is an ever-present scent of dust and old paper rising froardless of subjectbeside Dr Seuss beside Shakespeare When I get to the end of one row and look down the next, I see unreadable titles, souess at—French, Gerin to decipher—Chinese? Korean? Japanese?

I could get lost here, but I need to see if Orion really did leave a clue for me to follow in the phrase printed onthe fairy tales and poetry (Gritheir bu the titles—The Pilgriet to the one I’ for

Inferno, Voluhieri, shelved beside a slender volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets Ironic—a book of love poems beside a book about hell I pull out the poetry collection and toss it on the metal table near the door so it can be reshelved with the Ss; then I hook er on the spine of Dante’s Inferno

Just the title lish class I can feel the hard seat ofwith Ryan and Mike as orked on our final project

Funny how a book about hell reminds me of home

As I slide Inferno off the shelf, so to the floor I bend over to pick it up—a paper-thin sheet of rectangular black plastic, about the length and width of my open hand The feel of it reernail-size bit of raised hard plastic in one corner I slip it in my pocket; Elder will probably knohat it is I stand back up and reach for Dante again

The door bursts open I get a glimpse of a panicked wo She races past me to the far side of the room and throws herself behind the last bookshelf

I run over and drop to ?” I ask, reaching for her Now that I have a chance to really look at her, I realize who she is: Victria Harley and Elder’s friend The girl rites, stories or novels, I think The last time I spoke with her, I told her about the sky on Earth and how it never ended, and she spit inme in front of everyone