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When Seto was a child, he was always stopping to read the posters on the mosaic outer walls of the tenements that lined his home street. The best calligraphy in his neighborhood belonged to the balding old woman who each week posted a list of the spices she had for sale. One day, when he was 10 years old, Seto extolled the curvature of the old woman's s to his father. Joso Dioso was a goat seller who could hardly read, and he was taken aback by his son's knowledge. That night, Joso told his wife, Renea, our son understands the language and we do not. Rhaena replied, not nearly so well. He sees things in the street posters beyond our understanding. Then when he comes of age, proclaimed Renea, he will find himself an apprenticeship in bookmaking. He will work with the language every day, and many fine books will result. Rhenea's decisions were final, so when Seto was 14, he set out from his home street to find a bookmaker. Seto had never ventured more than a mile from his seaside tenement. The furthest he had ever gone was to the adjacent South Harbour to fetch eels and conches for his mother's weekend stews. Now his search for a bookmaking master brought him north up the island's sloped interior, where the hundreds of seaside tenements gave way to a few dozen palazzi on tracts of scrubland as big as soccer fields. Seto had never seen so much empty space, nor the moas grazing, nor the children playing in fountains hewn from lapis lazuli, nor the people in purple cone hats pushing wheelbarrows of tomatoes the size of watermelons and watermelons the size of tomatoes. But none of this struck Seto as forcefully as the absence of brine in the air and of mosaic walls to paste posters upon. Seto came to the first bookmaker at dusk. She lived not in a palazzo but a little adobe house. There was no door, and Seto wandered through the opening in the front of the house, unbidden. A woman of about 50 sat writing in a book in a rocking chair beside a small fire. What are you doing here, little boy? Surely you lack the means to buy any of my output. I am to be a bookmaker's apprentice. Will you have me? No. She put her book on a table made from petrified cactus. You are too good a calligrapher to learn much from me. How do you know that when I've never held a brush? Your posture, she explained, is a calligrapher's posture. The bookmaker got up and stoked the fire with a stick of dried basil stems so that it burned brighter than anything Rhenea had ever lit. To cook meals at home. Go to the top of the island a bit north of the center, and you will find a master commensurate with your gift. She returned to her chair. Seto backed out of the house, then continued north. The landscape changed as Seto moved uphill, appearing at first glance to be misshapen rocks, then crouching statues. At second were cactuses. Seto trod past these spiny enigmas warily. He hadn't passed any palazzi in some time, with only shrubs, the cactuses, and an occasional sleeping tortoise dotting this part of the slope. Night fell. He turned around to find a view of the southern three quarters of the island below him. There at the base of the mountain, was Seto's neighborhood, although in the morass of darkness and candlelight he couldn't make out the street where he had grown up. Beyond that were the placid masts of ships resting in south harbor, nodding with the current, pearly under a waxing moon. The mix of lunar and man made light below constellated as much as the sky, so that twinkling of one kind or another filled Seto's vision. Further up the mountain, the cactuses made way for a new kind of small squarish building made of alabaster brick. There was alabaster on the ground, too, slabs of it forming a walkway between the buildings. Seto knew that these were authorized buildings used by the people who ran the island, because once per month or so an official would come down the mountain to paste a poster featuring an illustration of one of these buildings, with a caption reading, upon catching any novel fish types, bring them up the mountain to the authorized buildings so the government can catalog them. Through the dimness, Seto saw a little wooden sign in front of one building that read FISH Department in the same stiff lettering as on the government posters. Now that night had fallen, no one was in any of these authorized buildings. Their circular windows emitted no light, but a torch was mounted above each door to light the walkway. Behind a cluster of buildings he found a circular amphitheater carved out of the earth into the very apex of the hill. A spring in the center of the amphitheater, marked by a mossy cairn, flowed northward through a trench carved into the amphitheater's north edge and and downhill to the sea below. Encircling the area was a ring of monkey puzzle trees Now Seto beheld the island's north side for the first time. There were no candlelit tenement neighborhoods on this side, and no harbor to shelter ships, but Seto could make out the shadowy figures of livestock asleep in gymnosperm pastures. He continued past the amphitheater. A little ways northward, 100ft or so downhill, was a small marketplace sitting on a dirt road. The Orderly row of 8 North facing wooden frame shops clung to the north slope for life. Any carts or wagons that traveled the road in front of them risked tumbling downhill. A few candles were lit. Leaning in the doorway of a tannery, a young man was smoking reefer, whose odor Seto knew from his parents evenings, although he hadn't before smelled it, mingled with fresh leather. Next to that was a small grocery with an apartment atop it, out of which came the din of a mediocre bassoonist. The leftmost shop, but one tucked between a carpenter and a butcher, belonged to the bookmaker. He was visible through a blurry window, older than anyone Seto had ever seen, with wrinkles in his face like little ravines, yet moving a brush energetically over the pages of an enormous book. Seto noticed the old man's posture and shivered a little at the likeness to his own. He approached the entrance, a rectangle as doorless as that on the adobe house on the other side of the mountain. I am to be a bookmaker's apprentice. Will you have me? The old man had a long beard like a priest's, and dirty clothes like an artist's. Stray ink colored his fingernails. He looked Seto over nonchalantly and said, your posture is suitable. Have a seat on the floor. Seto obeyed. From the dusty floorboards he looked up at his new master, who was hunched over an iron wrought table, his back to shelves and shelves of books in every color, a few bound in fabric, most bound in the scaly hides of wondrous animals. The walls across and adjacent held equally bountiful shelves. Titles on countless spines, from recollection of flights across the eternal desert to 4,000 auspicious recipes for poison, beckoned to Seto in strange fonts. The old man continued, will I have to teach you to read, or only to paint the pages? I already know how to read. That simplifies my work. How did you learn to read? Posters on the south side tenement buildings where I grew up. That may be an impediment. Child's brain should be fed books as early as possible. You may never be a great reader, although bookmaking should be no trouble for you with such choice vertebrae to prop your head up, I shall begin teaching you now. Now Night is no obstacle to learning. If I may, Mr. Sleepiness is an obstacle indeed. Promising, I'll fetch you a sleeping bag. The bookmaker rose abruptly from the table, tossed his 30 pound book over Seto's head into an empty slot on a shelf opposite him, and bounded lightly up the rickety staircase in the back of the room that led to his attic apartment. Fumbling reverberated through the floor upstairs into the shop below until the bookmaker descended with a Spanish moss sleeping bag under his arm. He laid the mass on the floor in front of Seto, who, while not small for his age, could have fit in the thing three times over. Thank you, mister, said Seto. The bookmaker pinched the end of his beard before asking, have you ever called anyone by their first name? No, I haven't reached that rung of maturity. Now that you are my apprentice, I will decide the rung you sit upon beside your calligrapher's posture. You have a young adult's bearing, so I now promote you to the corresponding rung. Call me Soa. The Young Adult rung. I haven't even cleared the adolescent rung. Soa blew out the candle and walked back toward his staircase. You must not know many adolescents. Many of them have worse bearings than children, yet their parents graduate them up the rungs unthinkingly, without the most basic inquiry into their so called adolescence mindscapes. What is your name? Seto. Like the famous sailor from the other side of the world? Yes. My parents chose him as my namesake. Well, you won't replicate the original Seto's recovery of lost continents, but maybe you'll have commensurate success in bookmaking. Soa bolted up his stairs again. Without another word, Seto fell asleep in his sleeping bag. The next morning, Soa awoke Seto to a breakfast of six sardines on hard toast. Seto asked, is this fish from the north shore? Yes. Soa waved Seto to the front of the shop. Through the empty doorway was a view extending all the way down the north side of the mountain to a beach. I caught them myself this morning. No one will fish this side of the island because of all the crocodiles on the shore. But the crocodiles and I get on well, so they pose me no danger. Seto observed several cobalt blue crocodiles the size of limousines lying on the beach with their mouths wide open. Why aren't there any crocodiles at South Harbor? He he asked. Because the sun is Better over here. And there's the wall around south harbor to keep any stray crocodiles out should they become curious about the fishing folks. My parents told me the wall was to keep out invaders from furthest south. That's a fishing folks myth. To mask that, they built the wall for fear of nature. This statement made little impression on Seto, for his attention had moved on to the Protoceratops herds grazing on the north side's pastures. Why, he asked, do those sheep look like that? Soa chuckled as he set up several sheets of paper and calligraphy brushes on the iron wrought table. I'll have you read Criso's guide to the Fauna of the island so you can learn our quadrupeds. Those are Protoceratops, a genus very important to our work because we use their skins to bind most of our books. Look at all the colors they come in. The shepherds breed them to maximize the variety of their skins. That male by the magnolia tree halfway down the hill is an emerald quill tail. See how green his frill is now that spring has come? It's an excellent breed for botanical books, given its verdant scales. Seto re examined the books in the shop. Their spines had the same palette as the hundreds of Protoceratops, with one volume called Mosses, Endemic to the Peaks of l', Auxo, bound in the emerald scales of a quill tail, and another called A Memoir of My Time as a Prairie Merchant, done in the same yellow striped magenta as a Protoceratops. Seto noticed crossing a stream flowing downhill east of the marketplace. This stream, he realized, came from the spring that flowed through the trench at the north end of the amphitheater. So he proposed that stream must have been installed for the animals to drink from. That's one theory of the spring's origin. Another is that the island's original population opened the spring for themselves to drink from. Although how they opened a spring at all on the top of the island is unknown, they must have been hydrologists far beyond anyone we have on the island today. You inferred the stream was man made? Well, no stream so straight would occur in nature. Once breakfast was over, Seto's lessons began. First, he wrote each letter of the Alphabet in his own hand, which he'd never done before. His letters were impermissibly crooked and pretentious in the extent of their serifs, but their potential was unmistakable. Less pressure, shorter serifs, more consistency. After some meditation on the letter A, Soa showed Seto some examples of calligraphy from books on the shelves, A history of the island, written 130 centuries earlier, exemplified the curves and swirls of waterform script. For contrast. A book called Constructing a Reliable Nautical Compass contained a thorny, angular script that had only emerged in the last 300 years. This lesson structure recurred every day. Seto's learning pace accelerated constantly, so that by week's end he had progressed to the letter H and the tall, narrow script of the desert. When he wasn't painting Leaves of Practice paper with increasingly intricate letterforms, Seto ran errands around the marketplace for Soa. If ink ran out, Seto filled a clay pail with water from the stream, and if the desired color had a simple enough recipe, Soa let Seto mix the ink himself. Thus, in his third week, Seto mixed water with a mustard colored powder to yield an ink called loud canary with level 4 viscosity. SOA used the concoction for a footnote in a short treatise on child rearing, explaining Nothing, warns the reader like a yellow Sometimes Soa left the shop to go fishing. Seto would follow him down to the north shore, where the crocodiles lay statuesque. Soa always gave these lounging giants a collegial wave, as if they were acquaintances in a cubicled workplace. Before wading into the water in his swim trunks, his head of wispy old man's hair would suddenly and intentionally disappear under the waves. Then he'd emerge with hands full of sardines. Soa and Seto always munched a few sardines on the way back to the shop, while taking care to save the rest for toast and so forth. Sometimes they'd stay a while on the beach to watch the little bats who flitted between open crocodile mouths to eat detritus on the stalagmite like teeth. Normally Soa only made books for export to faraway places, but sometimes he would take a private commission from someone on the island. A commission seeking customer came in during the 10th week of Seto's apprenticeship. The woman, dressed in green robes and a gold cone hat, entered the store unannounced and greeted Soa familiarly. She was amused to see a boy so young working with a man so old. My name is Mario. Are you learning the book ropes, little minnow? Seto nodded shyly. Mario and Soa discussed the island's latest happenings, her tone gossipy as she related an affair between an oligarch's wife and a South harbor vegetable merchant. Soa feigned interest in this tidbit admirably, while Seto in the middle of honing his punctuation marks, gradually became oblivious to the chatter. He didn't notice when Mario began to outline her commission, a book of island stories for her daughter's birthday, to be decorated with color illustrations and bound in the swirled blue and gold scales of what was called a princely turquoise Protoceratops. Only when he heard his name called did Seto leave his calligraphic reverie. Seto, I have an errand for you to complete on Mario's behalf. Go westerly down the north side of the mountain until you come upon a herd of protoceratops spangled in blue and gold, where you will buy a skin with this coin. It was the size of a scallop shell, this weathered old silver coin with a monkey puzzle tree impressed on its obverse and a view of the walled south harbor on its reverse. Seto embarked on his errand immediately under a mid afternoon sun without clouds to intercept it. Many of the protoceratops were sheltering under cycads. Some juveniles were mock fighting in the horsetail covered open spaces. Seto saw his quarry halfway down the hill. Five gleaming protoceratops in just the colors Soa had described. They were clustered sleepily in the shade of a cycad grove, overlapping their tails affectionately. Legs stretched out dog like, their patches of gold scales caught the sunlight in a dazzle. Somewhat apart from the others, a female was guarding a nest of 20 eggs. She looked Seto in the eye sternly. A shepherd's burrow lay near the small group of animals. This side of the mountain was home to about a dozen shepherds, all of whom dug cavernous burrows in the side of the slope rather than bothering with above ground housing. The burrow's opening, six feet across and utterly dark despite the sun, emitted a bloody smell. A male voice called up to Seto from the underground. What do you need? I've come to purchase the skin of a turquoise prince. Protoceratops. Princely turquoise, yes. Sorry. Can you render me this service? Toss coinage down here? Seto flicked the silver into the little abyss. For a moment nothing happened. Then a pair of human eyes appeared below. Then a gnarled bald head. Then the tall muscled body of a solitary shepherd. He emerged from the burrow without any kind of human grace to his movements. In his left hand was a hempen noose. The shepherd approached the group of protoceratops, all of whom began to bleat and put the noose around a middle sized animal's neck. There was no protest, no resistance. The protoceratops followed the man down the burrow A squeal rang out from under the ground. The chorus of bleats became louder. Seto's knees shook and he threw up among the horsetails. The shepherd re emerged from the burrow with a linen bag of hide. Take it to the tanner, he said before descending again. Seto followed this instruction without forming a memory of doing so. When he returned to Soa's shop, he ran his eyes along the shelves of corpse remnants. Soa was lighting a candle to keep pace with the now dimming sun. He looked up at Seto and asked what the matter was. Why do we do this? Because, as holy objects, books must be honored with the most beautiful materials in our dominion. Seto had no response. He withdrew into his sleeping bag for an early end to the day. The volume of island stories for Mario's Daughter was the first book Seto made on his own. The stories themselves came principally from Soa's memory. He knew dozens of them from the career storytellers who had entertained him as a child when he was growing up near the lighthouse on the island's east shore. Seto would transcribe as Soa recited stories like Eggs Before Breakfast and the Pebble Confronts the Mountain. For that handful of stories Soa didn't know, Seto copied directly from existing books of island tales. Some of these were out of keeping with contemporary mores, such as one where a woman stood in the middle of a busy thoroughfare to protest the iconoclastic transition from rickshaws to MOA drawn carriages, only to be run over by one of the latter. Under SoA's instruction, Seto rewrote the ending so the woman turned into an alabaster statue that the carriages were forced to bypass as they made their routes. All this work yielded a book with a pebbled shell of blue and gold scales and a silver leaf embossed title that read 47 Island Stories of Various Lengths, Genres, and Periods. The birthday party for Mario's daughter arrived just in time. Take the book over the mountain and look for a palazzo done in pale yellow marble. There you will find the girl's birthday party. Mario will be preoccupied with festivities, but she will be glad to see you with the book. Her daughter will receive no gift as fine. Mario's palazzo lay just below where the cactuses began to grow on the island's south slope. The structure was a pale yellow marble cube rising out of the slope to a height of 50ft. Circular windows, like those on the government buildings, looked in on rooms full of crystal dolphin figurines and velvet furniture. A Wind band was playing. You may see me daily if you like on the flat roof of the house, signaling to Seto that he must find his way up there to deliver the gift. Luckily, a rope ladder to the roof hung down one of the walls. Seto struggled to climb with an arm wrapped around the book. At the top were dozens of people, more than Seto had ever seen at once, most of them drinking cocktails and wearing gold cone hats. Their clothes were varied. Some wore robes in frills and tinsel, while others wore trousers with nothing at all to cover their chests. At the center of the rooftop was the birthday girl on a seti with a line of attendees assembled to pay their regards and give gifts. A disproportionate number of the people in line were young men clad in the polka dotted ensembles worn by hopeful suitors. They nodded ceremoniously to the girl when they reached her and deposited their gifts in front of the ceti. Most of the gifts were prickle bananas and bunches of bright blue grapes imported at great expense. The girl's blue hue betrayed that she had already tried some of the grapes. Eager to pass on the book and leave the spectacle, Seto began looking for Mario. He found her fussing over a platter of overcooked sausages. They're not nearly bursting enough with drinks. Juiciness. She exclaimed at a servant in a purple cone hat. Bring me up some really juicy sausages for this party, please. The servant nodded and hastened down the rope ladder. Seto approached reluctantly. Hello, Mario. I've brought your daughter's Island Story compilation. Oh boy. Thank you, thank you, thank you. How about you go give it to her yourself? I am a little preoccupied with sausage hijinks. Sure, said Seto, and wove his way through the crowd to the line of people in front of the seti. At the front of the line, a teenaged boy in a polka dotted cape was reciting bad poetry. Of all the things under the sky, you are the one who caught my eye. Won't you make me your only one? Jessana? Hear that? My heart's undone. Five spaces in line behind the inept suitor, Seto sighed louder than he meant to. Grape hued Jessana was more forgiving. That was a great oration, Marcille. You should try your words on Donna. See her over there by the wind band? Go ahead. She's really keen on you. Marcil blushed and skipped over to the wind band. It wasn't at all the callous rejection Seto expected from an oligarch's daughter. Reclining on a ceti with mounds of fruit at her feet. He followed her interactions with the gift bearers ahead of him in line and found that she was warmer to each of them than they deserved. Her clothing, vocabulary, and mannerisms mirrored those of her guests, but her sweetness was distinctive. It made Seto think unaccountably of the dove pairs that cuddled on rooftops when night fell on South Harbor. Soon Seto reached the front of the line. He noticed new things about Jessana's appearance, like the smooth arch her hair formed around the top of her forehead and the way her eyes looked green in one light and brown in another. I have brought you a book on your mother's behalf. Oh. I bet she had you make it for her, didn't she? Uh, yes. So it's really a gift from you? You can think of it that way, if you like. I like. Let me see the book. She felt the COVID then leaped through. This is gorgeous, she said. How do you do it? You must be some kind of magician. The assembly was me. The skin is a protoceratops. Jessana's face darkened to shade. I don't want something with a gory history. Take it back with you wherever you came from. And tell my mom on your way out. Or actually don't, because she'll get mad and bite your head off. I'll take the book back. I don't want to leave you with any impression that I was complicit in the gore. I don't have that impression. I'm starting to think you can hold up a conversation. I can. Jessana lowered her voice. This isn't a good time for any real conversation. Do you know the spring at the top of the peak? Yes. Meet me there when the moon's a quarter of the way through the sky. Seto thought he understood what was happening, but to confirm, he asked. I've out competed the suitors. I'll see you tonight, was all Jasana said. She handed the book back to Seto, and he was on his way. His head was so far up in the clouds that he hardly perceived the walk back to Soa's side of the mountain. That evening. Seto was admirably composed for someone without pertinent experience. He didn't wring his hands or tap his feet. His heart rate was the only physiological tell, and Jessana couldn't have perceived that. She sat next to him on the west side of the amphitheater, and they began to talk. It was easy conversation. Before long, Jasana said, I have got A rhyme for you, Seto. You're an alright sight in the moonlight. Can you do a rhyme compilation book and put some of mine in there? Maybe no one's attempted a rhyme compilation. While I'd like it very much, it would give us another excuse to see each other. I should hope excuses aren't a strict prerequisite to that. No prerequisites. Just don't treat me like a crystal dolphin. They discussed everything, from quarrels Jessana had had with her friends over who was the best dancer to which kind of cheese had the least noxious smell. After an hour or so, Jessana grew weary of talk and taught Seto a dance called the Fishmonger. Having lived among fishmongers most of his life, Seto couldn't help but laugh at the inaccuracy of the absurd movement. When a misstep caused him to fall to the earthen floor of the amphitheater, Jessana joined him there and gave him an unexpected kiss. She did it so quickly that the adrenaline didn't have time to course through Seto's body until after the kiss had begun. When the moon had made it halfway through the sky, they said good night. Seto and Jessana met every subsequent night, too, varying the location of their meetings. Mario was more than happy to have Seto in her palazzo, because in her this young man has a really promising future, what with the books and all. In the meantime, Seto's bookmaking kept improving. He acted on Jessana's proposal for a rhyme compilation, sifting through hundreds of books for choice rhymes until he had something like a rhyme thesaurus. Soa remarked, only your taste exceeds your initiative. It was the haberdashery amid robes and pantaloons and cone hats where Seto first noticed an outbreak of penzel pot. The haberdasher's eyes were colorless, and they played tricks on their owner. To him, Seto looked just like Soa. Seto had seen this during his childhood. After a few years of tormenting tricks, the afflicted eyes would shrink all the way to the size of peas until they became useless. Penzel pot was contagious. Seto didn't catch it himself, but before long he saw it in Jessana's eyes. First they stopped changing from brown to green depending on the light. Then Jessana started seeing what looked like a protoceratops standing on its rear legs, only instead of the frill and beak, it bore a head identical to her own. Seto and Soa sought this chimera in the gymnosperm pastures After Jessana reported it, and when they found nothing, they knew Penzilpot had tricked her eyes. Jessana resolved to cure herself upon learning her prognosis. No malady's getting the better of me, she declared. Seto had done his reading, and he told Jesana the cure is an oil found in the bulbs of a tulip variety that grows on the other side of the world. I looked through an atlas, and it would take a year for us to get there by ship. We need to start now. Don't worry, Ajat. My mom will bankroll the voyage. She was mistaken. What are you, a mariner? Asked Mario. You've only ever known paradise. You wouldn't do well out there. No, you don't need to go. I'll just buy you a couple days in a mud bath. Mario had some servants take Jessana to a mud bath on the west side of the island. The treatment emboldened the Penzilpod's tricks so that Jessana saw disfigured reflections of herself in the glossy mud. Sometimes her hands appeared to be splitting in two, but worst was when her nose inched slowly up her forehead towards her hair. She was allowed to leave after two days of isolation. That night, Jessana met Seto under the moon cast shadows of monkey puzzle trees. My mom's a bust, jessana announced. Insofar as she sees a problem, she thinks mud is the answer. We need to get voyage money somewhere else. Have you talked to Soa? Seto had, and Soa had been firm. There are inviolable things in the crust of the island. One of these is a mother's will defying that would defile this place, which can never be done, no matter the exigency. And if you leave with Jessana, I know you won't come back. Seto relayed all of this to Jesana, who rolled it over in her mind without changing her expression. She rose from the floor of the amphitheater to sip from the spring. Then she returned to Seto's arms and looked him in the eye. Soa might as well have it in for me. Seto nodded. He has a lot of money in that little attic apartment of his, right? Seto nodded again. You see, then it's hard. I imagine he cares about me a lot. Well, I'm your wife to be, if you'll have me with me. You don't have to imagine. The next morning, Jessana snuck out of a Charleston lesson arranged by Mario in the palazzo's dance room. She gave a last scan to the crimson floorboards with the little butterflies painted on them, the ebony grandfather clock with dust gnawing at its lion's feet, and the crystal dolphin figurines. Mario was sitting in a chair in the corner of the room, smoking a tea cigarette while a servant polished her toenails with dyed beeswax. Jessana said, mom, someone is at the door. Who? I don't hear anyone. I don't know who it is. Maybe someone died and you're a big name in the will. Don't tease me, dear. I'll go check the stoop. Say, though, whatever happened with the eye thing? The mud made it worse. Mom. That mud cured your grandmother of lupus 70 years ago. You know. It's excellent mud. You'll just have to spend some more time out there. I can't have my beloved's eyes shrinking to some unsightly size. I can take care of my own eyes, Mom. Go on the door. When Mario was gone, Jessana slipped out an open window unnoticed. Her refusal to cry fell on its face. Once Jessana reached the bookshop on the other side of the island, Seto said, soa just started down to the shore for sardines. I told him I was too tired. Let's go. They approached the staircase in the back of the shop. Seto had never set foot on it before, and when the guilt of touching the first step overwhelmed him, he looked at Jessana to reassure himself of the necessity. Up they went, keeping quiet so as not to corporealize their theft with noise. Their heads poked through the opening in the ceiling that led to the upper room. Only a window as wide as an orange crate provided any light. Seven or eight posters hung on the slanted walls, human sized posters depicting animals that neither Seto nor Jessana had ever seen, some with wings like a ship's sails and others with teeth meant for killing. A mattress stuffed with hay rested on the floor with a chamber pot at its foot. Stacks of books, more tattered and dog eared than those on the shelves downstairs lined the edges of the room. In a too small rocking chair under the window sat Soa. His mouth was a line under his nose and his eyebrows were furrowed in pain. How did you know? I've seen enough of your development to forecast your mind's trajectories, Jessana interjected. Reconsult your ethics, Soa. I need my eyes. So you do. Soa stood up and shambled across the room to the staircase, where the pair's heads were still only poking through the opening in the floor. From a pocket of his inky clothes. He produced a gold coin with the circumference of a coffee mug. You will come back. Yes, they said. Soa handed Jessana and Seto the coin. On one side were hundreds of illegible words carved by jackknife, on the other a pyramidal palazzo. There was no need to run, as the far bound ships wouldn't leave until after dinner time. Yet Jessana and Seto were still so frantic that they reached south harbor with an hour to spare. Seto hadn't seen the south side neighborhoods in over a year. They were exactly the same, but they looked completely different from his new vantage. Further up the rungs, he revisited posters pasted on mosaic walls that fish at better prices than conceivable. Talk to Air Yamo at the docks, cured serpent from the remotest ports. Around sunset they boarded the cutter that would take them a third of the way to the continents. Had they looked back at the island, they would have seen a gradient the wooden tenements at the base of the mountain, palazzi of marble and stucco nestled in scrublands at the middle elevation, blue green cactuses and authorized buildings near the top, monkey puzzle trees jutting out of the peek, all of it in relief against familiar pink island dusk. Soa and Mario didn't hear from their beloveds after that. Many years later, Seto and Jasana told their children of the island with its protoceratops herds and alabaster, and their children believed not a word of it.