A quiet voice said, “Tell me.”

She didn’t recognize List immediately. In this space, surrounded by alien meat, nothing sounded like it should.

“Tell me what it means,” the Archon said, his voice smoother and more pleasant than usual, and by a long measure.

“The inscription,” the Master said.

Yet his voice was more like it ever was, if that was possible.

“You made a translation,” List said. “I know you did, and I don’t see why you won’t share it.”

Nissim said nothing.

Noise passed through the stomach walls. The rumble might have been an explosion diluted by the creature’s body, or maybe it was the body changing shape. Quest had vanished long ago. At least it seemed like long ago. Diamond had set his sister down, and she quickly ate her way into the floor and out of sight, taking her glowing light with her. And since then, very little had happened.

People and Diamond stood together.

Without fans blowing, the air was growing hotter, and each breath tasted staler than the one before.

With that strange voice, List said, “Master. Please. I want to know.”

Nissim moved the torch again, changing arms and counting those scared sorry faces. Except for Karlan’s face, which was hidden. Their bully-protector was holding one rifle, staring back at the collapsed hole, probably wishing that an army would give him another excuse to fight.

Haddi put her hand in the torch’s beam, finger shadows dancing across the stomach walls. With a sharp impatient voice, she said, “Tell my son at least. He deserves to know, doesn’t he?”

The gray ball was resting in the middle of them. It would be nice if the object glowed for them. That was a small trick to dream about from the object that had destroyed the world.

The torch tilted, its beam finding the inscription.

“Art has a tone,” the Master began. “Even in translations, art and poetry have a distinct feel—one layer over another five layers. You often see that in the old works, the classics that people save and protect long after governments vanish and every tree and its grandchildren have died.

“But this is not one of those times. This is not art.”

He paused, and the stomach around them shivered. For an instant it seemed as if they were moving with the corona, but then the meat wasn’t shivering meat, nothing around them but a deathly calm.

What if Quest couldn’t digest the corona?

The idea came into Elata’s head, and she couldn’t fling it out again. That’s how true it felt.

“Okay,” said Seldom. “But what does this mean?”

“These are instructions,” said the Master.

The beam wasn’t bright enough to reveal the etched words. When Elata looked, all she saw was the smooth timeless gray face of the ball.

“They are brief and very simple instructions about how to begin a purging or cleansing,” he continued.

“Cleansing what?” Elata asked.

Except why did she talk? She didn’t care one way or another.

“The cell,” the teacher said. “Cleansing the cell.”

“Like cells under a microscope?” Seldom asked.

People weren’t real, Elata was thinking. Habits were what counted, and people were just convenient closets to fill up with important, everlasting habits.

And just like that, in this unimagined place, they were suddenly in class again.

“Not that kind of cell,” Nissim said. “I can’t be sure, but the text seems to refer to the kind of cell where prisoners are kept.”

List made a soft, doubting sound.

Then Prima began to laugh—a long strange cackle leaving everyone else uncomfortable.

Nothing around them moved, and the heat was growing worse by the moment.

Nissim moved the torch to the other hand, and he looked at Elata’s face longer than anyone else’s. Then he pointed the beam at the ball, saying, “If I understand what I can read, then the sun’s disappearance was just the initial step. Then the cell’s floor opens, and every wisp of moisture and every breath of air is sucked out of the bottom, leaving the cell chamber ready for new prisoners.”

“Prisoners,” List said.

“Yes,” Nissim said.

Karlan snorted, amused or angry. Who knew?

Haddi leaned away from the globe, brushing against Elata.

Elata couldn’t remember where Diamond was. She turned her head one way and then the other, discovering him standing back as far he could be without being alone.

She looked at his face in the gray reflected light, and nothing about his manner seemed at all surprised.

Cold ideas got busy inside Elata’s head.

“No wonder you didn’t want to tell us,” said Prima, not laughing anymore. Now she was miserable, saying, “All of our noise about the Creation being special, except this is just a cage with bars, and everybody is a prisoner.”

“Children of prisoners,” Haddi said.

Now the old lady was laughing, nothing happy in the sound.

Elata watched Diamond, and he looked at her until he grew uncomfortable, then turned to glance into the back of the corona’s cavernous gut.

The corona was dead around them. No sound leaked in from the world outside, and maybe there wasn’t a world outside anymore.

“But there’s more,” the Master said.

Everyone turned to him. Even Karlan.

“That’s why I was desperate to look below with a good telescope. Somewhere past the sun is a mechanism, some kind of lock. The purge can be stopped. Like I said, this cell can be readied for new prisoners.”

List sounded like his old self, shrill and tense when he asked, “And how do we manage that magic?”

“Use this key to engage the sun again,” said Nissim.

“But how?”

The Master wasn’t sure. He said so with his bouncing eyes, his silence, with the hard chewing that his bottom lip had to endure. And then finally with his voice, he admitted, “I don’t have any idea how.”

Elata looked back at Diamond.

This time the boy didn’t look away from her.

“I don’t understand,” Seldom complained. “Do these instructions tell us how to use the key or not?”

“I can’t decipher that last line,” the old man admitted. “Not well enough, not even to guess.”

Then the torch changed hands again, early this time. But both arms were very tired, and the beam dropped low and stayed down.

Elata approached Diamond. She could barely see the face. Grabbing his shoulders, she dragged him away from the others. Five long steps, and it felt as if they were far from prying ears. And then when she was certain that nobody else could hear, she said, “You know what the words mean. Or at least you think you know.”

He nodded. But then he said, “No.”

“You and your siblings knew to put fingers inside those holes,” she said. “So I think you know a lot, even if you’re too stupid to realize it.”

The nearly invisible face lifted, staring at her.

And then an old thought came back to Elata—an idea the girl dreamed up maybe two days after she met Diamond. She had never mentioned it. It was such an obvious idea, simple and direct and obvious. In a world full of people who were smarter than she’d ever be, she couldn’t believe that no one else had thought it. So the inspiration had to be stupid and wrong, and that’s why she never brought it up.

Until now.

“Diamond,” she said. “You have the power to do whatever you want. You could shape the world as it needs to be, or at least better than this shitty damned mess of ours. You had the power when I met you, and you didn’t even know it, did you?”

“Know what?” he asked.

“You could have told us,” she whispered. “You could have told us that you remember your life before, and you remember the Creators, maybe, and we would have believed a thousand smart instructions from the Creators. After that first day with me, you could have claimed anything. The Creators sent you here to share their blessings, and maybe you could have gotten some good things done.”