Dana had survived the end of the world, and now she did not know what to do with the morning. The war was over. God had wiped the earth clean and made it new. The sky held no smoke. The fields grew fruit she had never tasted. Everyone she passed seemed sure of their place, tending gardens or laughing in the sun. Dana wanted what they had. She wanted a life close to God, full of beauty and love and meaning. But three months into Paradise, she still felt like a guest in someone else's house. She walked to the great hall of stone and gold to study scripture with the others. Its walls stood open to the wind. Tall columns caught the light. Inside, people bent over scrolls, murmuring, nodding, at ease. Dana sat among them and opened a scroll. She read the words about the new earth. She waited to feel what they felt. Nothing came. She had crossed through fire to reach this place, yet here she sat, empty, ashamed of her own emptiness. An old woman two seats down watched her close the scroll. "You keep coming back," the woman said. "But you read like you're looking for the door." Dana's face grew warm. "I don't know why I feel nothing," she said. "Everyone else belongs here. I keep waiting to belong too." The woman set down her own scroll. "You think purpose is a gift someone hands you at the gate." She pointed at the open wall, where light fell across the golden floor. "Out there a boy can't read. A man buried his whole family before the end and can't speak of them. Nobody has taught them these words yet." Dana looked where the woman pointed. She had spent three months waiting to be filled. She had never once asked who around her was still empty. "Teaching is slow," the woman said. "It costs you. You give and give and wait years to see it grow. Most people here already found their work. This is the work no one wanted." Dana stood. Her legs felt strange, but certain. She had crossed the end of the world to be near God. Maybe nearness was not a feeling she waited to receive. Maybe it was something she made with her hands, for other people. "Then I'll take it," Dana said. The woman smiled and handed her a blank scroll and a reed pen. "Start with the boy who can't read," she said. "He sits by the far column every morning. He won't make it easy." Dana held the scroll against her chest. For the first time since the fire, she knew where she would be tomorrow, and why. She walked toward the far column to find the boy, already afraid she would fail him, and already unwilling to leave.