The moonlight cast a soft glow over the meadow the night that Ivy snuck out of the house. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder, her footsteps echoing with the snap of fallen twigs and the crunch of autumn leaves. She wondered if she’d made a mistake for sneaking out so late, but she shook it off and kept going.

Ivy stopped herself at the place. A cave, large and curved, with an open-mouth entrance. Her sanctuary. She pushed aside the vines that made the mouth of an entrance hold its tongue during the day. With a deep breath, she brought the flashlight from her jacket and pushed the switch forward with her thumb. The light beamed in a straight line in front of her.
Ivy’s treasure was hidden by the walls of this cave. They spilled over the ground, spines gleaming on shelves when the light hit them just right. She could imagine herself in here during the still night, turning pages and discovering new stories, new people.

Books. Ivy was a book smuggler. She was the Protector of the Paper Knowledge. Ivy had declared the title for herself after reading Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The thought of someone taking all the books, setting them on fire...No. She couldn’t think about that now. Here in 2057, books weren’t supreme. Phones were. People everywhere had them: her parents glanced at them while they ate dinner, teachers texted while lecturing, they were constant in everyone’s lives. Ivy was pretty sure that she was the only girl in her town-no, maybe the world-that read actual paper books and wrote in vintage leather journals. The only one who was offered a gleaming, screen-filled life and turned it down. The only one who read words that bloomed on her skin tickled her ears and formed a paper body: a hard spine, rough pages on her exterior, beautiful sentences in her interior.

Ivy unzipped her backpack and pulled out a stack of books. Anthem by Ayn Rand, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. She took them to one of the bookshelves and pushed each one on the shelf. Hundreds of books, pages, and pages of other worlds and ancient history, smuggled night by night into the cave. Her safe place.

Ivy brushed her fingers over the spines, letting them linger on old favorites. Once she found one to her liking, she tugged it loose and flipped to the first page. The first line read: “Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood.” She trained the light on the page and settled in for another light-and another world.