Hawthorne had shut down the biome for the evening, and most people had already left the main floor, streaming to the large auditorium for the keynote speech. Crowds of people had eddied around the various stalls, peering at what was on offer, networking, and pretending there was still enough time to stop what they all knew was coming. They walked around with easy smiles, as if the Florida coastline wasn’t barricaded by high sea walls. As if the hurricanes that descended on the state yearly didn’t grow stronger every year. The Kennedy Space Center was thinking of packing up and relocating to an area where the high winds didn’t cancel launches more often than not.

The crush of the people hadn’t overwhelmed Naomi, but as someone used to the relative silence of her lab, the constant noise and having to shoulder her way through the throng—who would stop like pebbles in a stream—was exhausting.

Naomi let her hands fall open in her lap as she tilted her head up, breathing deeply, emptying her mind.

She and Valerie had spent the day introducing the public to Cavendish. Naomi had been on a couple of panels that day, knowing her face was being recorded, her words quoted and dissected from every angle. Sent out in out-of-context or paraphrased bytes on social media. Her face hurt from holding a polite smile.

Some of the panellists had been more diplomatic than others, but Valerie had, without fail, gone into one of her impassioned speeches, any attempt the others made at candy-coating the future washed away by Valerie’s acid.

The artificial sunlight in the biome was as orange as Ran’s would be. Naomi had grown four types of vascular plants that were similar to Devonian-era flora on Earth, like ferns and lycopods, in her larger biome from seeds brought back through the probes. For ease of transport, her portable biome only grew one.

The ferns weren’t radically different at first glance. The fanned, striated leaves were still green, though tinged closer to teal. Instead of fiddleheads, the ends spiralled sinuously in a way Earthen ones never did. The ground was a rich, loamy soil, softened with a blueish moss. Between the orange sunlight and the odd shade of the greenery, Cavendish would likely look like a world on the edge of perpetual sunset.

Naomi had spent the last year studying the reports from the Cavendish probes until her eyes crossed. When the first bit of blue-green had emerged from Earth soil treated to be like Cavendish’s, she had felt a fierce satisfaction.

That little sprout would be her ticket to NASA.

Naomi was late—she should already be in the green room. Valerie’s keynote speech would begin soon, but it almost hadn’t happened. Protests. Petitions. Valerie Black would not represent what the UN stood for in this conference, they said. She was too loud. Too radical.

Too female.