Rachel’s little red heart suit graphic pulsed hard and fast, while her respire icon puffed yellow clouds: settle down, it meant. If her stats worsened, the suit would inject a slowdown drug in her arm.

The elevator brought them up slow and steady, giving them all time to reflect in silence. Temperatures in the elevator fell as they neared the surface. The residual moisture on their suits froze to rime and fell away, a dusting of dirty snow. When they walked out of the elevator onto the gritty brown-red sand, the flakes fumed away within seconds. They climbed into the trawler to return to the habitat. Rachel sagged, tired. She had not adjusted well to the Martian 0.38 g or to her ill-fitting pressure suit.

Back in the hard sunlight, the big open-air bus carried them from the vent mouth, across rolling hills of sand and rock. The Martian day blared on outside but they all sat silently, meditating on the panic below. Some were texting back to Base, undoubtedly, but Rachel ignored them, letting the swaying ride calm her. Fraq gave her his intent stare, the strange glittering eyes focused directly at her in his alien way. She ignored him, too.

She was glad their suits had the new self-cleaning liners, because she had sweated up hers in the Mat tunnels and while flailing around in the streams of sudden water. She had peed in the suit, too, but at least there was a catchbag for that.

Only now, after coming up, did she feel a kind of shadow fear—dry mouth, sour stench, skin tightening around her skull, muscles knotting at the knob of her spine.

A cyclone tracked along near them, sending a whirl of red dust up hundreds of meters. Rachel marveled; she had never seen one before. She had never thought well of weather, from her experiences of it on Earth—sweaty summers, nasty hurricanes. Mars was like the moon, fairly easy gravity, about twice Luna’s. It had the disadvantages of having an atmosphere, with none of the compensations. There was not enough pressure to make the near-vacuum chemically useful, but it came with freakish sandstorms of irritating dust and howling winds. Still, there were rosy dawns and sunsets, which she liked. The nearest she had ever seen to them on the moon was the striking sliver of the sun shining through Earth’s skin of air. The thin layer of gas acted like a prism, making a flickering rainbow of colors in the eye.

She watched the cyclone unfold and die, and knew that she had at last learned something. In all the stunts with Fraq—the orbitfall, the Everest ascent, the deep-sea black smokers—there had been moments of rigid fear. Those were the worst of it. Just now, deep inside Mars, she had felt no fear because she had at last defeated her own imagination.

It made sense. Nothing happens until it actually occurs, so worry was pointless and she could live her life up until then. Danger existed only in the moment of danger. An event was bad only when it happened—not after, and certainly not before. Cowardice came from the inability to suspend her imagination. Learning to ignore imagination and live in the very second of this present minute was a great gift. And she had achieved it by some mysterious inner workings of her mind, not by conscious thought. And not through imagination.