“Most of it, yes, but some of it really wasn’t.” She flicks a switch, and looks up at the ceiling like she’s expecting something.

Whatever’s supposed to happen doesn’t.

“The main sensors were built specially, with the Eye in mind. Based off some wreck the company found after Phradi.”

“None of that stuff worked.” I flex my fingers. “NorCol tried something similar, I heard, but the project lived and died in months, a year at most. Something about human beings being incompatible.”

She shrugs. “This worked. In Open Waters, at least.”

“And here?”

“If they’d gotten half of it going, it would’ve been a game-changer, back when the game was only a few decades old. Hell, if they’d just gotten one of these things working, all of the froth would be property of the Sigurd-Lem Corporation.”

“There’s more than one of these things?”

“The Stone here?” She points at it under her arm. “None. Others like it, maybe ten, fifteen.” She leans back over the switches, tries another, which sparks. “Fuck,” she says, shaking her finger. “There were supposed to be thousands of them. Part of a project to map everything in sight of the Eye. Every chunk of rock, every prevailing storm system, everything. Tagged, measured, labelled, scans sent back to deep servers on Sanctuary.”

“But they couldn’t break the froth.”

She nods. “Remember the first time you saw the Eye?”

How could I forget? “You said it was artificial.”

“As far as anyone can tell, almost everything in this place is. There’s driftwood that comes in on the currents, wreckage of things that didn’t translate. Things that got chewed up somewhere between normal space and this little pocket of sky. Everything else is made. Manufactured.”

“What about the clouds?”

“Find a patch of air that’s clear enough, and you’ll grow yourself a cloud before long.”

“And the dust?”

“As much as anything else. Up close, it’s all the same colour. The same colour as the Stone over there, and the same colour as the Lighthouse. Zoom in close enough, and you’ll see that every grain is the exact same shape.”

“Christs.”

She chuckles. “Oh, it gets worse. Think about it; why would you make dust? Open Waters is full of it, why go through the trouble? Actually, forget that. Why would you make enough of anything for there to be storm cells of the stuff?”

Oh. “It’s a screen. They made it to hide something.”