Zora and I exchange a look. Zora’s family has never taken her skiing, and although I went to the Blue Mountains last year with Mom, it was kind of a disaster. The best thing about that trip was warming up at the lodge at the end and having a hot chocolate with extra whipped cream.

She’s a coder and I’m an engineer. Neither of us are exactly the typical “outdoorsy” type. But I grit my teeth. I know I will do whatever it takes.

Zora shakes her head vigorously at Tobias. “I’ve never even been on a pair of skis before.”

“Cross-country skiing isn’t too difficult to get started.” Thankfully Tobias continues. “I do think we’ll need a team based here, in the cottage, to help guide us and keep things on track in case something goes wrong at Lake Baku. We don’t exactly know what we’ll find there.”

Zora raises her hand. “I’ll volunteer for that.”

River does as well. “Me too, man. I’m not really one for the old Nordic-style, if you catch my drift.” He gives us an all an exaggerated wink and Ashley tuts and rolls her eyes. Zora raises her eyebrows in alarm.

“He’s being a jerk,” says Ashley. “Nordic-style is just another name for cross-country skiing.”

“Oooh, okay,” says Zora, looking relieved.

“So that’s sorted. You two will be running point from here, inside the media room. We’ll all stream directly from our bakus to the big screen here.” Aero squawks, and there’s movement from the far end of the room. The wall opens out to reveal a floor-to-ceiling television screen. “Then Lacey, Ashley, Kai, and I will head to where we think Lake Baku is.”

“Awesome. I can start work coding up some trackers so that we can all make sure we know where we are in case you need to split up.” Zora’s in her element now. She moves to the table in the middle of the room. Linus plugs into the huge screen, bringing up Zora’s preferred coding platform. Then, Linus projects a keyboard onto the surface in front of Zora, and her fingers soon send code flying across the screen. River comes and sits next to her. Within seconds, they have recent satellite imagery of the region up on the big screen. Zora zooms over to where Lake Baku is indicated on Aero’s map.

“Huh, this is strange,” Zora says.

“What is it?”

“Look—the area where Lake Baku is on your old map is completely blurred out on this map.” She types a string of code. “Sometimes this can work to layer old images on top of the blurred one to try and get it to be unblurred. Nope, no luck. We’re not going to get anything new out of the satellite imagery.”