Her commander paused then. Worked his jaw for a moment; opened his mouth and then shut it again. Finally he said, looking tired: “We never kept things from you, Park, or anyone really, because of anything personal. You know that ISF determines who knows what based on who they think they can control. It’s a matter of conscription. They explicitly told us not to let you—the non-conscripted—know too much, in case of leaks. They don’t want the data getting out to the knowledge companies back home. Or even to the terrorists themselves.”

“Yes,” was all Park could say. She told herself not to tremble.

Wick spread his hands. He broadcasted helplessness, resignation, the idea that these things were out of his hands. “If it were up to me, everyone on the ship would have access to the same amount of information,” he said. Then he looked away. “But it’s not. Up to me, that is. So I have to ask that anything I tell you is kept private and between us. I’m violating my orders by bringing you into the fold. I discussed it with Sagara, and I think—I think he doesn’t mistrust you personally. In fact, I think he respects you, in his own strange way. But he’s an ISF man. By the book, follows his orders. Loyal to ISF to a fault. So he won’t be happy about me telling you. But I think it’s necessary. My call as commander.”

“I understand,” Park said, trying to crank on a soothing smile. “I’ll obey the confidentiality strictures. Of course.”

Wick took a breath.

“We came to Eos for colony reconnaissance, it’s true,” he said. “But we also came for something else. Close to a year ago, ISF received a mayday transmission from a miner who’d gotten stranded here by accident. In viewing the videos he sent, we discovered something about the planet. There’s some sort of phenomenon that goes on here. A—gravitational anomaly.”

Park waited. She expected herself to feel the lancing bolt of shock, maybe even outrage. Wick was telling her that they’d hidden half the damn mission from her. But somehow she felt nothing. It had been distantly obvious to her all along—like a billboard she could only dimly make out. Why else would they forbid her from seeing the planet? Why else would they confine non-essential personnel to the ship, if not because there was something unusual about Eos itself?

“What does that mean?” she asked. “A gravitational anomaly?”

“It’s not far from here,” Wick said. “A few kilometers. We’ve been calling it the Fold, for lack of a better word. It looks like fractal structures from a distance, or giant mirrors towering into the sky—but in fact, they’re not structures or surfaces at all. They’re creases in space. In dimensions.”

Park stared at him. “I’m not following.”