But you’re not here anymore, Park thought. And when they kept their secrets from me, I didn’t know what to fear. I was afraid of everything.

At least it’s over now, she told herself. At least now she knew. No more secrets, no more fear.

What had she said to Glenn then, on that sun-showered day? Had she ignored him, had she thanked him? Had she wondered what her android guardian was keeping from her? She couldn’t remember—the memories felt waxy with disuse and time. A feeling of acceptance washed over her. It didn’t matter. It was over now. Things could proceed as usual.

A gray veil seemed to fall over her eyes. Eventually Park settled into the rattling of the ship’s walls and dreamt of her jettisoned body hurtling through folds in space and time. There was Earth below her, spinning away, blue-blushed and familiar. She didn’t know why, but she turned away from it. Her body aimed instead for cold and distant stars.

12.

Antarctica was good to Park. The training of the Deucalion’s crew took place in a biodome there, and Park had initially resisted going; the biodome was for the sole benefit of those going on expeditions, crewmembers who would have to acclimate to building and dwelling in their own biospheres once they’d surveyed Eos’s terrain and established the beginnings of a settlement. Park herself would be stuck on the ship; she’d never need to live in an artificial habitat, so in her view, she didn’t need the training.

But Dr. Keller said that she needed to go to Antarctica anyway, to observe the candidates under the peak of their stress. The biodome, for training purposes, was designed to be even worse than the confines of their future ship—and Antarctica’s bleak and lifeless landscape was the closest they could come to simulating Eos’s alien tundras.

To her surprise, Park loved it. She had never been outside the cities before, but she adjusted well to the blank, razor line of the arctic horizon, the roaring emptiness of the ice. Most candidates, Dr. Keller warned her, would feel claustrophobic: the pressures of their own thoughts would creep up on them. Most of them had never been stranded with themselves for so long before. There had always been diversions to stimulate, occupy, distract—but here, at the bottom of the world, they would feel trapped in the microcosms of their own minds.