Not Park. To her it simply felt like the environment had finally changed to suit her; as if she had always lived within a bubble of ice, peering calmly out at an empty world. Now there were merely a few more people inside the bubble, and she didn’t mind this—even though they peered at her suspiciously, and conversations died when she entered a room. Once or twice she found that someone had taken the battery-powered lantern from her tent, or filled both of her boots with snow.

“It’s like frat row around here,” Dr. Keller said.

“It’s all right,” Park said. “This happened in college, too.”

“For different reasons, I would hope,” said Keller. Together they hypothesized that their presence was fomenting resentment: the expedition candidates knew that they were being evaluated, dissected, their suitability rigorously commented on by Keller and Park to ISF. While the candidates ran through simulations of the various tasks they’d have to perform on Eos, familiarizing themselves with the equipment as well as with each other—Park and Keller were watching. Always watching.

And Park was the more vulnerable target of the two, being younger and more introverted. The Eos team viewed her as an ISF snitch, a ladder-climber, a betrayal to her peer group—and also just plain strange. She was also troublingly unavailable as a sexual partner—none of the expedition members were married—and this isolated her even further. There was no comfortable niche for her in the social structure. No connections to anchor her to the community.

Once, during a patient session, Valentina Hanover asked to be called “Hunter.”

“Hunter,” Park repeated, thinking of her file. “That isn’t your middle name.”

Valentina gave her a look of loathing. “It’s called a nickname, you absolute imbecile.”

That about summed up everyone else’s apparent impressions of Park. She barely spoke to them, and when she did, it always seemed like she came off as baffling, primitive: some kind of specimen that one examined with half-disgust, like protozoic ooze. No, they acted like she was an alien sightseer, ogling the most basic human interactions, and in turn, they ogled her, too—squinted at her from behind the glass, whispered and smirked to each other.

“Of course they’ll steal your boots,” Keller said later, running a hand over her stubbled head. “In environments like this, an academic community reverts to a tribe. The biodome becomes a habitat. And tribes will always choose an enemy, arbitrary or not, to unite against, to single out. It helps them bond.” She shook her head. “Be thankful no one’s poisoning your water supply or burning you at the stake.”

Grim jokes, but then, Keller admitted to succumbing to the dour mood that hung around the biodome like a buildup of stale air. It had only taken a week without sunlight or hot water for the prospective crewmembers to get irritable.