That night, Park submitted her report to ISF, recommending the termination and recall of Bebe Hill. The botanist had confessed everything when she heard what had happened to Park and Natalya: she’d not only inserted the metal stake, but had tampered with the engine, too, causing the fatal jerk of the drill that brought down the cliffs. “I only meant to make her look bad, have her come back empty-handed,” she told Wick, while a wooden-faced Park watched from behind. She made eye contact briefly with Park. “I never thought you’d get hurt. I’m so sorry, Park.”

Don’t apologize, Park thought. Her heart was both numb and raw with hatred. That had been the HERCULES’s last statement to her: “There’s nothing to apologize for. It’s not your fault.”

But it was. She hadn’t controlled the situation. She hadn’t known how to fix things—the HERCULES, Bebe, Natalya, Holt. She’d been negligent. Things had gotten out of control. That was what happened when you threw things like love into the mix, she thought. It was the unknown variable, the chaotic element.

It couldn’t happen again.

Afterward, fingering the bandage on her chin, she decided to go on her night patrol, something she and Keller sometimes did to catch any problems that erupted under the security of darkness. Mutinous talks behind tent flaps, whispered quarrels. Nightmares. Sleepwalkers and parasomniacs would immediately be sent home.

She was annoyed to find as she stepped out of her tent that the biodome’s snow had turned to slush again. This sometimes happened: Wan Xu had explained that the combined heat and mass of one hundred bodies could turn the pristine Antarctic permafrost into a dark and soupy puddle when the biodome’s circulatory systems went awry. Calculations were off, the dome designer had told her. The air was filtered properly, but sometimes there were fluctuations in temperature; this could cause the snow to melt and refreeze, dirtily, at different periods throughout the day. Adjustments would be made in time for the expedition, Wan Xu said.

The slush, when it happened, always irritated Park. She enjoyed staring out at the tundra through the biodome’s transparent film; the milky hues of dawn would spark against the flat white blade of the land, sending streaks of mandarin, peach, gold, and royal red into the sky. But what good was that when she was trapped inside a bubble of ugliness? The slush made her feel as if she were stuck inside a pimple, pus gathering around her ankles. Almost nothing else bothered her more than the unsightliness of the slush.

Tonight she looked closer, and was startled to find that the slush was palely gleaming; there was a kind of pearly luminescence coming off the ground. Park bent down to examine it further. Yes, there was a faint light moving beneath the mud, shifting in waves.