She went to find Wan Xu. “Oh, I see,” the designer said, poking his disheveled head out his tent flap. “That’s interesting.”

“What is it?” Park asked. “It isn’t happening outside the dome. Could it be something in our atmosphere?”

“It’s plankton,” Wan Xu said. “Bioluminescent. Most likely Noctiluca scintillans. This whole tundra is composed of frozen seawater. The plankton were trapped in the ice; the more the top level melts, the more they’re disturbed, and they glow.”

“This is a common phenomenon, then?” It disconcerted her a little, thinking that there were millions of single-cell organisms milling around beneath their feet. “Do they do this during the spring thaw?”

“Oh, no,” Wan Xu said. “This is by no means a regular occurrence. It’s harmless, but unusual. This wouldn’t occur in a natural system.” He stood there brooding for a while. “Curious. The biodome causes any number of unpredictable results.”

“What’s different about this one?” Park demanded. “What’s different now?”

Wan Xu looked at her, then smiled without mirth. “Dr. Park,” he said slowly, because Park was a psychologist and he was Wan Xu, “I don’t think you understand. This is a manmade structure in a place where man was not supposed to go. A closed system of our own making, not a natural one. We’re playing in the realm of gods now; none of our variables are known. Everything is different here.”

After that, he let his tent flap fall shut, and Park was left to wander the pale-gleaming night alone. Her boots stirred through puddles of liquid light. The backs of her eyes ached—with tiredness, Park told herself. She looked at the moon and wished she were there, arrested in silence and the untouched powdery dust like snow. Beyond the moon, beyond the dark curtain that hung behind it, Eos was waiting. What had she told Bebe? An opportunity of a lifetime. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose sight of what’s important.

Before they left the cliffs, Park had climbed back out of the Earthmover. She’d tried to salvage something from the wreckage, tried to gather up the scattered pieces of the HERCULES. The metal shards had slipped through her hands. Her face had stung from the cold. She’d felt as if the metal stake tucked against her chest was freezing, turning the rest of her to ice. Her body was so numb that she couldn’t hold on to any of the debris.

“Leave it,” Natalya had told her tersely, standing over her like an executioner. “Just give it up, Park. It’s not as if it’s fixable.”

13.