Inspiration Season

1

She'd hoped to go outside again before the beginning of Inspiration Season. Conditions had held good-relatively clear skies, normal oxygen levels, few hallucinations among the perimeter guards. All the labs were trying to squeeze in last-minute projects before the change of season, which meant lots of work for interns.

But now the meters showed the atmosphere shifting, oxygen levels trending downwards. The tula-trees were darkening, stretching towards the sky. Soon their great fleshy yellow blooms would open, sucking the remaining oxygen from the air.

It might take days-even weeks-before the levels got too low to breathe. Even then, you could take an oxygen tank. But it didn't matter. No one went outside during Inspiration Season. That was asking to come back to the Bubble altered, or not at all.

It was still unclear why the Beyond was so much more dangerous in the months when the tula-trees inhaled oxygen like animals, but the atmospheric changes definitely correlated with an uptick in strange, often fatal accidents outside the Bubble. New complications appeared every year. Even if you guarded against every danger you knew, a new one could get you. People had disappeared in full view of entire departments-gone a few steps into the tula-tree forest and vanished forever. An entire expedition was once found comatose just outside the perimeter, and though they'd been sent home, they still hadn't awakened. For a whole week last year, enormous pink flowers had bloomed in ten different sites around the Bubble, exhaling thick clouds of black spores, which had eaten through biohazard suits and caused horrible respiratory infections.

Most concerning were the people taken by the Haze. At least ten had disappeared so far after encountering the deep purple clouds, with no traces ever found again. And the Haze grew more aggressive every year, drifting towards unsecured doors as if it could sense breaches in the Bubble's seal-which perhaps it could. No one had ever gotten close to it without being taken, so no one knew quite how it worked.

Thus, when oxygen levels began to drop, no teams were sent out unless absolutely necessary, which meant no interns were sent out at all. And from what Miranda could see, Inspiration Season was just about to start.

She turned unhappily back to the task at hand: a rack of tula-tree samples with unusual spotting, which Dr. Hobok thought might have been caused by some kind of pathogen. The project technically wasn't complicated: check the affected areas under a microscope for signs of cellular deterioration. The problem was that every single tula-tree was unique on a cellular level, so it was hard to know which variations-discoloration, deformed or missing organelles, precancerous-looking growths-were disease-related, and which were normal. Every anomaly had to be checked against a huge reference gallery, and anything new required exhaustive documentation. The job took intense focus, and would keep her busy for many hours; she'd already been working on it all day. Even if she stayed the whole night, she probably wouldn't finish.

But she'd been falling behind-depressed to be trapped inside, weighed down by an odd ennui that never seemed to leave her these days. No matter how much extra time Miranda spent in the lab, her work kept piling up. Worse: she was making stupid mistakes, errors that could jeopardize entire experiments, things that would embarrass a first-year biology student.

Jordan, her supervisor, hadn't said anything yet, but she'd seen his disapproving frowns. If she couldn't pull herself together, she was going to be in pretty serious trouble.

He'd be checking her progress tomorrow. She had to process at least thirty more slides tonight-fifty would be better. A bad report could mean Miranda's contract wouldn't be renewed when it came up-internships in the Bubble were in high demand, and she could easily be replaced.