White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Two

An hour's run, lukewarm shower—can't even have our creature comforts—and fresh outfit later, I steel myself and return to the dining room. Liu and Krüger have dispersed, leaving an ecosystem of red marker scribblings on the table. Why couldn't he have gotten blue? Every time I see this colour somewhere, I have half a heart attack thinking someone's cut themself on one of the kitchen knives.

Liu is in her room if the off-tune singing not quite muffled by the "soundproof" door is to judge, and Krüger has left to check the instruments outside. His sign-out on the fingerprint register dates back less than ten minutes. I wander back to the common room occupying the Pod's broadest regions. It's a square-ish space with windows along both exterior walls, and blow-up rubber couches that look comfy at a glance. A rickety metal-and-plastic coffee table boasts three coffee-mug rings, an empty mug, two of Liu's beloved notebooks, four pens—two of them capless—and a smattering of crumbs.

I take a deep breath, run a hand through my hair, and move deliberately to the other side of the room. I need a haircut; I'm getting shaggy. I have to punt a couch out of the way to reach the only window designed for anyone shorter than a meter sixty: a long, vertical thing that stares at you from across the room like a cat's pupil. The view outside is resoundingly white. If Krüger didn't clip himself to the line Kwon installed last week when we saw this blizzard coming, I'll skin him alive and turn him into a throw pillow.

Which would probably still be comfier than the couches, actually.

I'm going to start dropping obscenities if I have to exist near the mess on the coffee table any longer, and having a team member outside alone on my watch never fails to make me squirrelly. Out here, at least. I pace down the hallway to the back of the Pod, resisting the urge to check outside for Krüger again. Bedrooms, comms room, workshop, gym. I feel like I've been here six hundred times in the last week alone. I spin around and retrace my steps: ten to the common room, six across it, and another ten past the kitchen and dining room, cleaning closet, and into the research lab. Is counting steps an early sign of insanity? Or am I just spinning?

There's a ladder masquerading as a staircase at the back of the lab. I haul myself up it by the railing and step out into the greenhouse that occupies the Pod's second-ish floor. Plants cram the space like pillow stuffing. I breathe deeply, but hydroponic systems carry none of the rich, earthy smell that I miss more often than I care to admit. I push my way to the center of the room, where I can get a better look at the sky.

Oh, for fuck's sake. It's been six and a half days; you'd think the snow would have gotten tired and blown off somewhere else already. This is the worst weather we've had in two months at the station, and that's saying something.

News clippings of Jenu's dust storms and the havoc they wreaked spring to mind unbidden. My gaze lingers outside. The head of Liu and Krüger research group might have been onto something when she used Jenu and Mahaha's similarities to justify this mission. The ferocity of their storms matches, as does their unpredictability. I hope the wind anomalies Krüger spotted last week don't draw another parallel. Jenu deserves more research, but I'd hate to see missions to its closest meteorological match—this—become commonplace in an effort to understand it.

The airlock pops downstairs, followed by a shout. "Boss?"

I let out a breath and trot back down the staircase and find Krüger shedding snow all over our pint-sized lobby. Safe inside again. He unzips the top half of his suit, which empties a small drift into my boots by the door. "We're going to get snowed in if we don't move the Pod."

Shit. "Kwon?"

"On it!" comes a call from down the hallway. The ceiling whines as a sensor array starts its upward trajectory from the Pod roof. I sincerely hope the equipment can still register the local topography through this storm.