White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Liu gapes at me. Several long seconds elapse before she says, "Did you just propose that we blow something up?"

"I did." I can't stop the tug of a smile. "Well? What do you think?"

Still stunned, she turns her attention back to the snow hill. "Well, the flares aren't electronic... I don't know how it would react. We've never blown something up here before."

"There's a first time for everything." That's a joke. "But that aside, how different would it be from the snow cannons or the defroster?"

"It doesn't like the defroster."

"I wonder about that."

She frowns at me. "Why?"

"I've been thinking about all the times Mahaha's reacted to us around the Pod, and what they all have in common." The trip here gave me lots of time to overthink things, so I figured I might as well put it to good use. "Name all the things it's done."

"It's attacked Dea..."

"Besides that."

She ticks them off, still frowning. "It's frozen a lot of instruments... it puts ice on the Pod... puts ice on the instrument panel... covers us in butterflies..." She gives me a sidelong glance. "What do those have in common?"

"Think about how we respond to them." I want to see if she comes to the same conclusion I have, based on the evidence.

"Well, Tobias has to go out and thaw the instruments, and you go melt and chip off the ice. We didn't really do anything about the butterflies."

"We did. The Pod's top camera was totally covered when we raised it to see if we'd been buried. The butterflies cleared when Dea turned on the heating mechanism."

I see the moment she lands on the answer. Her eyes widen. "Melting the ice."

"All of those make us go out and melt whatever it puts on our equipment. And then every time we melt it, it puts more back in the same place."

"Like it wants us to do it again." Liu is staring at me. "Do you think—"

"I don't know," I say. "But I think this moon of ours might be fond of water."

"But then why did it back off when you and Tobias hit it with the defroster? When you were rescuing Dea..."

"What if it wasn't the defroster?"

On the day we woke up to find the Pod covered in butterflies, Krüger told me Mahaha acted differently towards him. If it likes the water that comes from us melting things, that would make sense: he's been outside more than the rest of us combined, checking our instruments twice a day and thawing them again and again. I saw snow fingers reaching up the trickles of meltwater one such trip sent running down the Pod wall. Reaching like they wanted to catch the drips.

I've been out less often, and until recently, I've had no association with water. It wasn't until Kwon invented the defroster and we began using it everywhere that I found myself with a heat cannon in my hands, accompanying Krüger around the Pod to check for storm damage. We melted and chipped small patches of ice off the wall. The next night, we found that same wall covered in out-of-place ice. Krüger and I went out to melt it off again. It was on our way back that Mahaha first scoped me out with a butterfly.

The parallel doesn't stop there, either. There's no other reason I can think of for Mahaha to discriminate between our technologies, besides the obvious example of a person it likes sitting on a vehicle it doesn't. Our probes were an easy target. But the Pod, with Krüger thawing his instruments and both of us melting off ice, has been a ready source of water.