White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Twenty-Four

"Where are they?" she says.

"Gone." My voice is cracked. "Outside."

The dawning horror on her face tells me all I need to know. Liu and Krüger planned this on their own.

"How long ago?" she says, the stir into action exchanging some of her shock for a harder tone.

I didn't check. Kwon catches up to me as I head back to the entryway. Her hand reaches for my shoulder, then falls again when I duck over to the airlock panel and open its tracking history. The two left in the dead of night, over three hours ago. I don't need to look outside to know that even their tracks will be gone.

I punch another button and swipe the fingerprint reader, taking myself to the master log of all our personal equipment readings. It's rows and rows of data, but I don't need to see it all; another swipe takes me to the bottom. They took the probe receiver. It's still transmitting, but there's no way to send a message to it. I scroll up, looking for the last time the communication systems in Liu or Krüger's helmets were in range.

We missed them by an hour.

"Alex."

This time, Kwon doesn't need to run to catch me. She doesn't need to move at all. Her hand rests on my shoulder, warm and firm, steadying me as the spinning returns. My hands are freezing.

"They are both bright, sensible young people," says Kwon quietly. "They would not leave if they did not have a plan to get back."

"What if it hurts them?"

She doesn't have an answer to that.

"Come," she says at last.

I let her pull me away. She sends me to the comms room with a slip of paper from her pocket: a list of which of the Pod's external cameras are still working. She herself heads to the kitchen, as if breakfast matters right now.

It does matter. I know it matters. Staging a rescue alone is a last resort in hostile wildernesses, and something as simple as an empty stomach can mean the difference between success and failure. Life and death. But even a rescue isn't open to me yet. We have to wait. I can't compromise my own safety until I know I need to: until we get an SOS from Liu or Krüger, or until they overshoot the timeframe in which I can reasonably expect them to be back.

I sink down in the comfier comms room chair and bury myself in the task of sorting out the functional cameras from the frozen ones. It's been a while since I did anything with our cameras. Soon I have our last three outside eyes arranged to capture the widest possible view of the surrounding landscape. I turn on figure recognition for all three, then set an alarm to go off if they spot a person outside. A test run goes through automatically, and I jump as our station phone rings. I'd forgotten Liu rigged that up as an alarm.

Then there's nothing to do but wait. I spin my chair back and forth, leaning into the rhythm to keep myself calm. I feel detached from reality, trapped in a slowly rolling nightmare with the potential to get unfathomably worse. I can't think about the possibility. I cling to the fact that neither young scientist is yet confirmed dead.

They can't be dead. They're both young and bright, with their whole lives still ahead of them. One of them is a parent. Probably to a child who's already lost one of hers. I know how that feels all too viscerally.

They can't be dead.

I can't have failed them.

I can't go through this again.

Kwon comes to find me with fresh-from-the-pot oatmeal, complete with cinnamon, raisins, and a sprinkle of brown sugar. I murmur thanks and cradle the warm bowl, nibbling more out of habit than through conscious decision as I watch the camera feeds. Nothing moves in them except blowing snow. I try to get a sense of the clouds. The weather looks calm, at least; if I need to stage a rescue, conditions are as good as they're getting. Still, even the thought of venturing out onto Mahaha's surface alone makes my skin crawl. That kind of solo venture would be a nightmare even on earth, and even then it would only be employed if the situation was low-risk and we had a full understanding of it. None of that applies here.