White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Seven

Krüger stays silent the whole way back to the station. I can tell he's fuming as he bags the pieces we collected, but he's saving his words for himself, or for later.

Liu just stares, speechless, as we lay out the wreckage on a laboratory table. Kwon picks up the bag with the biggest sample, the first twisted slice of metal that we found. She fingers the edges carefully through the plastic, then turns to the ripped wires in the bottom. She doesn't say anything either.

Krüger drums his fingers against the edge of his laptop as the photos he took of the snow formations upload. When the folder finally pops up on his drive, he opens the first file and spins the laptop to face Liu.

"Oh my god," is her first response.

She clicks slowly through the other pictures, sometimes doubling back, or flipping between pairs taken from different angles. "How big was this?" she asks, to which Krüger wordlessly points out the Isoptera leg sticking from the snow. At this scale, it's barely visible.

"I need to see it in person," says Liu, and my prediction lands true.

Krüger faces me as my expression hardens. Here it comes.

"This," he says, fingering the screen, "is dangerous. And if we want to know what the hell it is—or even what it isn't—we need to go back there and get those pieces, and we need Liu along."

I cross my arms. "It's dangerous, and that is exactly why that is not going to happen. You heard me the first time, and that order is final. It's too unsafe to send anyone back."

"That's not the point!" I so rarely hear Krüger raise his voice, it's almost a shock. I think whatever that was spooked him. "We came here because Mahaha's proven similar to Jenu in other ways. What if whatever phenomenon made this exists there, too? Or on other planets? What if it's preventable? What if it's the breakthrough of the century, and humanity should know about it to keep tens if not hundreds of thousands of people safe? You go off on us about safety, but right now the whole Pod could be in danger, if not a whole other planet, and you want us to sit here and not even try to figure out why?"

"We have been here for two months, and nothing has ever touched the Pod. The probes we keep deploying are the problem, and after we learn what we can from this one, we are not deploying any more probes."

Krüger cuts across me. "'Nothing has ever touched the Pod'—are you serious right now?" His face is a mask of furious incredulity. "The last team to come here was fucking buried. Two people died."

As if I don't think about that several times daily. He has no idea. "And that will not happen again, because I have taken steps to ensure this space stays safe this time around. The last team came unprepared."

"And Jenu?"

"Do not ask me to endanger a member of my team for the hypothetical safety of others in other, wildly different parts of the UIS. I am doing my job."

He rears up to his full height. "And we're trying to do ours! I've worked with Lingmei. You've worked with us. You know we both follow orders, and neither of us is going to be reckless on a moon like Mahaha, least of all at the site of something like this. Accompany us, stick trackers on us, tie us together, whatever you think will make the outing least risky. But for Christ's sake, we have something on our hands that can wreck a military-grade probe with hurricane-force winds and an ice wall; at least let us retrieve the pieces and let the meteorologist among us have a look!"

We stare each other down. Krüger is glaring, one hand clenched around a burette stand, glasses tipped askew in his curly hair. I keep my feet firmly planted and my arms crossed, not betraying the runaway pace of my pulse and the intense, nauseating panic that his proposition gives me. He's trying to back me into a corner with my own reasoning. The way he's phrasing it, anything I say in reply will border on outright hypocrisy. While I have no issue imposing differing standards on myself and others, I need to get my shit together before I can field this argument without crumbling.