White Crystal Butterflies | Wattys 2021 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Twenty-Two

My heart drops into my stomach when I step out into the common room the next morning. Every last window is white from top to bottom. The panel on the opposite wall is a mosaic of green rectangles: there's no wind, no radiation, and no extreme temperature. I run to the lab and take the stairs to the greenhouse two at a time. A thin light filters through the snow blanketing the domed glass roof.

I'm back in the hallway and hammering on Kwon's door before I feel my feet moving. She swings it open with a look of alarm I rarely see her wearing.

I hear my own voice like it's someone else's. "We've lost all view out the windows. Check if we've been buried."

She goes straight to the comms room. I'm steps behind her as she pulls up the compiled sheet of all our external sensors. One in Liu and Krüger's array is registering a slight wind and normal outdoor temperature, but the camera feeds are white. Kwon swears softly—another rarity—and activates the periscopic array at the top of the Pod. It gives no error message as it whines upwards. My hands hurt from clenching the back of her chair. Soft snow, then? At least the array can move. Even so, it reaches its maximum extent without emerging from the whiteness.

"Try the heating," I say. "In case it's frost."

The camera lenses are supposed to be frost-proof, but the whole array might be encased. Kwon flicks on its emergency heating mechanism. It's not technically meant for emergencies, but neither of us has ever trusted it not to wreck the Pod's battered, aging equipment if used on the regular.

Only moments after the heating activates, there's a flicker in the camera feed. Its view clears abruptly.

It takes me several seconds to realize that the white hump visible below the camera is the Pod. It's not buried. It's sitting in exactly the same place it was last night, and every inch of it is covered in butterflies.

"Please tell me this isn't happening," I say.

Kwon's fingers fly over her digital keyboard, recording, saving, and logging everything in front of us. When that flurry of activity is over, we just stare at the screen together. I hear Krüger's footsteps in the hallway, returning from the common room.

"Boss, what's—" He stops in the doorway, in full view of the camera feed. "Okay, what the fuck."

"Good question," I say. "Any ideas?"

The smell of hot imitation coffee wafts over me as he joins us in front of the screen. "You think it's trying to contact us?" says Krüger when he's taken in the full view. He's much too calm about the possibility.

"You tell me."

He cradles his coffee and rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet. "We just lost the radiation meter, too," he says at last. "I think it's taken that one out more times than the rest combined. I wonder if it wants us to come outside."

"It's going to be sorely disappointed if that's the case."

"That would explain why it keeps destroying our probes, too," he continues, like he didn't hear. "Though it really doesn't seem to like those. The instruments, though... and the ice on the walls. One of us goes out every time it freezes an instrument or puts ice on the Pod. If it wants us outside, that's basic operant conditioning. It's learned what makes us turn up."

"Then it had better be prepared for a blow to that learning," I growl, "because we are no longer going outside."

Krüger's eyes flash dangerously. He stops rocking. "You agreed to once-daily instrument checks until it shows aggression towards us or the Pod. I don't consider covering us in butterflies to be a particularly aggressive move. If it was, I'd have expected that one last night to do more than hover over you."