Either Kwon spoke to the scientists after my blow-up, or they overheard us talking in the hallway. Either way, I prowl the single hallway of the Pod unaccosted the next morning, and even Krüger gives me space. The day is only marginally lightened by the dissipation of the blizzard. I send Liu to the comms room to inform the Hub that they can send us our delivery now, though I have strong doubts about the timeliness of its arrival. To say we're a low-priority mission in their books would be putting it lightly.

Liu is waiting for me on my next pass of the room. "They said it'll be here at the end of the next ecliptic cycle, so I'm guessing we're looking at about eight standard oscillations from now. They didn't give a time."

I rub my forehead. Of course they didn't. Why would they bother? When have they ever bothered?

"Thank you," I say, noticing Liu watching me anxiously. "Mark it down on the station calendars, and we'll mount a rotating watch at the phone when it rolls around."

I leave before she can see the crisis I'm having. I lose my mind over the most stupid things when I'm trapped somewhere for too long. "Standard oscillation" can go die in a black hole; it's just a day. An earth day. Twenty-four hours, another measurement the United Inhabited Solar Systems—for some reason, UIS for short—chose to scrap when humans turned space-happy and left their home planet behind.

I don't need another reminder that I left it, too. That the sun-clock I grew up attuned to is so meaningless and arbitrary in a galactic diaspora inhabiting a dozen or so planets and god knows how many moons that it doesn't even get to keep its own name. It's another strike of home that piles on top of everything else and sends me back to my room again.

I shut the door and lean against it. Posters paper my walls: battered, fading pictures of deserts, mountains, swamps, snowy wastes, and one two-foot by three-foot spread of a jungle. Just a fat rectangle of green. I kick off my shoes, step up onto my bed, and carefully unstick its corners. It collapses limply onto my sleeping bag. It's come everywhere with me, but I can't look at it right now.

When I first left earth, I fought every impulse to even think about home. Where fellow pilots personalized their spaces on weeks-long interstellar voyages, I kept my walls bare as a medical-wing table, or added plastic posters of other planets, diagrams of the ships I'd driven, and other junk just to fill space. It took three or four years of homesickness for me to finally pull out the stops and request real, paper pictures of all the places I've lived. It cost an arm and a leg, but I've kept them ever since.

None of them have people in them. It would take too much emotional energy to keep from thinking that one of them was Yahvi.

I drop to the bed as the hurt rolls over me again. I've heard people say that missing someone gets better with time, but it's been nine years and I'm still waiting for this ache to fade. The fact that she's still out there somewhere, carrying on with her life, doesn't make it any better. Not when I'm the one who ran away.

There's a tap on my door. "Boss?"

I don't lift my head from my hands. I already know what he's going to ask me.

"Twilight's hitting," says Krüger. "We've got four beats to get the probe out if we want it deployed yet today."

"I'll meet you in the lab."

His footsteps retreat. Beats: another earth measurement. It's just an hour. Nobody in the galactic diaspora calls it an hour. I get the utility of a standard oscillation, but I don't understand why someone felt the need to change "hour," too, when "month," "week," and "year" all stayed the same.

From what I know, Krüger, Liu, and Kwon were all born out here. I'm the only one in the station with any earth-blood in me, and I have to admit, it gets to me sometimes.

Krüger has the probe out by the time I join him in the lab. The device looks like something you'd get if an insect and a planetary rover had a bastard child together. Chewing mouthparts at its front tackle snow and even packed glacial ice with ease, and in place of legs, it has wheels of long, sharp-tipped spokes. Its body is a torpedo shape cast in carbon fiber and sleek titanium. I'm honestly surprised Krüger hasn't given it a taxonomic name yet. It deserves one.

There's a crease in Krüger's brow as he pats the gleaming bug. "I don't feel great about sending this one out so soon, honestly. I'd have hoped the others would last longer."

"You're the scientist here," I reply. "You make the call and let me know."

He hesitates, then sighs. "No, let's do it. We need the data." He punches a button, and the bug's legs retract into their wheel hubs, which retract into divots in its body. The mouthparts withdraw. Now it looks like a silver turd. Krüger hefts it into its case and snaps the latches shut. He heaves the case to the floor.

"I'll bring it," I say. "Go get Samson."

One of Krüger's redeeming qualities is his acceptance of reality on matters that others would have taken as a wound to their pride. He's no slouch himself, but we don't do arm wrestles at the station anymore for a reason. It always came down to a tie between Kwon and I, and we both agreed to stop before either of us fractured a wrist.

"Lingmei?" I hear Krüger shout down the hallway. "We're deploying the Isoptera. Stand by."

I chuckle. The termite. Called it.

"Alright, buddy. Let's do this, shall we?" I say, patting the case on the floor. The Isoptera is excessive—and expensive—even for a harsh-conditions planetary probe. It was meant to be a later deployment in our stay here on Mahaha, but every piece of less hardy equipment has fallen to the moon's climatic and topographic wrath. The very wrath the scientists are trying so hard to measure and explain. I've got my doubts about that endeavor. The impetus for this trip was part scientific interest, part scientific rivalry, and part proving that the Dara Research Institute could do what those before it could not, which I'm sure played a bigger role than anyone lets on. But Jenu-parallels or not, I harbor the quiet opinion that sometimes moons like Mahaha are better left alone.

I sigh, tip the case up, and heave it over my shoulder. The thing weighs almost as much as I do—which isn't saying much, granted—but portaging canoes through the New Amazon is decidedly harder.

Krüger has Samson parked outside by the time I leave the airlock. It's beautifully calm out. The extreme-conditions timer on my goggles shows a green line: we can stay out here forever, and it makes me happier than it rightfully should. Mahaha's grey sky has turned sunshine yellow. Light-scattering makes evenings and mornings here brighter than midday—convenient for field trips, if an assault on everyone's sense of time—and the white ground is brilliant. My goggles darken in response to the glare as I swing the probe into the rover's trunk. Krüger vacates the driver's seat.

Driving on Mahaha is roughly equivalent to riding horseback through the potholed wastes where most of earth's equatorial habitats used to be. Humanity left one lunar landscape for another: I've seen planets more lush than what's left of earth's rainforests, and there's more ice here than in Antarctica. It was the sea-bound stampede of those glaciers that sent society into a panic, and towards the stars.

They called it the Great Escape. Everyone who could afford a ticket on the leaving shuttles evacuated, and those left behind migrated north and south to occupy the crumbling cities that still hung on at habitable latitudes. Those that couldn't migrate tried to survive.

I first met the Aventureros when they airlifted my family from a wildfire-ringed Quito when I was five. They hailed from Chile, a country that had held its own under the onslaught of climate change, and reestablished connection with the galactic diaspora. In the years since, it had become a powerful link between the UIS and their ancestral planet. I joined the Aventureros at nineteen. They had run out of people to rescue by that point, and so turned their expertise to crisis response and chaperoning remote supply deliveries, researchers, and tourists in a global network.

I met Yahvi there, and we quickly rose to become one of the Aventureros' top teams. I watched as the organization I once admired changed its name and gradually lost sight of its roots. Yahvi and I began to specialize in guiding research trips—history repeats itself, it seems—just to stay in remote areas and out of the politics.

Or we did, until our trip in the Philippines. 

Krüger waves for my attention when the receiver in his hand gives him whatever combination of locational data he's looking for. Samson pitches down a steep slope, making him grab his seat like a life raft. It's hard to tell through my shaded goggles, but his wind-nipped face looks paler than usual. It accents the tawny tone in his skin; together with the coarse, black curls, my bet is on Egyptian heritage. Hard to tell with the German last name.

We gain air for a moment, and he goes even paler. To be fair, we've been dodging ice cliffs, navigating glacial valleys, and lurching up and down drifts the size and shape of waves in the Southern Ocean for close to an hour. I'm quite enjoying it. My planet-hopping companion looks faintly seasick.

I gun Samson's engine and roar up the side of the hill Krüger's pointing to. He clings to his seat as the wind whines and snowflakes batter our faces. When I spin us around and park on the exposed hilltop, the wind dies. Krüger staggers out of the vehicle like a drunk man.

"Jesus Christ, you drive like a demon," he grumbles, his voice crackling in my headset.

I grin and hop down on perfectly steady legs. "That's the biggest compliment I've received in the last two months."

He ignores me and drags the Isoptera's case from Samson's trunk. He sets our bug friend on the ice and pushes several buttons. The Isoptera's legs extend like feelers. They stab down into the ground and lift its silver body as a rod I know contains an array of sensors clicks and whirrs up from its head. Like a periscope, or maybe a cyclops version of antennae. The tip of it gives a quick spin.

"We should leave," says Krüger. "Or it's going to try to climb Samson."

Sure enough, the Isoptera's leg-wheels turn clumsily, orienting the bug towards our vehicle.

"Topographic analysis?"

"Yeah. It sticks to the highest ground it can find."

"Useful." I give the probe an approving once-over. That's the kind of instinct any species native to this place would evolve if they knew what was good for them. We haven't found any signs of life yet, but suffice to say, I can understand why.

The probe starts towards Samson. Krüger puts a hand on its nose, then whips it back. The Isoptera's mouthparts gnash a few times and withdraw.

"Vicious little beast," I say. I kind of like this probe.

"Let's go."

We return to the vehicle. "And drive a litt"—Krüger begins, only to break off in a yelp as I gun it straight down the hill.

"We need to be back by sunset," I say calmly. I steer around an ice tooth and shoot straight up another bank. It's not just enjoyment; some of these hills will crumble if I climb them too slowly. But I'd be lying if I said it was no fun at all.

Kwon and Liu are waiting for us when we get back to the station. Liu is a breathless kind of excited. She meets us at the door, and stops, confused, when she sees Krüger's glare.

He levels a finger at me. "Don't ever drive with them. Consider yourself warned."

Kwon behind me chuckles softly, fiddling with the straps on my oxygen tank.

Krüger lets Liu help him out of his. "Is the data coming through?"

"Yeah, the transmission's working. I've got it up on the tablet. You... might want to come see it."

"Sixteenth time's the charm, hm?" He grunts as the tank falls away, and struggles out of the rest of his gear. "About time. Maybe we'll finally find out what's wrong with this moon."

Liu's smile fades. "I'm not so sure."