The wind picks up outside as we get cozy in the common room, eyes pinned to the two small screens on the coffee table. There's a bigger screen in the lab that we could use, but everyone agreed that if we're going to be here for a while, we'd rather stick to the comfier seating. Kwon soon slips out, returning with fuzzy blankets and two throw pillows that managed to migrate elsewhere during the ecliptic cycle. She then takes to the kitchen and flicks the kettle on. I don't think I've seen it run empty since we lost the Isoptera.

The scientists take turns getting food and drinks in the kitchen, neither wanting to leave the data feeds. When it becomes clear that nothing is happening immediately, I head there myself.

"You not coming to watch?" I say, finding Kwon eating at the table, ebook in hand.

She shakes her head. "I will just get one of them to explain it to me after. This old brain cannot make sense of all those graphs."

This coming from the engineer reading what looks like an advanced aeronautic electrical systems manual like it's a novel. I fill my bowl and return to the common room, saving my chuckle for the hallway where nobody will hear me. Knowing Kwon, she probably genuinely believes that.

Fifteen minutes pass with no anomalies, then half an hour. Liu and Krüger remain glued to the data feeds like they're watching the world's most riveting telenovela. I find my eyes wandering. By an hour in, I'm done sitting still. Clearly whatever Mahaha has to unleash upon us is taking its time.

I excuse myself and gather everyone's bowls. Liu is on dishes, but I do them myself, then wipe down most of the kitchen for good measure. There's still residual red marker on parts of the table. I pull out the cleaning products and ignore the twitch at the corner of Kwon's mouth as I take to the stains with a vengeance. She pushes her chair back to let me work. I scrub the table spotless, look around for other things to clean, and find none.

"I am sure you will hear it when they see something," says Kwon, glancing up.

I run a hand through my hair. "Fair point."

Sitting on a snowmobile for most of the day hardly counts as exercise, even if I kept getting off to help plant mini-probes. I change into running clothes and take to the gym, roping the door open with a stray resistance band. The treadmill's hum is quiet enough to hear any commotion in the common room over. It doesn't even muffle the strengthening lash of the storm outside. This blizzard is a brutal one. Worse than any we've had so far.

There's a faint beep from the common room. I pause the treadmill and trot to a halt as it slows. With the door open, I can see all the way down the hallway. After a long pause, Krüger crosses the common room to the screen on its opposite wall.

I hop off the treadmill and join him. "What's up?"

He points to the screen. Where we once had weather data from outside—wind speed, wind chill, temperature, humidity, radiation—there is now blank space and floating units waiting patiently for numbers. An error icon flashes in the corner. Krüger clicks it, revealing an itemized list of instruments we've lost contact with. All our station weather readings gone in one fell swoop.

My internal alarm bell starts up. "When and how?"

"I don't know." Krüger's face is a new kind of serious. He taps buttons on the screen, scanning quickly for connection issues that might have caused the abrupt and complete loss of data. "I can't tell if it's a computer glitch, or an actual problem with the instruments. It normally beeps when one goes out, so it must have been a simultaneous loss..."

That sounds like a computer glitch, but the timing is suspect. My skin crawls at the prospect of going out to check the instrument panel. I keep reimagining the butterfly over Krüger's head.

Krüger pokes a few more buttons, then makes an exasperated noise and flicks his hands up. No go.

"Tobias?" says Liu from the couches. "We just got a really big gust. I think they're picking up."

I don't need a probe outside to tell me that. The Pod trembles in some combination of ice shift and wind. A sudden realization shoots adrenaline through me, sharpening the world into crisp focus. We don't have the means to move the station in these conditions. Even stepping outside on a tether in this wind and cold is tantamount to suicide. If Mahaha plans to bury us, it'll do it now.

I return to the couches with Krüger. The graphs have all shifted since I was last here. Average wind speed has climbed up close to ninety kilometers an hour, about what I would have expected given what I can hear through the walls. The various mini-probes with wind gauges register the gusts in complete asynchrony. It's not just a strong storm; it's also a turbulent one. I glance at Krüger's laptop screen beside the tablet, but the video feed on the last probe shows nothing but a solid wall of white.

Then the first probe goes out.

Liu squeaks and claps both hands over her mouth. We sit tense and silent as the device's temperature gauge climbs slowly, back into negative single digits. It's now under the snow.

"This is it, this is it," whispers Liu.

An eternity of moments later, the next probe goes out.

"Are they going in order?" says Krüger.

"It's probably coincid—"

The third probe goes out.

"What the fuck," whispers Krüger. He beat me to it.

The data feeds are all stacked in the order that we turned the probes on. The same order we planted them. Liu is now kneeling on the floor, as close to the tablet as she can get without blocking our view. Krüger reaches past her and taps a button. The graphs drop to the lower half of the screen. An aerial map fills the rest, the Pod a green dot at its center, surrounded by a ring of mini-probes like candles in some elaborate satanic ritual. The first three are flashing red.

The fourth goes out.

This one had a wind gauge. Even on the tiny graphs, I see the spike. It's more than double the average, far above the gusts we were already recording. The fourth icon in the ring joins the congo line of "Error: Connection Lost." The fifth follows. Even the time gaps between them are identical: twenty-six seconds apiece.

I barely notice as Kwon joins us. This can't be happening.

The sixth probe goes out. I'm starting to feel like I can't breathe. I fumble back to my chair and sink down into it. I don't know how I was still standing. I can still see the dots on the top half of the screen. One by one, like a ticking clock or the beats of some gigantic, sinister heart, they flash and change colour. I try to make any sense of it beyond the one answer that seems branded into my mind. It could be a spinning storm. A moving wall of snow blown by consistent wind speeds...

We're through to the ninth probe now. Only three left. The last two are in close proximity to one another; if it's a single moving front, they'll go out at almost the same time.

Ten.

Eleven.

I wait, but the twelfth probe remains green. I start counting seconds. At twenty-four, the snow filling Krüger's laptop screen clears. For all of two seconds, we stand face to face with a white crystal butterfly. Then the probe goes dead.

There is utter silence in the common room.

I can't tear my eyes from the laptop screen. It stays black for several moments, then reverts to the database receiving the video input. The recording saves itself as a new file and tucks itself into bed under the dozens of other video files we've accumulated over the last two months. The one immediately above it is the last feed from the Isoptera.

When I drag my gaze back to the tablet, Liu or Krüger have switched us back to the graphs. They're all motionless now. Three register wind spikes in their final moments. Those with temperature or humidity gauges kept recording for up to half a minute after they were buried, before those instruments too went dead. I already know what happened to them. We've been dealing with ice in our instruments for months.

My own voice sounds hoarse when I manage to revive it. It shatters the silence like a hammer taken to delicate ice. "This isn't a storm."

Liu looks too stricken to move, let alone speak.

Krüger slowly shakes his head. "I think Mahaha is alive."