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."

"The fact that there was a butterfly around the Pod last night means this"—I level a finger at the screen—"constitutes an escalating display. In fact, everything Mahaha has done has escalated over time. I am not about to risk someone to determine if it is operant conditioning or an outright threat, especially given what's happened to our probes."

"Then how far are you going to let it progress before you let us try a different course of action?"

Is he kidding? "The question I have been asking so far has been how far I let it progress before I commit to this course of action. I've let you and Liu out on field trips, made concessions for more probes than we ever planned for initially, let you keep tending to your instruments outside, and this is what we've gotten for it. This, munched probes, and butterflies within a foot of our own heads. I am putting this station on lockdown, and I don't want to hear arguments!"

We stand locked in a stare-down, both of us glaring. Krüger's hand grips his coffee mug so tightly, his knuckles have gone white.

"It isn't all aggressive, you know," he says in a low voice. "It responds differently to me than to the rest of you."

I blink. "It what?"

His look is piercing. "It stops the wind when I go outside. I thought at first that it was just the turbulence around the airlock, but then it happened in a blizzard, too. Remember that storm when we had to clip ourselves to a tether just to follow the Pod wall? I checked the instrument panel twice a day, every day during that storm, without so much as getting snow down my jacket. Has that happened to you?"

I just stare at him, stunned. The wind once stopped for me when I stepped outside, too. It quickly corrected itself. Is he saying that happens to him every time?

"And why else would it target the instrument panel at all, if not to reach me?" says Krüger. "Until the last few days, I've been the only one who ever deals with that. Now you've started coming with me, and it's clearly paying attention to you now, too. Don't you think that's a bit of an odd coincidence?"

"Explain to me why a moon the size of earth would take a liking to anyone when it buried its last visitors under three meters of ice?"

"But that's just the thing! It hasn't buried us! That's what I want to know more about. Clearly it sees us differently than the last team, despite us living in the same station, wearing the same suits, and conducting basically the same experiments. Why has it put up with us for two months already, when that team only lasted two weeks? Why have we made it this far without another Mahaha Rescue?"

"Maybe because we didn't start intruding on its territory in a serious way until the last two weeks?" I say through gritted teeth. And he acts like I imposed my initial sanctions for no reason.

Krüger rests his forehead in one hand like he's tamping down his frustration. Like I don't get what he's saying. I am so very, very close to losing my cool.

"Alright," he says at last, lifting his head again. "Fine. You've heard my theory. Impose your lockdown. But if shutting everything down and shutting us in doesn't work, will you let us try to make contact then?"

"This conversation is over."

"Even if our lives depend on it?"

"Last warning, Tobias."

He looks at me for a long moment, then turns away without another word. For the first time, I notice Liu standing in the doorway, watching me with wide eyes. Krüger puts a hand on her shoulder as he leaves the room. They disappear down the hallway together.

"Take first watch," I say.

Kwon is still in her chair, running scans of the station. I glance down the list of results she's compiled so far. No problems. Yet.

"Yes Cap'n," she says.

At least there's one person here who still listens to me. Or maybe unlike Krüger, she just keeps her opinions to herself. If this comes down to station mutiny, I hope I'll at least have Kwon on my side.

It's late evening by the time the butterflies shift from their places. A few flutter for a while, then they all lift like a blanket yanked off a late sleeper who refuses to get out of bed. Snow swirls behind them. They're some three meters up when they shatter. Their falling ice shards sparkle like glass in the last murky light of sunset.

That night, a whole swath of instruments on the panel outside go out. If Mahaha wants us to go outside, it's asking with the needy insolence of a toddler or a very smart dog. The kind that will chew your shoes and shred your couch cushions if you don't pay it enough attention. Krüger acts like I'm not there when we end up in the same room again at supper. He takes his bowl and one for Liu and walks straight past me, back to the lab. I didn't give them permission to eat in the lab. I can't work up the energy to enforce something so trivial when the whole Pod might be at risk, though.

Over the course of the next two days, the remaining instruments wink out one by one. Then Mahaha goes silent. The rest of a week passes without another incident; we don't even have to move the Pod. I sincerely hope this means our problems are over. That the lockdown worked. That the moon will leave us alone now.

Nobody goes outside anymore, which is probably why it takes us so long to realize that it's not just the instruments dying.

"Cap'n?" says Kwon down the hallway. Her subdued tone drops my heart to the floor. At least the floor is clean from so many days of me being locked inside.

She doesn't elaborate, so I make the walk of doom to join her in the comms room. She's just run a scan of the Pod's external equipment, something we don't normally do more than once every few days. The screen before her glows with a packing list of errors.

"Switch to internal systems only," I say. I can't even bring myself to feel surprised. I should have seen this coming.

The overhead lights dim as Kwon activates the emergency setting we equipped the Pod with when we first moved in. I dictated its design. I wanted to be sure we would still have water and oxygen if we got buried like the team on the receiving end of the Mahaha Rescue did.

The new station diagnostics have scarcely finished displaying themselves when a new error pops up.

"Heating is reduced on the outer airlock door," says Kwon. "The sensors detect ice."

"Freeze us in, then, you delinquent lump of rock." I make a profane gesture at the comms room's exterior wall. "That's where we're staying anyway."

"Until we need to move the station," says Kwon.

"If it wants us outside, it should know better than to block our only exit." I spin around and stride back up the hallway, already snapping orders. "Krüger, close over the greenhouse hydroponics; we don't want to lose that water if this place tips over, and we definitely don't want it in anything electronic. Liu, shift our food stores to as few shelves as possible and lock them in. You can use the old transport boxes for whatever doesn't fit in the cupboards. After that, do the same in the kitchen. Then I want loose items in everyone's rooms stowed. Krüger, you can use that old plastic wrap from the kitchen to cover off the plants you've got there; just make sure they're tied down. Everyone report back when you're done!"

The team springs into motion. Kwon joins me as soon as she's done scanning for station errors. Two more have popped up since I left the room.

"Are any of them internal?" I ask.

"No. Only outside."

"Thank fucking god." I run both hands down my face. We can handle that, so long as we prepare for this station to get tossed around like a popcorn kernel the moment Mahaha decides it's done with us. "Check the water recirculation system, just to make sure it's sound. Then air when you're done with that; the filters might need purging, and I want that done before we lose access to outside air. Then pack down your workshop. I can help if you need it; I'm battening down the equipment storage room and clearing the gym, but those won't take long."

In another two hours, every loose, liquid, and heavy object has a home where it won't go flying if the station does a barrel roll. I run drills for what to do if that happens. By the time evening comes, I'm too high-strung to sleep, so I reread Yahvi's letter, then try and fail to meditate to bring my anxiety under control while the others go to bed. It doesn't work. I escape the confines of my room and wind up in the greenhouse instead. Having plants around me offers a marginal improvement, even if the soothing trickle of water over their roots is now muffled by plastic casing.

Nobody comes to find me, and I eventually wear myself out enough for sleeping to become an option again. Even then, I think I wake eight times that night. I wrap myself tighter in my sleeping bag. I miss my old gravity blanket. I haven't had one since I left earth. Not that I'd have been able to fit it under our shipping weight limit on Mahaha anyway.

I fully expect the station to tip over that night. Or the next. Or eventually. Which of course assumes we understand anything at all about Mahaha, an assumption it seems hell-bent on disproving.