Your choice changes what happens next
Glass beneath the moon
On Neris, buildings could forget where their doors belonged. Elian had spent fourteen seasons persuading Serein Outpost to remember. Now the workshop door opened onto a wall of pale-cyan ice, and the last warning bell had begun clearing its throat. Beyond the glass-fronted gallery, enormous frozen folds leaned over the station. Behind her, the orange-red escape lift stood on its vertical rail, an absurdly cheerful line through all that blue.
Elian, sixty-four, pushed a short gray wave of hair away from her eyes. The brass binding coil lay bright against her brown palm; her ochre station jacket still carried the pale rectangle where her retirement badge had been removed for washing. Jun bent beside her in his teal jacket. At twenty-seven he already had an archivist's suspicious regard for blank spaces. His short dark hair stood up where the headset pressed it. "Tell me that is not the spare," he said. "It is the last," Elian answered. "Different sort of bad news."
Four other people waited in the eastern refuge: watch lead Veda, cook Oru, surveyor Senn and stores keeper Pell. No one was missing. Jun wrote all six names on a paper lift strip before asking about the archive vault. Elian pointed to the escape rail first. "People, passages, then everything we cannot bear to leave." The station repeated a bell it had never been meant to ring twice.