Chapter One: The City Only I Could See

At 2:17 a.m., the East Antarctic Ice Sheet opened an eye on Lin Yan's screen. It should have been the kind of synthetic-aperture radar image that could put an insomniac to sleep: pale ridges, black crevasses, orbital banding across the frame. L-band signals from Surveyor Seven had penetrated the snow and returned a blurred echo from beneath thirty-six hundred meters of ice. Lin had spent eleven years staring at such noise. He knew what made every species of blemish—crystal orientation, thermal interference, orbital drift, or a night technician forgetting an ionospheric correction. But now the noise gathered itself. A long beak pointed toward Wilkes Land. Uneven wings spread along a buried mountain chain.