Chapter One: The City Only I Could See

"I didn't see your city," she said. "But just before the outage, the ice-core database received an automatic search request. The keyword was your name." The drive contained the record. The request had not originated from Surveyor Seven, but from a meteorological satellite decommissioned twenty-two years ago: Kuafu One. Its chief remote-sensing engineer had been Lin's father, Lin Yue. Twenty-two years earlier, Lin Yue had disappeared after an aurora observation accident. The official finding said his aircraft had gone down in the Southern Ocean. There had been no body and no wreckage. Lin had last seen him while waking in a hospital. He had been ten, his eyes wrapped in gauze, his father holding his hand.