Chapter Four: The Wing Beneath the Ice

Thirty-six hours later, Lin Yan stood in the wind at seventy-five degrees south, unable to tell whether the ice was beneath him or the sky. The aftereffects of the wing bone had not faded. During landing, he had mistaken his safety harness for the edge of a cliff and gripped it for ten minutes. Su Mi offered no reassurance. She taped a red line inside his goggles. "The line always points down. If you cannot trust sensation, trust calibration." They had joined an emergency subglacial-lake survey. Elena Voss authorized the mission but appeared only in an email instructing them to recover an "anomalous radar reflector." Chen Du traveled as the investigator of the Shanghai incident, accompanied by four silent security officers.