Work Text:
In February, Taishan Station shuts down. It happens the same way it does every year. The days get longer and the last shipments start coming in from their base further northwards. The final crew of researchers, technicians, cooks, mechanics, operators get ready to bunk down until winter stretches into lazy spring and they make it back to the land of the living.
It’s Shenhe’s third season at Taishan. The researchers took to calling them ‘seasons’ a long time ago: the space between February and October in the Southern Hemisphere, too long to name winter but not quite a full year. She’s analyzing a water sample, almost absently, when the plane touches down.
She sees it through the window, first. Her room isn’t big, but she doesn’t need it to be. All she really needs is the small slice of sunlight that pours in during Antarctic winters and room for her lab bench, room to watch the plane wheels kick up ice on the frozen ground.
When people begin to walk towards the plane, bundled in down jackets and padded pants, Shenhe stands up to go outside.
By the time she’s huddled in front of the station entrance, five people have disembarked from the plane, and two more are crouching to leave the side door. The new arrivals bring Taishan’s total from eleven to eighteen—more than they’ve had in decades, maybe.
The thing about living in Antarctica is that it’s only so permanent.
People come, and they go, coaxed by the freezing winds and southern dry spells. Every year when the opportunity arises, someone says yes to living at the edge of the world and at the same time, someone else says no.
Some people stay for a season and then return to their lives once October comes and the waterway passages clear back up, and they never want to come back to Antarctica. Then there are people who have waited out twenty Antarctic winters, maybe more, collecting marine samples and playing cards in the lower deck and staring out the window, waiting for autumn.
Yet others swear up and down that they’re leaving for good, and then they come back, not sure why they’ve decided to return. Only that February is here again and it seemed natural.
Shenhe came to Taishan because she liked it, mostly—the silence. Marine chemists don’t work alone. They can’t. Working in Antarctica was the next best thing, and she would have gone to Zhongshan Station because it was active year-round, but there were always too many people there, even in the winter. She settled for the least populated one instead.
Shenhe has spent one year, twenty-one weeks, and four days in Antarctica so far. All her time at Taishan Station failed to prepare her for someone like Yelan.
—
Introductions are a comfortable kind of rote. Everyone looks a little bit the same in the harsh fluorescent lighting. Before they’ve tugged their hoods down and unzipped their jackets, each person is a blur of goosedown, red and yellow puffed clothes.
In the dining hall, Shenhe hangs up her coat and pulls her mitts off. She’d forgotten to pull her neck warmer up before going outside and her lips are chapped with ice, nose a hectic red. She sits down at a bench to rub her palms together, the warmth rushing through her blood all at once.
“I’m Lanyang.”
“Guanhai.”
“Changping.”
“Huixing.”
“I specialize in mechanical engineering.”
“Rock formations in permafrost.”
“Migration and distribution of krill in southern waters.”
“Cosmic microwave background radiation at Earth’s poles.”
“I’m happy to be here,” they all say at the end of their introductions, and Shenhe looks up long enough to wave before she goes back to her food. If any of them need something, they can find her. The station is only so big.
The girl, when Shenhe sees her, is heading to her table, a bowl of rice and bamboo shoot soup on her tray. She wears blue from top to bottom, a white down coat hanging off her shoulders. Her hair is bluer than Shenhe has ever seen. Not many people have dyed hair on Taishan: it’s hard with the upkeep—no hair dye on base. Arctic temperatures dry it out faster than anything. Shenhe doesn’t know what to make of this girl.
The girl doesn’t ask before she sits down. Shenhe swallows and looks away.
“I’m Yelan,” the girl says, after a second, teeth glittering but her smile not quite reaching her eyes. Shenhe suppresses the full-body shiver that threatens to trickle down her spine.
“I know,” says Shenhe, because she had listened to the introductions even if she hadn’t paid attention.
“I don’t think I caught your name.” Her voice is—interesting. The tilt to her words doesn’t sound like any place Shenhe has been to.
Shenhe glances up. “Shenhe.”
“And you work in…”
“Marine chemistry.”
Yelan sits back and spoons up some soup. “That’s interesting.”
Shenhe shrugs. She thinks it is, but she’s learned how to tell the people who think the same from the ones who are just saying it to be nice. She can’t get a read on Yelan’s tone, or her expression, or her actions—fingers twisted, playing with the dice charm on her bracelet as it taps the table. It sets her off-kilter, like the whole world has shifted just two centimetres to the left, a watch fastened a notch too tight. “Kind of.”
“I study planetary geology,” Yelan says. “I did my practicum last year and decided to go to Antarctica instead of getting a research internship.”
“Why Antarctica?” asks Shenhe, and Yelan grins.
“Funny you should ask,” she says. “Antarctica is the best place on Earth to find meteorites.”
Shenhe blinks. “Really?”
“Really,” confirms Yelan, sitting forward. “There’s no field work opportunity quite like it.”
“I suppose there isn’t,” Shenhe says, feeling like she’s caught in Yelan’s gaze, bright turquoise and diamond-hard, krill swept up in a fishing net on the Antarctic seas.
—
Shenhe developed a daily routine within a week the first time she arrived at Taishan, and it’s been constant ever since.
Waking up is a struggle with barely two hours of sunlight a day, and she heads to the station gym to invigorate her muscles before stepping out onto the ice sheets. Breakfast is quiet; barely anyone is awake by then, so she eats oatmeal (easy to store, light to travel with) and freeze-dried strawberries (easy to store, even lighter to travel with), then goes out to collect samples.
The work is meditative. She gets through it by focusing on a small patch of ice at a time, bending down to chip away until she reaches the water beneath and the gaseous bubbles that have built up in the ice over time.
“Don’t you get scared?” one of the technicians had asked her, last year.
Shenhe had stared at him, for a moment. “No,” she said, a little confused. “The world is only so large.”
And then she went outside the next day, and saw a rock in the distance—a black blob across the sheet of ice, further out where the water samples became harder to collect. She saw the blob and decided to walk there, just to try it.
When she first saw the rock, she had figured it couldn’t take long. Thirty minutes, at most, and she’d be back in time for early lunch. Instead, it took her three hours to get there, and another three hours back. Lunch was long past served by the time she made it to the station.
The world is larger than she thought it was, and Shenhe doesn’t waste time dwelling on it anymore.
She does not think about how vast Antarctica is. She likes not knowing better.
After sample collection in the morning she eats lunch. Usually she gets chicken curry, but if it’s a good day they’ll serve hand-pulled noodles, and those are her favourite. The meal quality drops as winter melts into spring and they start drawing on the preserved ingredients to cook. With nothing fresh left, they make the best of what they have.
Still, during those months at the knife-edge of human existence, Shenhe remembers the second year she came to Taishan, and the first night of that long winter. How they’d served shrimp stir-fry and she took two servings with chili oil, just to feel the sizzle, the hot snap of the shrimp between her teeth.
In the afternoons, she retreats to her room and the lab bench scattered with Petri dishes, microscope humming away in the desk corner, pH indicators and her spectrophotometer pushed to the side.
She cleans the samples, disinfects all the equipment with the spray they keep in a back cabinet on the other side of the station.
After the small-scale analysis, she takes her work to the lab—or what can be classed as one, barely bigger than her bedroom and cluttered to the brim with miscellaneous machinery—to run it through the gas chromatograph, the spectrometer, and the row of liquid sensors stacked by the window.
Shenhe is the only chemist on Taishan. The rest of them are stationed at Zhongshan or Kunlun, so Shenhe gets the lab all to herself in the winters, and that’s how she likes it. If she runs into trouble with the data, she’ll ask one of the data scientists to help her with the visualizations.
The best and worst part about Taishan is the team activities. After dinner they clean the whole station, then meet in the common room and play board games or cards. Last year one of the techs hooked up a TV and a couple of the motion sensors that were lying around in the control tower to fashion a game of virtual tennis.
Shenhe reads, sometimes, or goes back to her room to finish analyzing the day’s samples and do a writeup on the results, and then she turns in for the night.
It’s good. It’s quiet, and easy, and it’s a routine. That’s the one thing she hadn’t realized before: living in Antarctica requires routine. Plenty of people didn’t have one, and most of them didn’t make it the same.
—
THE JOURNAL OF GLACIOLOGY
Vol. 104, No. 96
Hydraulic Activity and Landscape Limnology: Drainage patterns and spatial hierarchies in Mercer Subglacial Lake
Qing Shenhe
Marine Chemistry and Ecology, Taishan Station, Polar Research Institute of China
Abstract:
Prior studies of the activity in Mercer Subglacial Lake and adjacent lakes have suggested measurable outflow connections between the reservoirs, with researchers finding that the subglacial drainage of the lower Mercer Ice Stream directly correlates with the filling and follow-on drainage of Whillans Ice Stream (Fricker & Scambos, 2009). Building on this scholarship, we aim to lay the groundwork for a system of subglacial activity and spatial reservoir relation tracking that employs already-established methods of glacier grounding isolation to map out the drainage cycles in West Antarctica’s lakes and their tributaries. In addition, the biological matter found in pasteurized lake water samples from Mercer Lake provide an empirical basis for new research on carbon cycling in subglacial reservoirs; however, this requires further exploration.
Recommended citation: Qing, Shenhe. Hydraulic Activity and Landscape Limnology: Drainage patterns and spatial hierarchies in Mercer Subglacial Lake. Journal of Glaciology [Online] 2019,104, 323-337.
—
“Where are you from?” Yelan says. She leans against the lab doorway, limbs long and careless.
It’s late afternoon and one of the darkest days of the season so far, an artificial nocturne that most of the new researchers haven’t seen before. Blue light pours in through the window, pale and frosted in silver. The sun doesn’t rise at the South Pole the same way it does everywhere else.
That morning, Shenhe slathered sunscreen on her face and sweated it off by the time she drilled through half a chunk of ice, the remnants clinging to her balaclava. The light is faint but it’s there all the same, and the refraction from the ice makes it hard to see. These days she has to keep her lab equipment out of view from the window and use artificial light to examine results, and waking up while it’s darker than ink outside is a task and a half.
Shenhe shuts her eyes. “Don’t you have rocks to look at?”
“I can do that later,” says Yelan, unperturbed, sauntering through the room to sit down in the folding chair next to Shenhe. “How much do you know about winter-over syndrome?”
“Why? Do you think you have it?”
Yelan pulls a coin out of her pocket and flips it, twice. Tails up both times. “Not really. Someone I know, maybe.”
Shenhe sighs. “Who?”
“Does it matter? Just tell me what you know,” Yelan says.
“A lot of people get moody around here,” Shenhe tells her. She’s seen it happen to the best of them, crammed in a tiny research station with nowhere to go but outside. “It’s lonely. Not everyone can live with the same fifteen people for eight months of the year.”
“So what can you do?”
“Not much,” Shenhe says. “Leave them alone if they’re not up to talking, or try to coax them out of it with questions. If they have something like Polar T3 syndrome it’s trickier, because hormonal imbalances can’t be fixed the same way, but.”
Yelan stretches her legs out, twists her hands. The lamp overhead buzzes, yellow and waning. “Good to know.”
“Yes,” Shenhe agrees.
“How’s your research going?”
She shrugs. “Not bad. Mostly monitoring outflow patterns. The oxygen levels in the water are high enough to sustain marine life.”
“That’s cool,” says Yelan. “Further south there’s a crater that some of the other researchers have been going out to visit. I might head down with them in a few weeks.”
Shenhe spins her pen between her fingers. “Be safe,” she says.
Yelan grins, quick and sharp. “I’m always safe.”
“Okay.”
Toying with the dice charm on her bracelet, Yelan stands abruptly. “You aren’t easy to get to know, Shenhe. You realize that?”
She blinks. “Sorry?”
Yelan seems like she’s about to say something else, but she shakes her head. “Forget it.” And then she’s out the door.
Shenhe stares at her samples, not quite focusing. Her head hurts. She doesn’t know if it’s winter-over syndrome, or the lack of sunlight messing with her head, or just Yelan.
She sets the vials down harder than she means and walks back to her bedroom to go to sleep. It’s only five PM, but her brain is foggy. It’s late February in Antarctica, and her muscles ache all the time.
—
Yelan sits with her at breakfast.
“You’re up early,” says Shenhe, picking at a strip of youtiao.
“I wanted to catch you before you head out,” Yelan tells her. “I have an idea.”
“A research one?”
Yelan rearranges the bowls and silverware on her tray, chopsticks lying neatly on the side. “No. A friend one.” She doesn’t say anything else.
Shenhe watches her hands move, deft as she pulls back the bones on a piece of salmon. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“We each get to ask each other a question,” Yelan says. Her hair falls in her face but she doesn’t try to brush it aside. Shenhe itches to tuck a lock behind her ear for her. “Like this. I would ask you a question, and you would tell me the answer. If you already know the answer for me, you get a point.”
Shenhe frowns. “What?”
“Let’s just play, and you’ll understand,” suggests Yelan. “When did you first come to Taishan?”
“2017,” Shenhe replies. “This is my third year.”
“And do you know when I first came?”
She blows on a spoonful of congee. “Uh. This year?”
“Yes,” Yelan says, examining Shenhe closely. It feels like she’s picking her apart; trying to find something to cut through. “So you would get a point for that.”
“You let me get that point, though,” Shenhe points out.
“Obviously,” allows Yelan. “It won’t always be that easy. It’s your turn to ask a question.”
Shenhe stares at the wooden grooves in the table. “Do you have any siblings?”
“No,” Yelan answers. “You have a brother and a sister.”
“How did you know that?” Shenhe asks.
“The picture on the lab bench. They look a lot like you.”
Shenhe curls her arms across her body. “We don’t talk a lot.” Neither of them had known she was going to Antarctica. She hasn’t spoken to them in long enough for it to be natural to tell them, and besides, they don’t contact each other anyway. It wouldn’t matter.
“One point for you, one for me,” says Yelan. She puts her hand on the table, barely a centimetre away from Shenhe’s closed fist. Her hands are pale, veins icy blue. Shenhe wants to rub warmth back into her palms. “I get the next question.”
—
“Where are you from?” asks Yelan, one week later. The point total is up to fifteen for Yelan, Shenhe behind by one.
Shenhe closes her computer. A ping-pong ball has rolled into her room from the common area’s ping-pong table setup, and she crouches to pick it up as Yelan sits down on her bed. “You asked me this already.”
“But you didn’t answer,” says Yelan.
She examines the ping-pong ball. It has a dent in the side. “Zhangjiajie.”
“You don’t strike me as someone from Hunan.”
“Well,” Shenhe says. “I moved away to study. Not exactly a lot of opportunities for marine chemistry. We lived too far from the river.”
“Maybe you can teach me how to get better with spice,” Yelan says. “I’m still learning.”
“I’ll give you some recipes,” she says. “You can make them.” She very carefully does not add when you get back.
Yelan hums, kicks her legs up on the headboard of Shenhe’s bed. “Is it weird that I didn’t really imagine you being from anywhere?”
“Thanks,” Shenhe replies, a little stung. “I appreciate it.”
“Not like that,” says Yelan, waving her hands. “You look like you belong here, kind of. It suits you.”
“I look like Antarctica,” repeats Shenhe tonelessly.
“Everyone looks like somewhere, don’t they?” Yelan asks, instead of confirming Shenhe’s statement.
“Maybe?” she hedges. She tilts her head to look at Yelan and tries to imagine where she’s from, but fails. It slides away from her like a desperate fish; slips off like water, edgeless. Even her accent is impossible to pin down. “You don’t look like anywhere,” she says.
“I don’t,” agrees Yelan. “That’s the difficult part. Not everyone belongs to a place, either.”
“But you have to be from somewhere.”
“You’re going to laugh,” Yelan warns. “You probably won’t know it, anyway.”
“Just tell me.”
“I’m from Yilan,” she says. “In Taiwan. Same second character and everything. My grandparents thought it was funny. The fortune-teller said it was a lucky name.”
“And was it?”
“I have no idea,” Yelan responds after a moment, her eyes tracking the swirl of ice outside the window. “That isn’t up to me.”
—
The first snowstorm of March comes in cold and vicious; Shenhe just manages to slam the door against the wind as she hurries inside, equipment tucked into the pockets of her clothing.
“Hey,” Yelan says, and there she is again, sitting on the kitchen counter and stirring a cup of coffee. “It’s bad out there, isn’t it?”
“Well, it isn’t good,” Shenhe says. “The biggest storm so far this season.” She hesitates. “If you’re not used to the weather you’ll want to stay as far away from the outside walls as possible.”
Yelan shrugs, shoulders slight in her jacket. The colour in her hair is starting to fade, the roots melting from dark blue to black. “I’m used to storms.”
“What’s the weather like in Yilan?” asks Shenhe, sounding genuinely curious without meaning to.
“Wet,” Yelan says with a smirk. She raises her brows and meets Shenhe’s gaze, and Shenhe looks away, trying not to look into Yelan’s eyes. She doesn’t think she imagines the flirtatious tone of Yelan’s voice. “It rains all the time. Typhoons, mostly.”
“Different kinds of storms,” counters Shenhe. “They act differently. You’ll find out.”
—
When there are storms, everyone at the station is locked up in a tiny space. They get sick of each other quickly, and by the time she hears Huixing complain about losing at ping-pong for the fourth time in a row, Shenhe decides it’s probably time to go to bed.
“Wait,” says Yelan. She’s curled up on one of the wooden chairs, talking to Lanyang, but she stops and waves at Shenhe when she spots her getting up from her seat.
Yelan has made friends easily. She knows more about everyone than Shenhe does, even with the people she’s spent several seasons with already.
Shenhe wonders, briefly, if she plays the same question game with anyone else, then tamps down the flicker of jealousy that sparks in her chest at the thought.
“Ping-pong was getting boring,” Yelan tells her as Shenhe pushes open the door to her room. “Do you play any sports?”
“It’s not your turn to ask a question,” says Shenhe, on autopilot. She remembers because Yelan had asked yesterday about her favourite food as a child, when they were eating freeze-dried snap peas and huddled in the lab as Antarctic midnight brewed outside.
Yelan’s hands still. “You’ve been keeping track?”
“There are rules,” says Shenhe. “You can’t just let the rules go.” Which is a roundabout way of saying that she’s been keeping track.
“Right. Then you ask your question, and I’ll ask mine after that.”
Shenhe sits down on the edge of her bed, facing Yelan. The corners of her sheets are creased from Yelan’s motions, and she smooths out the wrinkles with a palm. “Why did you choose to come to Antarctica?”
“You already asked that,” says Yelan, brow raising as she adds, “and I said it was because of the rocks.”
“No, but…” Shenhe stops, searching for the words. “A lot of geologists wouldn’t think the rocks were worth it.”
“And you think they’re not?” Yelan asks, leaning back on Shenhe’s headboard, the set of her shoulders defiant.
“I couldn’t tell you anything about rocks either way. I was just saying. Most people hate the idea of going to Antarctica for research.”
Yelan falters, for a second. “You’ve been here before,” she says, by way of explanation. “Do you think anyone in Antarctica counts as ‘most people’?”
—
By the time the storm blows over, both of them are neck-and-neck in scores. Shenhe learns about Yelan’s grandparents, tells her about their shared family customs: what changes, what stays the same.
They stop counting when they get to a hundred points.
But they keep the game going, keep asking questions, taking turns, like if they stop there won’t be anything left to do. And maybe that’s true: once it’s over, it’s over.
—
The first time they play weiqi, Yelan teaches her. Shenhe hasn’t seen a weiqi board since she was seven, at least, milky eyes and too-pale hair, balanced on her grandfather’s knee as his voice rumbled in his chest. Pointing out the stones scattered across the board.
“It’s easier when you get the hang of it,” says Yelan. She’s almost as pale as Shenhe—Antarctica in the winter will do that to you. Where summers spent at the larger research stations or conducting field studies on ships leave everyone burnt and reddened by the glare of the sun off the snow, the wintertime is too dark for any of it to leach into skin, either way.
Shenhe shrugs. “Okay. When did you learn how to play?”
“Bad question,” Yelan says, eyes dancing. The flame flickers in them and melts at the snow on the windowpane. “You know that’s a free point for me.”
“Maybe I just wanted to know the answer.”
“My grandmother taught me,” Yelan tells her. “The second week I came to their house.”
“You—”
Yelan’s knuckles go white around the armrest. “I told you about Yilan’s storms,” she says. “The water goes up to your shoulders and not everyone makes it out.” Playing with her bracelet, she laughs, and adds, “I swam so far inland I almost made it to Luodong.”
Shenhe laces her fingers together. “Oh,” she says.
“Oh,” agrees Yelan. “They’re waiting for me, still,” she says, abruptly. “My grandparents. Sometimes they still ask if I’m coming back.”
“And are you?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she answers, which isn’t much of an answer at all. “Did you know Antarctica is one of the only places on Earth where rain is physically impossible? It freezes before it leaves the sky.”
Shenhe feels like she’s being dragged along on a string, part of a race she has no chance of catching up on. “Okay?”
Yelan folds her legs up beneath her—graceful, pale, her fingers bony and sallow-looking. Almost translucent in the snow-light. “Do you have anyone waiting for you at home?”
“I—” Shenhe stops, confused and tired and a little irritated. “No,” she says shortly. “If I understand what you’re asking, no.” She doesn’t think she’s ever understood what Yelan is asking.
“Depends,” replies Yelan after a moment.
“On what?”
“If you understand what I’m asking.”
“I’m not going to understand if you don’t tell me,” Shenhe answers, and she gets up and stares out the window, ice frosting the corners of the sill. She tries to prop her hands up on the ledge and they come away ice-cold.
The room is so quiet for so long that Shenhe thinks Yelan must have slipped out. She looks at the glacier outside, unseeing, until the reflection in the window shifts and Yelan comes up behind her. Puts a hand on her shoulder.
“I think you understand,” Yelan tells her.
Shenhe drops her head into her palms. Her temples throb and she feels so distant it’s hard to remember how to care about anything. Whether it’s winter-over or just a bad mood, no one can say.
Yelan hooks her chin over Shenhe’s shoulder. “It’ll get better,” she insists.
Shenhe is about to protest that really she should be the one saying that, as the Taishan veteran, three seasons of wintering-over to her name and more cases of polar T3 witnessed than she can count. Instead, Yelan’s voice sinks into her muscles like honey and something in her ribs shifts, settles.
The darkness outside is ice-blue. The aurora Australis is here, already, but it’ll be most visible soon—perhaps a few weeks more. Something to look forward to, at least.
—
GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE
Vol. 157, No. 5
Field studies on the parallel deformation in Martian landscapes and monzodioritic valleys in Northeast Antarctica
Zhang Yelan
Planetary Geology, Taishan Station, Polar Research Institute of China
Abstract:
Previous research on the inter-plutonism and deformation in Antarctica’s monzodioritic valleys (Cox, 2009) has found that superposition of the radial expansion and regional compression resulted in an inhomogeneous strain field and non-coaxial structures developed at the ends of the pluton. This led to metamorphism of the host-rocks and migmatite development not previously observed. In this collection of field studies, we discuss the products of ductile-plastic deformation that we have discovered and analyzed in Antarctica’s Northeast valleys, extending from Princess Elizabeth Land to the Shackleton ice shelf, and—considering the mirroring eolian processes and stabilization in Antarctica and Mars (Malin, 1984)—we examine their implications for further exploration into Antarctica as a Martian case study.
Recommended citation: Zhang, Y. (2019). Field studies on the parallel deformation in Martian landscapes and monzodioritic valleys in Northeast Antarctica. Geological Magazine, 157(5), 15-29.
—
April freezes into May, and the whole station goes dark. The lights still buzz away, and the heaters in their rooms are warm enough to keep their muscles going, but every time Shenhe looks outside the pool of darkness is inkier than before.
“Settling in for the long haul,” she hears one of the older researchers tell Lanyang, and that’s essentially how it goes—bunking out until the sun finally peeks over the horizon.
Without the sun to guide them, there’s less need to keep the same schedule. Shenhe likes to abide by it just to stay sane, but technically nothing stops her from falling asleep at random times or holing up in the lab for days on end.
When she spends almost a full day trying to find out what’s wrong with the spectrometer, too proud to ask the technicians playing ping-pong in the lounge, she blinks and feels the grittiness beneath her eyelids.
She checks her watch. Eleven-thirty PM: past lunch, and dinner, and even an after-dinner snack.
“I brought you food,” Yelan says, hovering at the door. She sounds tentative. Shenhe has never heard her sound anything but confident before, aware that she has everyone wrapped around her finger and knowing exactly what to do with it.
Shenhe shuts her eyes. “Okay.”
Placing the Tupperware on the table, Yelan sits down next to her, quiet and careful. Shenhe sees the light reflecting blue in her eyes and the months of winter feel a little bit brighter.
Yelan opens the container. “You can see the aurora from here.” It’s not a question.
Shenhe shrugs. “You can do that every day.”
“My room has a terrible view,” says Yelan in disagreement. “It’s not the same. I’ve always wondered,” she continues, “why the aurora is so much more pink than it looks in the books.”
“Well,” Shenhe says, and she wraps her sweater around her to stave off the cold leaking in through the walls, imaginary or not. “The Southern lights are more pink, because of the ions colliding with nitrogen in the atmosphere. In the books it’s the Borealis, usually—that one has more green in it. Green and blue mostly. They’re asymmetrical.”
“Huh.” Yelan tilts her head. “Why do you know so much about it?”
“Can’t exactly get a position as a chemist in Antarctica without knowing why the sky looks the way it does,” Shenhe points out. “Before I decided I wanted to go into marine chemistry, I did my undergrad capstone on the aurora Australis, so it felt like the natural choice. I always kind of wanted to come here.”
Yelan hums. “I didn’t know what the fuck I wanted to do until like, November last year,” she says conversationally. “But we ended up in the same place.”
Shenhe curls her fingers in her palms. “Only one of us really wanted it, you’re saying.” It bruises more than she expected it to, but then again, she hadn’t expected Yelan to tell her anyway: that despite one of them trying so much harder, despite slaving over her dissertation and being too wrung out to even cry herself to sleep, she’ll never truly get ahead.
“What—no, that’s not what I meant,” Yelan says hastily, waving her hands.
She pulls her knees into her lap. “What did you mean, then?”
“Just that it’s funny how life works out,” she replies. “I mean. Less than a year ago I thought I’d met the love of my life, but here we are.”
Shenhe startles for a moment, regains her stance—as if the floor has slipped out from beneath her feet, so quick it’s only noticeable once the moment has passed. “Sorry,” she says, stumbling. “I’m—sorry.”
Shrugging, Yelan traces the veins in the wood table. “She wanted us to get married. I was scared,” she says. “She was too gentle for me. And—you know. It was still new, but that wouldn’t matter here. No one tries to say who you can and can’t marry in Antarctica.”
“Oh.”
Yelan stares out the window, aurora Australis glimmering a fierce purple against her skin. “Have you ever been in love before?”
Shenhe blinks. “I mean,” she starts. “I don’t think so?”
“No?”
And then she’s just standing there, throat dry, Yelan’s profile sharp and graceful in the glow of the Southern lights, the ache of her spine knotted with want. She reaches out and puts her hand over Yelan’s, tentative. “But I could be persuaded.”
—
“Be safe,” she tells Yelan, brushing a lock of hair away from her face. “Don’t go too far.”
“I’m always safe,” Yelan promises. “I won’t go past the crater.” She’s suited up to head outside in the storm, the waning months of August bringing better weather and exploration conditions.
“Don’t fall into a polynya,” adds Shenhe.
“I’ve been outside before,” Yelan replies, grinning. “Your fancy chemistry words can’t scare me. I love you.”
“It’s not a fancy word,” counters Shenhe. “I just don’t want you to die out there.”
Yelan flicks her on the shoulder. “It takes four syllables to say; it’s a big word. And you’re supposed to say it back,” she reminds Shenhe.
“Fine,” Shenhe says. “I love you. Don’t die.”
—
“I didn’t die,” Yelan says, peeling off her outerwear and placing an airtight, sealed bag on the table. “I brought you back some rocks.” She closes the door to the lab and presses a kiss to Shenhe’s hair.
Shenhe closes her eyes. “What kind?”
“Cool ones,” she tells her. “Ones that take four syllables to say.” Shenhe can hear the smile in her voice, clear as Antarctic daylight.