MATURE. Adults only. Every named and speaking character is an adult, with an age on the page: Dr Ines Marsh 33, Commander Alice Fenwick 46, Dr Pavel Hora 51, Moses Adeyemi 28, Yuki Tanabe 39, Bex Carmichael 24, Sona Reyes 42, Priya Sandhu 36, and the Haal Varuk 210 and Ossek 411, adults of a species that lives about six hundred years. The youngest is 24. No minor exists in the book in any role, memory, or plan. Themes: an ice moon at sixty-seven kelvin, minus two hundred and six degrees, a station held at nineteen degrees by a heat exchanger thirteen years into a ten-year life; eight humans one solar cycle from relief; one thousand one hundred and seventy-six hours of oxygen against forty-nine days of wait, then thirty-one; nine hundred and sixty kilos of rations at three kilos a person a day against a nine-day gap; a colony bounty of four hundred and ten thousand credits for a live Haal specimen and ninety thousand for tissue; a resonance that crosses species as biology stated as fact and never as fate; a specimen log written in a hand nobody else can read; and an elder of four hundred and eleven years offering a bargain. Sexual content: Dr Ines Marsh, 33, and Varuk, 210, are adults of different species and are not married. What each of them wants and what stops it is said out loud before anything begins in each of the three scenes, either of them can stop it at any point with one word, and the word is said once in the third scene and honoured immediately with no question afterwards. He asks as often as she does. The resonance does not override a choice and does not make one, and it does not reverse. The scenes are written in full and specific to these two people and to one warm room on an ice moon. They are not rewards: the first costs the clean log, the second costs Bex's silence, and the third costs the sentence its ground. No civic choice and no ending is unlocked by any of them. No injury is depicted, no weapon appears, and no method of anything is described. No slur is written out. Fictional moon, station, colony, and people. All music is instrumental, vocal playback is disabled, and lyrics are empty.