Weeks later, the first synthetic hease bloomed inside a chilled reactor, following the snowflake’s blueprint. The domed station glowed with new air. Lyra kept the original crystal in her quarters, floating in zero-gravity, catching light.

The snowflake wasn’t just ice. Its lattice held a pattern—a molecular echo of ancient Europa water, structured in a way their hease-refiners had never seen. If they could replicate it, they wouldn’t just harvest hease; they could grow it.

Not a real one, of course. Real snowflakes couldn’t exist here. But inside a frozen geode, preserved for a billion years, a perfect hexagonal crystal had somehow formed. It was delicate, impossibly intricate, and utterly useless for hease extraction.

Kael looked. Then he looked again.

In the glass-domed botanical station on Europa, “hease” was the most valuable currency—a rare, breathable essence extracted from the moon’s subsurface vents. Lyra was a hease-harvester, and she’d just found a snowflake.

And every time someone asked how she’d saved them all, she said the same thing: One flake. One chance. Hease.