“Mars air,” Imani repeats, like she’s tasting a lemon. “For the plants.”

The painted tomato on Oskar’s tablet seems to frown. “The buffet is real chemistry and the wrong restaurant. Outside CO2 is almost the whole menu, but the plate is empty. Pressure is a count of how much stuff is there, not how famous the stuff is.”

Imani watches you. She will not mock you. She will also not pretend a wrong map is a brave map.

“If we crack Leaf Hall to the outside, we don’t enrich the greenhouse. We empty it. Heat leaves. Water leaves. The plants’ air leaves. What comes in is a whisper of carbon dioxide at a pressure that cannot hold a lung or a stomata conversation. Some problems, you want extra CO2 from a tank, at our pressure. This problem? Photons, and not punching a hole in the bubble.”

The brown sky on the port has edges like teeth.

“You can still insist,” Imani says quietly. “You’re crew, not cargo. But insist with your eyes open.”

You feel your ears get hot. Wanting to use the planet you came to is older than greenhouses. Physics is older than that feeling, and it does not flinch.