Lina walks you to the gauge like it is a shy animal.

“Feel that number,” she says. You cannot feel a number, but you look until it becomes a sentence. Outside: about six hundred pascals, if you like pascals, which is a tiny slice of the hundred thousand you would have at a beach on Earth. Inside Leaf Hall: a comfortable Earth-ish bubble. The bubble is the whole trick.

“CO2 percent outside is high. CO2 amount is low,” Lina says. “Percent is a pie chart. Amount is the pie. Mars baked a pie chart and forgot the pie.”

You snort, because she wants you to. Then you stop, because jokes are not seals.

The inner hatch has a wheel. The wheel has a pin. The pin has a label. “We go outside on purpose, in a suit, on a tether, for glass we can reach. We do not ‘crack’ anything to be generous to tomatoes. Tomatoes want our pressure and a tank if the room CO2 is shy. They do not want a depressurization with a philosophy.”

Imani on comm: “If the lesson stuck, I need a grower who can still do fractions of light.”

You can take the lesson back to Leaf Hall. You can still want a tiny vent, because tiny feels like it shouldn’t count.

Tiny is how bubbles die.