The wind shoved sheets of snow across the tarmac as Aysel stepped off the plane. The cold was biting, and a rush of hesitation went through her – what have I done? The decision to move to the far north wasn’t a deception. She had never lied to herself. Her choices were hers, but they had been repayments—debts to a damaged family past, to inherited guilt without consent. Lately even her own thoughts felt distant to her.

A woman waited for her at the exit, holding a small sign with her name. She introduced herself as Katja—an unobtrusive Finnish woman—and Aysel was grateful that she knew only a few words of English.
They walked to the car. She put the only bag she had in the small trunk, and they drove for more than four hours, in silence, through the barren, snow-covered Finnish landscape. The apartment lay on the far side of the lake, across from the Pyhäjärvi mine. It was a single room, sparsely furnished. A bed. A small table. A shelf fixed to the wall, filled with books. Everything belonged to someone else’s life.

She put her bag down and tried to anchor herself in a single familiar feeling. She checked the TV, flipped through the magazine on the table, and finally went to the bookshelf. Plath, Lispector, Knausgård, Auster. She picked up Diamond Prose by Arthur Rimbaud, a 1950s edition that smelled faintly of damp when she opened it at the poem Departure:

Seen enough. Vision has met me in every quarter.
Had enough. The cities’ murmur, in the evening, in the sun, and always.
Gone enough. The halts of life.—O Murmur and Visions!
Departure in rapture and noise anew!

A warm light from a lotus-shaped candlestick on the shelf softened the room. She put Barzin’s Notes to an Absent Lover in the CD player. His melancholy voice filled the room.

Desperate in my sleep
Like I’d lost something.

The setting sun cast a calm, amber light through the old window glass. Its uneven, wavy surface bent the light into small shifting fragments that moved across the room. Then the light thinned. Only the last faint shimmer lingered in the glass.

Barzin’s record ended. She fell asleep.

***

When she woke, the sun was already above the horizon. She got up, made coffee, sat down by the window, and looked out at the whiteness. The sunlight bounced off the snow so sharply it was almost impossible to keep her eyes open.

The lake was frozen, a flat sheet of white stretching toward the far shore where the mine lay. She stood at the window and looked at the wide, unfamiliar expanse. She checked the clock on the wall. The first meeting at work was still hours away.

Aysel was approaching fifty-five and had been considered a respected researcher at the advanced technology center she had worked at—a development whose good intentions she no longer believed in.

It had not always been like that. There had been a time when the movement of electrons had enchanted her as much as the pulse of a living body. That enchantment had faded, but the deep need to understand the human urge to reach another was still there. The need to be heard, seen, understood. What had troubled Aysel most lately was the clear, almost painful realisation that the more enthusiasm humans invested in developing devices, the less they developed and understood themselves. But she kept doing her job as well as she could. She no longer had the strength to build a new belief.

Still, she had taken the job several kilometres underground, in the remote north, where she and her team were equipping the largest European mine with a wireless network, trying to transform it into the safest in the world.

She took another sip of coffee and looked at the clock on the wall.

It was almost time to go.