A new image bloomed in the air: a great wheel divided into twelve houses, planets marked in glowing symbols, aspects drawn between them like delicate threads of fate. The Sun reveals the core of the self, the Moon the hidden tides of feeling.

Ten kilometres or less—so small a core to command so vast and lonely a pilgrimage across the abyss. She felt, with a strange and sudden intensity, the fragility of that frozen nucleus, locked in eternal cold, carrying within its modest bulk the memory of the solar system’s birth