SEEN BY HUMAN EYES, THE HOLLOW HULK OF YMIR ’S ICE SHARD WAS as dead, brittle, and gleaming as the discarded carapace of a beetle. Captured through the electronic eyes of cameras, then speeded up a hundred-thousandfold, so that the events of one day were compressed into one second of video, it looked like an amoeba pursuing, capturing, and swallowing Izzy. A person with no preconceptions of what they were watching would perceive Izzy as a steel-headed insect, all legs and pods and antennas, twitching and kicking in an effort to defend itself from the slow, relentless, liquid onslaught of the ice monster.