MOST OF THE GIANT NICKEL-IRON MOON CORE FRAGMENT NAMED Cleft had been melted down and reshaped into what was now the Eye. The engineers had not been able to bring themselves, however, to destroy the part of it immediately surrounding the place where Endurance had come to rest at the end of the Big Ride, and where the bodies of Doob, Zeke Petersen, and other heroes of the Epic had been interred directly into iron catacombs. That patch of the asteroid—the deep, shielded declivity where the first several generations of the new human races had lived out their entire lives—had come to be known as Cradle.