"Holy shit!"

"Clearly!"

"...I should probably be freaking out or something but actually this is really cool," says Cass.

"I'm freaking out a little bit!" says Anna.

"I'm freaking out! We have no way of getting back!"

"I mean, there was a way to get here, so logically a way to get back must exist, but, yeah, that doesn't mean we can find it..."

"Something that could get us back has to exist but it doesn't have to exist here."

"Yeah."

She has now progressed to nonverbal forms of freaking out like sitting down, putting her head between her knees and trying to take deep breaths.

Edie sits down beside her and hugs her.

Anna sits a little ways away and looks up at the alien sky.

Emily starts quietly crying.

The sky is brightening in a couple of places. Near the high end of one of the gold lines, and more faintly near the low end of one of the silver lines on almost the opposite end of the sky. It's pretty, in a really, really strange way.

Yeah. That's--not nothing. Eventually Emily stops crying and silently watches the sky.

A disk of blazing gold peeks over the upper horizon on its way down the golden line. At the same time on the other side of the sky, a fainter silver disk peeks over the lower horizon on its way up the silver.

"This place is crazy," Anna murmurs.

"No kidding."

"Upside-down sunrise."

"Maybe it's really a sunset...no, that doesn't fit either..."

"If that's really the other half of this planet up there, it's sunrise for them... but at that rate, you'd get a hell of a short day before it goes past the other horizon and disappears..."

"You think this--shell thing--is a planet?"

"More like I don't know what to call it if it's not one."

"Some kind of cavern or something? I mean, it seems likelier than not to be artificial."

"It has a sun and a moon, it's approximately planet-sized... I'm getting kind of a Ringworld vibe, almost? Like, fantasy's answer to Ringworld." She squints at the floating jungle. "Maybe fantasy's answer to the Integral Trees, too."

"I'm more of a fantasy person than a sci-fi person so I don't know what those are."

"They're sci-fi books by this famous-ish old-school author. The Ringworld in Ringworld is a literal giant ring spinning around a sun, and the world in Integral Trees is a giant gas cloud around its sun. It's like - I'd put planets and Ringworlds and gas toroids and whatever this place is all in the same category? And I don't have a better word for that category than 'planet' even though 'planet' is not great."