As they argued, I heard the telltale clacking of the train on its way down the tracks. “Come on,” I said to Henry, and we hurried to the platform’s edge. The train coasted to a stop and we rushed through the sliding doors. I could hear the business suit guys calling after us, saying that security was on its way, but I didn’t want anything to do with that. I just wanted to get the heck out of there.
“What the actual…” Henry panted as we slumped into our seats.
“I have no clue. That guy was a fruitcake and a half.”
“You shouldn’t have told him anything about your dad.”
“You’re the one who told him we found the coin at my house!” I flopped back against the roughly upholstered seat, exasperated. “What was I supposed to do? He was all up in my face with his nasty-ass breath! And he knew my dad, and about the coin. He might have known where it came from. And what else was he on about? A key?”
“Gee, I dunno, do you want to go back and ask him?” Henry suggested snidely.
“Of course not. And I think we’d better find another train to take to school if that weirdo’s going to be there every morning.”
“No kidding. I just hope he doesn’t know where you live, dude.”
I hadn’t thought of that. He obviously had known my dad, but I didn’t know how well. The thought of Emil turning up on my doorstep was enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life. I pulled up my palmtop’s phone app just to make sure it had emergency services saved on speed dial.
This stupid coin was causing me nothing but trouble. Maybe my mom was right—I should have let the whole thing go. But it was too late now. I was in it up to my neck.
Possibly the worst part of this whole weekend detention thing, I decided as I rolled blearily out of bed Saturday morning, was losing my two days of sleeping in. It was obnoxiously unfair to have to get up at 6:00 AM seven days a week.
The valley was blanketed in a thick fog as I walked to the train station—I was going to the one on Port Street now, a full kilometer farther to walk, but hopefully one that would be free of Freaky Emil. Henry was waiting for me when I got there, wearing a green short-sleeved t-shirt with no jacket, even though it had to be close to freezing out. This one said Freedom is life’s great lie in white text, and he’d crossed that phrase out with black Sharpie and written DISSENT in capital letters below it.
I didn’t know why I was ever surprised by anything he did, at this point.
We caught Tamara up when we transferred to the high-speed maglev terminal on Sparta Island. The maglev had a direct line to Kimbal University, over in Curiosity Bay on the far side of the peninsula. It was kind of out of the way, but we didn’t have a way to get to the dig site on our own, and since Erick’s project was being run through Kimbal, there was a shuttle to take the college students out to the site every morning.
By the time we got to the Curiosity Bay station, the fog had mostly burned off. Erick had told us to meet at the bus stop just past the front gates of the school. A group of students clustered in front of a short, carved marble sign that read Kimbal University and Institute of Science and Technology in gold letters. Henry, Tamara and I awkwardly positioned ourselves a couple of meters away from them and waited for the shuttle to appear.
It didn’t take long before one of the college kids meandered over to us, a tallish, relatively curvy Asian girl with black hair in a pixie cut. “Hey,” she said, “are you guys here for Professor Gomez’s survey?”
“Yup,” I answered.
“Fresh! I was hoping we’d get some more people signing up. It’s been getting really hard to manage all the digging with just the group we had.” She thrust her hand out at whichever one of us would take it. The three of us stared for a moment before Tamara finally moved to shake her hand.
“I’m Scylla,” the girl announced.
“Is that the name your mama gave you?” asked Henry.
Tamara jabbed him in the ribs with her left elbow, hard enough to make him flinch. The girl, on the other hand, seemed unfazed.
“Technically, it is. Priscilla. But I shortened it in high school, because, hello! Did you know there’s a huge monster named Scylla in the Odyssey? She’s got six arms and four eyes and she devours all the unwitting sailors that venture into her realm. And her best friend is a monster whirlpool. I mean, what’s not to love there?”
Henry nodded agreeably, apparently deciding that Scylla had passed the test.
“So, are you guys freshmen? Do you know what you’re majoring in yet?”
I looked from Tamara to Henry before finally saying, “Actually, we’re high school students. We go to the Academy in Tierra Nueva.”
Scylla grinned. “Fresh! I graduated from there last annum. Hey, hey, does Mr. Aguilar still do the announcements over the intercom every afternoon? Like, ‘Haaaave a nice day!’?” Her voice squeaked on the last word, in imitation of our vice-principal. Then she laughed, and, not waiting for an answer, chattered on, “Aw, I’m so glad you guys are here! I didn’t know they were opening the dig up to high school students. I guess they couldn’t find anyone else from Kimbal to volunteer? We really could use some more people. I wonder if they’ll open it up to other schools. My sister goes to Central—”
“They’re not here because they volunteered, Priscilla.”
A blond guy standing with the rest of the Kimbal students had apparently been listening in on the conversation, and he took a couple of steps closer to us now. “I was working with Professor Gomez on Wednesday while he was giving their class some tour, and these three set the alarm off.”
“Not on purpose!” I protested.
“Yeah, well you’d better be more careful from now on,” he snipped. “The work we’re doing out there is invaluable. If you damage anything, you’re damaging the whole of Mars.”
Henry scoffed. “Calm down, man. It’s just some rocks. I’m pretty sure the planet won’t explode if we accidentally drop one or something.”
“You can’t possibly comprehend the scientific significance of this—”
In what could only constitute as an act of God, the shuttle rolled into the parking lot and over to the bus stop just then, sparing us the rest of the blond guy’s diatribe. He still spent the whole ride down to the site fuming and glaring at us, but at least he didn’t talk to us again.
Scylla sat next to Tamara in the row ahead of me and Henry. “That was Grant,” she explained in a low voice. With a complete disregard for all seatbelt laws, she had gotten up on her knees and turned entirely around, leaning on her elbows over the back of her seat. “One of Professor G’s grad students. He’s insufferable. No one can stand him. I don’t even think Professor G likes him, and he likes everybody.”
My nose wrinkled involuntarily. “So do you think Erick—uh, Professor Gomez—is a good teacher?”
“Oh, he’s stellar! Everyone loves him. He’s one of those laid-back professors that doesn’t care if you eat in class and won’t throw a fit if you have to leave to go to the bathroom or something. He’s super nice.”
“Right,” I murmured.
Scylla kept chattering and swiveling around in her seat for the whole rest of the hour-long drive over to the dig site. I was already worn out by the time we finally got there and started unloading equipment from the back of the van, and it wasn’t even noon. We still had a good six hours of hard labor in front of us.
The other students who had taken the shuttle with us already had assignments, and they quickly dispersed to their usual trenches, which left Henry, Tamara and I standing awkwardly next to the van, wondering where we should go. A power tool whirred noisily somewhere in the distance, making a grinding sound that echoed off the hills around us. I wasn’t sure whether we should follow the sound or wait for someone to come get us. I was just contemplating getting back in the van and hiding out in there for the rest of the day when Erick bustled up, fiddling with something on his palmtop as he walked.
“Hello Isaak,” he said. “Tamara, Henry
. Glad you could make it. Since you’re new to the project, I’m putting each of you with an experienced group, to show you the ropes.”
Our first day on site, Erick spent most of the time showing us the ins and outs of the dig. Henry and Tamara both were assigned to Trench 21, one of the bigger pits the project had excavated out thus far. Even though one of the other professors was technically the supervisor in that area, it appeared that Grant had appointed himself the unofficial lead. I would have felt sorry for them, except I noticed that Erick had placed me in Trench 17, an area that he was supervising personally. Coincidentally, that would give us plenty of opportunity to get to know each other better. Perfect.
The good news was that Scylla was also working Trench 17. Her friendly exuberance was a bit intense, but it was far preferable to Grant’s imperiousness.
The site was much busier than I’d expected it to be, based on how quiet things had been the day of our tour—although, that day had been a weekday, and most of the workers were students. The machinery sound turned out to be emanating from Trench 6, where they were using a massive rig to drill core samples.
“This will enable us to get a more generalized look at the changes in geological strata over time,” Erick explained. “But we also want to get a more detailed, up-close look at what’s going on out here, and that’s where you all will come in. Trenches 17 and 21 are being excavated by hand, which lets us examine the different areas with a bit more finesse.”
He gave each of us what he called an “Earth Science starter kit,” which comprised of a rock hammer, a brush, a hand lens, a magnet, and, of course, gloves and safety goggles. Each of the trenches had been marked off with laser grids, and our job was to each take a square and dig it out, carefully documenting everything we came across. Erick had sent us a link to an app for our palmtops that would let us record every find and map its exact position with GPS targeting. The app even had a built-in compass and inclinometer that would let us determine every feature’s angle and orientation. Every detail would be captured and preserved exactly, and all our data together could be downloaded to any computer later on for analysis.
By the time Erick was done showing us the ropes—and since just about every task at the site had ultra-rigorous protocol assigned to it, that took awhile—the rest of the team had stopped for lunch.
“Hey, partner,” Scylla said, tossing me a water bottle from the plastic cooler. Then she pulled out a second and wiped it across her sweaty brow. “Ready to get your hands dirty?”
Surprisingly, I was. As much as I hated to admit it, seeing the trenches all gridded out actually made me excited. So many of the tools they were using out here were just like the ones Abuelo’s team used on his digs. I used to visit him for a month every Earth-summer—which corresponded with summer here some annums, and winter others—when he’d go down to Veracruz to excavate. When I was really little, I used to come home and grid out the backyard with kitchen utensils and dental floss, since Abuelo had told me they used to use string before the laser grids got more common. Mom would protest that she’d never get any gardening done if I had the backyard roped off like a spiderweb, but she always played along with it.
I had given up on archaeology. I knew it was an unrealistic, implausible fantasy. I couldn’t afford to chase down immaterial dreams when I had a solid future in front of me.
But as I sat there in that trench that day, my jeans caked in red mud and the sun beating down, with nothing but a trowel and the observations on my palmtop… for the first time, I felt like a real archaeologist. Sure, I wasn’t uncovering lost civilizations or exploring ancient pyramids, but when I dug up that first little stone seashell—Erick said they’d found dozens on the site already, evidence of primitive aquatic life—I felt like I’d just uncovered King Tut’s tomb.
So as much as it irked me to lose my weekends, and as crazy as Erick was driving me, I started thinking that day… maybe this project wouldn’t be so bad, after all.
Our first few weekends at the site were pretty straightforward, just a whole lot of digging and recording. It got to the point where I could recognize the different colors of rock and soil, and had somewhat of an idea what they meant—some of them formed only in conditions where water had been present, others were evidence of volcanic activity, and so on. And I started to recognize the fossils, too. We dug up dozens of those little spiral seashells I found my first day on site, which Erick said were similar to the cephalopods that were common on prehistoric Earth. There were fossilized plants, too; not just spider weeds, but beautiful ferns with curled, wispy fronds. Every fossil we uncovered gave me a thrill of excitement as I’d imagine how ancient Mars must have looked, so different from the pseudo-Earth we’d terraformed it into.
Apart from the fossils, the things I dug up most frequently were shards of glass. It seemed like every day I was uncovering one of these broken, blue-tinted fragments. The first time I found one, I thrilled at the thought that we’d finally found a sign of, as Henry put it, my Little Green Men.
“Don’t get excited, Isaak,” Scylla said as I held it to the light. “There’s glass like that all over the site. Professor G says it’s tektite. That’s natural glass that forms from the heat of a meteor impact. And there’s probably a billion impact sites here. Mars was like a meteor magnet or something.”
I frowned down at the smooth fragment in my hand. “Is tektite usually as clear as this? I always thought it was more like rock, or crystal. And look how flat it is. This looks man-made.”
Scylla hesitated, then took the piece from me, running a gloved finger over it. “I dunno. I’ve never seen tektite in real life. But Professor G ought to know what he’s talking about, right?” She tossed it back to me. “I mean, how else would this much glass have gotten here? We dig it up almost every day. It’s not exactly like Martians could have put it there.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s because the chemical makeup of the ground is different here than on Earth.”
That same nagging feeling I’d felt the day of the field trip hovered in the back of my mind, but I have to admit, I got so wrapped up in the work itself that I soon forgot all about it. The only time the coin crossed my mind was when Tamara or Henry off-handedly mentioned it. The two of them were more diligent than I’d been in the search for any clues about the coin. Tamara had tried to grill Grant about the arch a few times, but he’d been dismissive. It wasn’t important or interesting, as far as he was concerned. And after three weekends of digging up several pieces a day and nothing else of interest, even the glass started to seem commonplace to me.
The last weekend of May-II, I woke up to the sound of rain pelting my window. When I pulled the blinds up, I saw that this wasn’t just a little spring shower; water was pouring down from the sky in buckets. Along the hedge, a gnarled black spider weed that had popped up during the week and had already grown a meter high—one of us needed to get out there and chop it down before it overtook the whole yard—was bent over sideways from the force of the wind.
I wondered if the dig would be canceled in weather like this. Part of me was hoping it would so I could go back to sleep, but a shockingly larger part of me was disappointed by the thought of missing a day on site.
What had I become? Seriously, I was losing it.
My palmtop buzzed at an incoming group text from Erick. Storm’s less severe in the hills than the valley. See you all at eleven! He followed this with a dorky grinning emoji. I sighed and grabbed a pair of windbreaker pants from my gym bag.
I was heading out the door, rain slicker in hand, when my mom’s voice stopped me. “Isaak, you’re not planning on walking to the train station in this weather, are you?”
I found her in the kitchen, still in her pajamas, sipping coffee out of her favorite chipped mug. “Well, yeah,” I said, “unless you want to lend me the car.” Even though I didn’t have a driver’s license, anyone over the age of thirteen was allowed to ride by themselves in a self-driving car; it was just that Mom usually needed the car h
erself, to get to and from work, or to drive Celeste around.
She set her mug down and looked out the kitchen window. “I think I might. It’s awfully stormy out there.” But before I could get too excited about having the car on my own for once, she added, “I’ve been wanting to get out to see Erick’s project for a while now. Today’s as good a day as any.”
“But it’s raining out!” I protested. Although I have to admit, I was less concerned about my mom getting wet and more about her turning up on site at all. It was bad enough having Erick around all day when I was working. The last thing I needed was my torquing mom showing up, too.
“Exactly. You’re going to get soaked enough working all day. You don’t need to deal with walking and changing trains and waiting for the shuttle on top of it. Message Henry and Tamara and see if they’d like a ride, too. I’ll drive you all straight to the site.”
I tried arguing with her, but she wasn’t having any of it. So an hour later, there we were—me, Mom, and Celeste—parked in the circular drive outside Tamara’s house.
Tamara lived on the northwest side of town, not far from the Academy, in what bordered between a large house and a small mansion. Tamara always prided herself on not living in the sprawling “smart house” compounds some of our classmates lived in, but it still was a stark difference compared to my family’s duplex, let alone the apartment Henry had grown up in. Tamara’s moms were about as high up at AresTec as you could get, so they weren’t exactly short of funds. They’d been with the company since its startup and had even worked at GalaX for some time on Earth before relocating here to Mars when Tamara was a baby. Bryn was now the chief marketing officer for AresTec, and Mama D—her name was actually Delia, but she always insisted that Tamara’s friends call her by that nickname—was some kind of technical whiz, responsible for designing all their latest gadgets. She’d actually designed the A-Top 8, the newest model of AresTec’s palmtop that most of the kids at the Academy were using now.
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