My knuckles were white with fury. “Henry, what the hell are you talking about?”
He looked down, his mouth drawn in a thin line. “I’m talking about Tierra Nueva. I’m talking about people like my parents, slaving away day in and day out in a factory for the rich a-holes on Earth. My parents break their backs to line the pockets of someone who will never know them, but has no problem dictating their lives from a hundred million kilometers away. They have no voice, and if we let GSAF keep on the way they have been, they never will. We never will. Sure, maybe things aren’t too bad right now. But you know the funny thing about power? Once someone has a little, they always want more. So if we don’t raise our voices now, we might not have a chance later.”
He glared at me. “And if you ask me? That’s the real reason your dad left. Maybe that coin just proved it to him.”
I barely noticed Henry’s figure flicker and disappear as he signed off chat. I just stood there, fists clenched, shaking with anger. I’d always known Henry was a radical, but he’d crossed the line. He had no right to say those things about my mom, or about me. My mom had worked her butt off to get this job with GSAF. Space travel had been her dream growing up. Henry had no right to disparage her for taking a job that would give her that dream, and help millions of people in the process.
And Abuelo! Did Henry think he’d had it easy, coming to the United States when he was just five years old? Having to fight for citizenship? He’d told me time and again that deciphering the Cascajal Block had been pan comido compared to dealing with the US immigration board. My family had worked just as hard to get where they were as Henry’s parents had. And we certainly hadn’t taken handouts from anyone, regardless of what Henry seemed to think.
I wasn’t trying to make excuses for GSAF—how could I, after this morning?—but what did he want me to do? Lead a damn revolution?
I didn’t want to deal with any of this. I just wanted my life to go back to normal.
I pulled my headset off and flung it onto my bed with as much strength as I could muster. I stared at it, laying sideways on my crumpled covers, for a full minute. Then I turned to my nightstand and yanked open the drawer, where I’d hidden the coin after the incident at the train station.
But the coin wasn’t there. In its place was a piece of yellowed paper. It looked like a page that had been ripped from an old book. Across the faded print of the original text, a message was scrawled in black marker. My blood ran cold as I read the messy handwriting.
“Thanks for the coin. I still want the key. You know where to find me. -E.H.”
The storm had passed, but the fog was thicker than usual the next morning as I stood alone on the train platform. The tracks seemed to disappear into a blanket of white on both sides. It was so cold that my breath came out in steamy puffs that merged into the swirling mist.
This early on a weekend, only a couple of other people waited alongside me. Henry was nowhere to be seen. I doubted he’d show up at the dig site, either. He’d be sulking. That was fine with me. If I saw his face again before next annum, it would be too soon.
I’d barely slept the night before. When I wasn’t stewing over the argument with Henry, I was having anxiety attacks that crazy Emil was going to show up in my bedroom in the middle of the night, wielding an ax and demanding that I hand over the mysterious key. How was I supposed to give him something if I didn’t even know what it was? Had my dad left a key in the lunch box? I didn’t remember seeing one, but I couldn’t exactly check, now that Mom had confiscated it. And how was I supposed to ask her for it? “Hey, Mom, I know you told me to let it go, but I didn’t, and now there’s a serial killer after me. Help?”
I was relieved when the train rumbled up to the platform, and even more so when I found no one waiting for me onboard. But I didn’t relax entirely until I reached the Sparta Island stop and met Tamara at the maglev station.
“Where’s Henry?” she asked, looking around. “Not detention again?”
“Who knows? He’s probably out defacing GSAF headquarters or recording a new manifesto to stick up in his precious anarchist chatspace. Probably a better use of his time.”
Tamara furrowed her brows, but didn’t say anything.
Scylla was waiting for us when we pulled into the Curiosity Bay station. I could see her as the maglev slowed, perched atop the university’s entrance sign, swinging her legs. She was wearing a neon-yellow t-shirt that said Eat People, Not Animals in black letters huge enough to be legible from the passenger window. She stared at the train with such intense ferocity that Tamara laughed out loud and waved, though Scylla couldn’t have seen her through the reflective glass of the window.
As soon as she spotted us crossing the pedestrian bridge leading from the station to the school, she pounced.
“Where were you guys yesterday?” she demanded. “The rain scare you off? The dig actually did get canceled, but not until we were all already on the shuttle and halfway out to the crater.”
“My mom gave us a ride straight out to the site,” I explained, “so we were there when GSAF showed up.”
“Really? Fresh.” She looked between the two of us expectantly. “Well, give me the dirt!”
So Tamara and I told her what all had happened the day before. This time in the retelling, I found that my mind dwelled on the stranger details more than it had before I spoke to Henry. Especially how quickly Joseph Condor had appeared. Had he really planned to drop in on the site all along? Or was GSAF actually watching us?
Scylla nodded as we finished explaining. “Yeah, that’s happened a few times just this semester.”
“Does it make sense to you?” asked Tamara. “I mean, I get that if these things are GSAF property, we need to return them, but why are they shutting the entire site down for the whole day over pieces of scrap metal?”
“That’s been bothering me, too,” Scylla admitted. “You know, some of the things we’ve found… I’ve never really gotten a chance to get a good look at them, but they never really look like anything that would come off a satellite. They’re just weird, random things, like coins and stuff.”
I nearly choked. “Coins?”
“Yeah. I mean, not exactly, but the thing I dug up was flat and round like that. It was super corroded, though, so I couldn’t really tell what it looked like. Joseph Condor snatched it right out of my hand before I could even blink.” She swiped at me, her fingers curled like claws.
“The thing we found yesterday looked like an old earpod,” Tamara said. “I mean, I suppose it could be an antenna, but…”
Scylla said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said, Isaak. About the glass not looking like tektite. I looked it up online and you’re right, natural tektite is all dark and rocky looking. I think something’s going down. Do you think it’s a GSAF cover-up?”
I thought back to what Henry had said last night. On the one hand, it just seemed so crazy conspiracy-theory. But on the other…
“I don’t know. But I think we should keep our eyes open.”
◦ • ◦
When we got to the dig site, we split into our usual groups and started working. It was a bit surreal, to see how normal everyone else was acting when I felt so on edge. Between Joseph Condor, everything that Scylla had said, my fight with Henry, and then finding that Emil had been inside my house without any of us knowing, my skin felt prickly with nerves. Every sound made me jump. Every shadow that passed over my head was sure to be a GSAF drone, surveilling my every move.
Across the trench, Scylla smiled tensely at me. I wasn’t the only one on edge.
The ground was soft from the rain the day before, but not overly muddy. We dug for over an hour, Scylla starting from one end of our gridded-off workspace and me from the other, working methodically across the area, gradually moving closer together. By noon, we were about a meter apart and caked in mud. She was close enough that, when her trowel hit something in the dirt, I heard its metallic thud, softly.
She stared down at it for a moment. Then she glanced over at me, expression urgent, and looked pointedly down toward the dirt-encrusted object beneath her fingertips.
“Did you find something, Scylla?” asked Gilbert, one of the TAs supervising in our trench.
“Not sure,” she replied, her voice wobbling slightly. “I think it’s just a big rock.”
Gilbert pulled out his palmtop and took a couple of steps forward. Scylla’s wide eyes shot over to me. Before I could react, though, a shriek rang out from Trench 21.
The three of us leapt, startled. The radio at Gilbert’s hip crackled to life. “Dr. Gomez,” a staticky voice intoned, “we need you in Trench 21 right away. And we need to call GSAF out here ASAP.”
Gilbert’s eyebrows furrowed. “The hell?” he breathed, and moved away from us, gingerly climbing up the slick, muddy slope out of the trench.
Distantly, I heard someone crying in the next trench over. What in the world was going on?
“Isaak, quick,” Scylla hissed, dragging my attention back to the matter at hand. “Help me get this out of the ground.”
The object she’d uncovered was a flat, trapezoidal thing, about fifteen centimeters across and five centimeters thick. It was completely coated in red mud, but as she brushed at it with her fingers, I could see that beneath the dirt it was at least partially metallic, and covered in symbols and markings that were eerily similar to those on the missing coin.
“What do you think it is?” I whispered.
“I have no clue. But you know what? I’m sick of GSAF taking everything from us before we get a chance find out. I want to get a better look at this thing.”
“How are we going to do that, exactly?” The rumbling sound of an approaching helicopter echoed off the hills around us. “That’s probably GSAF now. You heard the guy on the walkie.”
“We’ll have to hide it,” Scylla said matter-of-factly, thrusting the muddy object toward me.
I stared at her, dumbfounded. “How am I supposed to hide it?”
“Stick it under your shirt!” She had to shout, now, to be heard over the near-deafening sound of the looming chopper blades. I looked skyward. A black-and-white police helicopter was bearing down on us. They’d called the police?
“Hold on!” I yelled back. “The cops—”
Scylla rolled her eyes and, without a moment’s hesitation, shoved her hand down her own t-shirt and tucked the filthy object into her bra. The cannibalistic urgings of her t-shirt stretched until the words were barely recognizable.
I looked down, my face red and hot with embarrassment. Her glare burned into the back of my head as she grumbled, “Good thing I’ve got plenty of storage in here for the girls, since some people are too chicken to do their part for the cause. I’ll never complain about wearing a D-cup again.”
Tamara burst over the side of the trench just then, sparing me from processing that completely unnecessary piece of information. “Guys,” she yelled over the noise of the helicopter, which was touching down on the flat expanse that doubled as a parking area. “Get over here, quick. One of the people in my dig group, they found…” She swallowed, struggling to get the next words out. “I think they found a body.”
◦ • ◦
Erick was standing in Trench 21, visibly pale, his fingers raking through that thick black hair as he looked down at the half-buried object at his feet. The dig site was total pandemonium, TAs and student diggers jabbering over each other incomprehensibly. Some people were crying, others dashing around in excitement, everyone overcome by the shocking nature of the find.
I only managed to get a brief look at it before the GSAF suits swept in and ushered us all away from the site. It was undeniably a human skull. There was no mistaking the dark holes of the eye sockets, the eerily toothy grin. The bone was discolored, cracked and red as the earth around it. It reminded me of the fossilized skulls I’d seen at the history museums Abuelo used to take me to when I’d visit him on Earth.
I wondered how long it had been buried here. And, more importantly, why. Why was there a human body buried out here, in the middle of nowhere?
The GSAF agents escorted all the undergrads, and me and Tamara, over to the parking area where the shuttle van was waiting for us. I was expecting them to interrogate us or something, but they were really adamant about getting the group of us off the site as quickly as possible.
“We’ll contact each of you individually for questioning in the next few days,” one of the agents explained, practically shoving me into the van. “Please make sure you have some time available when we contact you.”
“What’s going to happen to the dig site?” I heard Grant, standing across the parking lot, ask. He spoke in his typical demanding tone, but his quavering voice gave him away.
“That will be determined based on what our investigation turns up. But I wouldn’t expect to be back here for the next several weeks.”
Grant looked crestfallen. I tried not to betray anything with my expression, but I suddenly found myself glad that Scylla had shoved that thing down her shirt, after all.
Nobody talked much on the ride back over to Kimbal. Everyone who’d been working in Trench 21 was pretty shaken. The person who’d actually made the find had stayed behind so GSAF could question them about the events of the find.
“Poor Schlessinger,” a girl I didn’t know murmured at one point, her face shiny from tears running down her cheeks. “They were so freaked out, and now they’re stuck out there all alone with Joseph Condor and the cops. I mean, what the hell? Rocks and crap are one thing, but I never signed on to dig up a crime scene.”
“I wonder who it was,” the guy sitting next to her said. “It would have to be a missing person, right? Has anyone heard about anybody disappearing from Tierra Nueva the last few years?”
My heart shuddered to a stop in my chest. The chatter of my classmates faded, inaudible over the deafening roar in my ears. Oh, God, what if it’s…
My throat tightened. I thought I might throw up.
“Isaak? Isaak, are you okay?” Slowly I became aware of Tamara’s hand on my shoulder, peering into my face. Her expression was grim. “You don’t think it’s”—she swallowed, and added in a whisper, “your dad?”
“I don’t know. Ayyyy,” I groaned and shoved my face into my hands. I wanted a do-over. I wanted this day to go away. All this time I’d thought he just left, abandoned us. But none of us had heard from him at all in over two annums. I knew he and Mom had been having problems, and he’d talked so many times about leaving and going back to Earth, but what if he hadn’t? What if he’d actually been killed?
What if Emil killed him?
And Emil had been in my house, where Mom and Celeste were right now. Who knew what he might do to them?
I needed to get home. Now.
“I have to call my mom,” I said, pulling my palmtop out of my pocket. “I have to make sure she’s okay.”
On the other side of Tamara, Scylla frowned. “Dude, what are you talking about? Are you seriously saying you might know who that stiff out there is?”
“I don’t know.” I didn’t want to believe it, but it seemed like my dad had some sort of weird connection to the dig site—the coin, the arch, crazy Emil and his cryptic warnings. And then his disappearance. It was all way too much.
My palmtop buzzed in my hand. A text from my mom. Erick called me. Celeste and I are on our way over to Curiosity Bay right now. I’ll meet you at the bus stop on campus.
They were out of the house. They were safe.
I’d never been so relieved in my life.
“Zak?” Celeste asked in an uncharacteristically small voice. I looked up, blinking a few times as my eyes came back into focus. I’d been sitting on the worn, faux-leather armchair in the living room, staring intently at my feet, for over an hour.
Celeste stood before me, holding Mom’s deskpad out and smiling hesitantly up at me. “I drew you this. To make you feel better.”
On the
deskpad’s screen was your usual kindergarten masterpiece, a stick figure whose arms came out of their ears. But I recognized the characters as ones she’d drawn before—it was me and Abuelo, wearing matching Indiana Jones-style hats.
“You’re in the pyramid,” she explained. “You’re going to find the mummy and the treasure, and then you’ll be a famous arky-ologist, like Abuelo.”
I smiled in spite of myself. “Thanks. That’s pretty fresh. Can you send it to me? Remember how?”
She flashed her gap-tooth grin at me and nodded, running her fingers across the deskpad’s screen. The doorbell rang just then, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. Who would it be? The cops, come to ask Mom to ID the body? Or crazy Emil, come to finish the job?
“It’s Dr. Erick. I saw his blue truck out the window,” said Celeste, her eyebrows drawn. I could tell my reaction had worried her. She didn’t really understand what was going on, but Mom and I had been visibly upset all day, and it’d had an effect on her, too.
I never thought I’d find myself relieved to see Erick, but I was dying to know what had happened at the site after we’d left. I leapt to my feet and hurried into the entryway. The front door stood open, and Mom and Erick were embracing. I wasn’t sure who was comforting whom, honestly. They both looked as shaken as I felt.
When Erick saw me standing there, he quickly dropped his arms from around Mom. “Hey, Isaak. What a day, right?”
I couldn’t think of a sufficient response to that. I eventually just twitched up a corner of my mouth, noncommittally.
“Were the police able to figure anything out?” Mom asked, her hand on Erick’s elbow. “I mean, about the thing you found? It wasn’t…” She trailed off and looked over at Celeste, who was standing behind me, peering around my legs and solemnly watching everyone’s reactions. “Isaak, maybe you and Celeste should go watch flix in my room or something.”
Fourth World Page 7
