“Mom, I’m not a kid!” I protested. “I was there, I deserve to know!”
“Isaak—”
“It’s okay, Jesica. It wasn’t him. Isaak can hear.”
Mom folded her arms. “Fine. But I’m not putting a six-year-old through this. Celeste, mija, come on. You want to go play Speculus? Maybe watch Mickey?” She took my little sister’s hand and led her into the master bedroom.
I awkwardly wandered into the kitchen, slumping down onto one of the chairs in the breakfast nook. Erick followed, helping himself to a mug from the dish drainer and pouring some coffee out of Mom’s eternally-plugged-in coffee pot. He took a swig and grimaced. The thing had been on all day, so I was sure it was probably lukewarm and stale.
A moment later, Mom bustled into the kitchen. “All right. Spill. So you’re saying the body was not Raymond?”
Erick shook his head. “Definitely not. It’s not… well, fresh enough.” I winced, and he glanced apologetically in my direction.
Mom sighed and leaned against the counter. “How long has it been out there, I wonder?”
“It’s hard to say. I wasn’t able to get a very good look at it before the police closed the site off. That skull was definitely old, though. It almost looked… fossilized. I’d have to actually study it to be sure, of course. But that’s how it looked to me.”
I sat up. “How could a fossilized human skull be buried out there? On Mars?”
“I don’t know. This whole scenario is so bizarre. It could be that the illegal antiquities trade has gotten a foothold here. There has been quite an increase in the amount of”—Erick paused, trying to think of a tactful way to put it—“wealthier people here in the peninsula over the last several years. And that is your typical clientele for black market dealers.”
“So you’re saying that smugglers might be using the survey site to stash their goods between buys?” I wrinkled my nose. “But why? Not only is it really far from town, it’s also an area that people are digging at, every single day. I mean, that’s like asking to get caught!”
Erick nodded, gnawing his lip. “I can’t say. Maybe the site was in use as a cache before we started the excavation, and that’s just an item they missed when they cleared out.” He shrugged. “It sounds far-fetched, but I can’t think of a better explanation.”
I looked down at the table and started scratching at one of the myriad dried coffee rings with my fingernail. There was one person who might know for sure, but I sure as hell didn’t want to track him down to find out.
I just wondered how long it would be before he came looking for me.
◦ • ◦
After Erick left, Mom came and found me in my room, where I was lying flat on my back on the bed, staring intently up at the popcorn ceiling.
“Hey, papi,” she said from the doorway. “How are you feeling?”
I shrugged and rolled onto my side, my back to the door. A few seconds later, her footsteps scuffed across the tile floor and the door closed behind her.
Softly, she said, “I know today must have been hard for you. It was even hard for me.” She laughed half-heartedly. “And it got me thinking.” The mattress shifted beneath her weight as she sat at the foot of the bed. She placed a warm hand on my ankle. “You know, not everybody copes with things the same way, or at the same rate. Maybe I was bitter, but I shouldn’t have taken that out on you. I shouldn’t have tried to control your feelings just because I thought I knew my own.”
I turned slightly to look at her over my shoulder. Her eyes were red-rimmed like she’d been crying, but she smiled at me. “I’m sorry, mijo. You have a right to process things your own way. And if this is going to help you…” She gestured to an object that she’d set on the chest at the foot of my bed—the dirt-encrusted lunch box. “It’s not my place to take that away.”
“Mom, I—” The words caught in my throat. I tried to swallow the lump down, but my voice still did not return.
“It’s okay,” she said. She stood up and moved to the head of the bed, brushing my hair off my forehead like she used to when I was little. “We’ll get through this, I promise.” She squeezed my hand and left the room.
After a minute, I sat up and pulled the lunch box over to myself. My fingers ran across the grungy lid, but I didn’t move to unlatch the clasp. A few weeks ago, I would have been thrilled to have it, but now I was too scared to open it, terrified I’d find something else inside that would bring Emil back knocking on my door.
But then again, the key that he kept going on about might be inside. If I could find it and give it to him, maybe he’d finally leave me and my family alone.
Before I could open the lid, my palmtop buzzed in my pocket. I froze in horror. Emil?
Reluctantly I slid the palmtop out and looked at it. A text from Tamara. How r u feeling? she wrote. Everything ok?
Yeah. It wasn’t dad, I texted back.
A buzz again, almost immediately. Good. I need to show u something. Can u come over?
My eyebrows furrowed. It was kind of a weird request; usually if we needed to talk “in person,” we would just go on Speculus and save each other the trip across town. Before I could react, a second text came in. Plz. It’s important. We can’t talk online.
Realization dawned as I remembered the object Scylla had found during the dig today. All my fears about the identity of the skeleton had completely wiped it from my mind. Henry’s constant rants about GSAF data tapping suddenly rang in my ears. Yeah, I definitely did not want to discuss removing a classified object from GSAF property on the internet.
Ok, I texted back, I’ll be right over.
Mom hadn’t minded when I asked her if I could skip dinner to go over to Tamara’s house, which was pretty impressive. Cena was the most sacred meal of the day at our house—Mom always was trying out new recipes with projects from her garden, and if she was going to go to the trouble of making it, we were going to go to the trouble of eating it—so I figured that she probably still felt bad about today and was going easy on me. “Just make sure you’re home by nine,” she said, which was an astounding lack of instructions from her, especially on a school night.
I certainly wasn’t going to complain. Especially not after the day I’d had.
“Hey,” Tamara said as she answered the door. “How are you doing? Is everything… you know, okay?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” I replied. My voice echoed off the high ceiling of the entrance hall. A sleek black chandelier hung over my head, its clear crystal globes reflecting pink from the sunset glinting through the tall windows over the front door. “Erick said the skeleton was too old to be a, um, recent murder victim. He almost thought it looked fossilized, which is even crazier than the other idea.”
Tamara shut the door thoughtfully. “That whole torquing dig site is crazy. That’s why I called you over. Come here.”
She bustled through the arched doorway on her left, leading into the living room. I followed her and stopped dead in my tracks. Henry was sitting on the white sofa next to Scylla, who held the mystery object from the dig in her lap.
“Oh, great. What are you doing here?” I grumbled.
“I called him,” Tamara interrupted. “I wanted everyone in this together. It’s more important than whatever stupid thing you’re arguing about this week. Look.”
She took the artifact from Scylla and thrust it into my hands. It looked like she and Scylla had cleaned it; it was corroded and full of dust in the crevices, but the markings were clearly visible now. It was a flat trapezoid-shaped object, made out of a material I didn’t recognize. There were bits of metal attached, and what looked like hinges on all four sides. On one side there was an engraving of a corbeled arch, just like the one at Erick’s dig site. The same unfamiliar symbols as on the coin formed a triangle around the arch. In the center of the trapezoid, inside the archway where the human figure had appeared on the coin, was a shallow indentation, a few centimeters around, and coated with a discolored metal casing.
“It looks like something would fit here,” I said, running a thumb across the indentation.
Tamara nodded. “But look at this.” She flipped the object over. Its reverse was covered with etched lines and circles. In the lower left corner of the trapezoid were three interwoven letters: DRT.
“A monogram?” I asked.
“Sort of. That’s Mama’s maker mark. She uses it on her designs and stuff she makes with her 3-D printer.”
“What?” The word came out like a hiss. Tamara’s mom Delia was the lead hardware engineer at AresTec, but that company had only been around for a few annums. She’d worked at GalaX before that, but this thing looked older than Mama D herself. It looked… ancient.
I flipped the trapezoid back over, running my thumb over the green metal coating of the indentation once more. “Did you ask her about this?”
“She’s not home yet,” Tamara said. “She and Mom are at a fundraiser.”
“Now do you believe me about something fishy going on at that dig site?” Henry asked.
I glared at him. “I never said I didn’t,” I snapped, “but that doesn’t mean—”
“Yeah, can you guys figure this out later?” Scylla interrupted. “Because I’m more interested in figuring out what the heck is going on out in those hills. Let’s rewind.” She stood up and started pacing, counting on her fingers as she talked. “One, I’ve been digging out there for the whole semester. Lots of rocks, lots of little dead fish, lots of weird hunks of metal and glass that GSAF freaks out about and won’t let us look at. Two, you guys show up on a field trip and immediately get in trouble because Zak here wants to get up close and personal with that rock formation in Trench 9, which Erick claimed was just some kind of river rock thing but is suddenly turning up all over, Three, mysterious relics from Atlantis or some garbage? That, Four, at least two of your parents are somehow coincidentally connected to?”
“I wouldn’t say Atlantis,” I said. It was the best I could come up with. A throbbing pain was forming just behind my right eye.
“Henry here would.”
I gaped at Henry. “What? Henry, you’ve got to be kidding. Government conspiracies aren’t good enough for you, now you need aliens and fictional ancient civilizations?”
Scylla rolled her eyes. “Zak, shut up. Hank, tell him.”
Henry glowered at her. “Do not call me Hank.” Then he shifted his glower to me. “Since it seemed like you had lost interest in the whole reason we were out there to begin with, I took to the ‘net to try to figure out what the deal was with that coin of yours. Granted, I only had the low-res scan from Speculus, not the real deal, but I started asking about it in a few counter-institutional chatspaces. You’d be surprised the sort of connections people on there have.”
Never put it past a conspiracy theorist, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Anyway, this morning I got a DM from a guy who said he’s seen coins like that before turn up in private auctions. The one he saw most recently actually was apparently discovered in—you’ll like this one, Isaak—Veracruz, Mexico.”
“What?”
“Yup. But they’re not specific to central America. Coins just like it have been found all over the damn world, and most of them have been uncovered near arches just like the one we saw out at Erick’s dig site. That kind of arch has picked up a little nickname in the antiquities business—the Atlantean Arch. They call it that because it’s a link between civilizations. Like they say Atlantis was supposed to be.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Now, I’m willing to buy that sort of thing being a coincidence on Earth. But on Mars? So. You try telling me that there’s not something weird going on here.”
I sank down into an armchair. “What the hell?”
Henry smirked. “I thought as much. So, we’ve got the arch, the coin, and this.” He gestured at the object in Tamara’s hands. “Add it together with the fact that GSAF seems to be surveilling the site, and all signs point to a Class-A cover-up.”
A cover-up that both my dad and Tamara’s mom—two people I’d never even seen talk to each other—were somehow involved with. And where did Emil factor into this? It was all way too much to take in.
“My source said he can give us more information, but he wants to see your coin, Isaak,” Henry said. He shifted on the couch, and gave me his best conciliatory expression. “Do you think you could go on Speculus with us after school tomorrow?”
My stomach lurched. “Um, about the coin. I don’t… exactly… have it anymore.”
“What?!”
All three of them stared at me in horror as I explained how it had disappeared from my nightstand drawer. How, somehow, the factory worker who’d attacked Henry on the train platform had found my house, broken in, and left me the threatening note.
Scylla jutted her lower lip out and sighed, blowing her choppy bangs off her forehead.
“Right, well, who even knows what the key is. So the coin’s a dead end. And everything else we’ve found on site, GSAF has now. But, Tamara, what about this thing with your mom’s mark on it?”
Tamara looked it over once more. “There’s a 3-D scanner in her workshop. If whatever this is has been saved on her computer, scanning it should bring up the file on her deskpad.” She glanced at me hesitantly, as if looking for reassurance.
I shrugged. “It’s worth a try. I think we’re in too deep to do nothing, now.”
◦ • ◦
Over our heads, there was the slam of a door. “We’re home,” I heard Tamara’s mom Bryn announce. “Tam?”
“Down in the basement,” Tamara yelled back.
The basement doubled as Delia’s workshop and her unofficial museum of technology. Collecting old tech had been Mama D’s hobby for as long as I’d known her, and her collection was pretty impressive. Plexiglas cabinets lined the walls, their shelves laden with more electronics than I could count. It seemed like every time I came down here, there was something new—a lime green iMac, an Atari gaming system, a brick-sized cellular phone. Some were just for show, but a number of them still worked, and Delia had modded them herself to make them compatible with newer technology. The room was crowded and would probably look haphazardly cluttered to an outsider, but I’d been around Mama D long enough to know there was always a method to her madness. Each and every one of these gadgets had been cataloged in great detail, I was sure.
In the center of the workshop, the four of us sat on stools around Delia’s workbench, which was piled high with a clutter of tools. There were wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers, blank motherboards, lidless Tupperware containers filled with pins and random pieces of metal, and countless other things I couldn’t even guess at the function of.
On the far end of the table, a new-looking A-Top was hardwired into Delia’s 3-D printer. Tamara was scrolling through this now, searching for any files that might be related to the artifact. We’d already tried scanning it, but there was no record of it in the device’s memory.
I looked up at the thud of footsteps coming down into the shop. Mama D stood on the stairs with her hands on her hips, her frizzy red curls falling out of her messy bun in three different directions.
“Ah, sure look it!” she exclaimed, then turned to call up the stairs, “Bryn, she brought the whole school home with her again for dinner.”
Tamara retorted, “Not the whole school, just the junior class.”
“And a junior-plus-two-annums,” Scylla added with a grin.
Bryn appeared behind Mama D. Even standing two steps above her wife didn’t quite make her as tall as Delia, but what Bryn lacked in height she made up for in authority. Her shock of platinum blond hair stood in stark contrast to her tan skin—not to mention the black eyebrows over her dark eyes. She looked us all over, her mouth drawn in a mock frown. “I guess I’d better put the kettle on. I wasn’t counting on quadruple the mouths to feed.”
“Oh, don’t bother—” I started, but she silenced me with an appraising glance.
“Isaak, did you have cena at home?”
I shook my head, and Bryn nodded. “I’ll put the kettle on,” she repeated. She disappeared back up the stairs, and Mama D hustled her way into the basement.
“All right, so who do we have here? I know this love already,” she said, coming up behind Henry and propping her elbows on his shoulders, resting her chin on the top of his head as he squirmed, “and Isaak of course. But here’s a new face!” She grinned at Scylla and stuck out her right hand, nails manicured in five different colors. “Nice to meet you, my dear. Delia Randall-Torres.”
“Scylla Hwang. I’m a friend of Tamara’s from the weekend project.”
“Ah, a collegian! Lovely. So, what are you four up to down here, fiddling with my very expensive and highly off-limits equipment?”
Tamara slid off her stool and opened the lid of the 3-D scanner. “It’s about something we found on the site today, Mama.”
Delia frowned. “Are you supposed to be bringing those things home, Tam? I thought I read something on the permission slip that said everything on the site was GSAF property.”
“I know, but I’m not so sure about this one.” Tamara held out the object and pointed to the DRT maker mark in the corner.
Delia took the artifact and stared down at it, her eyebrows furrowed. “Now what in the bleeding…” She stormed over to the workbench, yanked open the rightmost drawer and pulled out a magnifying glass and a tool I didn’t recognize. “Tamara, baby, hand me my glasses?”
After a few minutes’ inspection, she looked up at the four of us. “You found this out in the hills?”
“Yeah.”
She pursed her lips and scrunched her nose, thinking. “I have never seen this before. But I’m sure you’ve surmised by now that, yes, that is my maker mark. And that makes me very concerned that someone is either helping themselves to my equipment”—she looked back at the scanner, rubbing her neck—“or is trying to associate my name with something that I am not a part of. And I don’t like either one of those scenarios.”
Fourth World Page 8
