Weeds

by Dianna Sanchez

Dianna Sanchez is the not-so-secret identity of Jenise Aminoff, whose superpower is cooking with small children. She is an MIT alumna, graduate of the 1995 Clarion Workshop and Odyssey Online, active member of SCBWI, and a former editor of New Myths magazine (www.newmyths.com). Aside from eighteen years as a technical and science writer, she has taught science in Boston Public Schools, developed curricula for STEM education, and taught Preschool Chef, a cooking class for children ages 3-5.  A Latina geek born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she now lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters. Her debut novel, A Witch’s Kitchen, came out from Dreaming Robot Press in September 2016.

I could be back on Mars, I think, looking up at the flaming pink range of the Sandia Mountains. Homesickness hits me with at least as much force as the gravity. I could be home, but I’m not. There’s a faint smear of green along the top of the Sandias, something I have never seen outside of a dome. And the sky above is a deep, surreal blue, the kind of sky I’ve only ever seen in photos or paintings. Still, I can see why Abuelo said he felt right at home when he moved from Albuquerque to Mars. To the east, above the mountains, I can just make out the faint streak of the comet, moving slowly towards Earth.

The Earthborn guy at the car rental counter behind us clears his throat.

“Oh, sorry,” Mom tells him, tearing herself away from the sunset. “It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been home.”

This is still home for her, after all these years. I pull away to stare at the mountains again. I never should have agreed to come with her.

The guy behind the counter stares at me. I can feel it, like a hot wind on my neck. “Here you are, ma’am,” he says, handing my mother the keys. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a fully automated model?”

Mom laughs her short, sarcastic bark. “You think driving on Mars is any different from driving on Earth? Relax, amigo, I bought your insurance.”

“And will your, ah, daughter be driving? Is she old enough?” He paused, then asked delicately, “Can she drive wearing that thing?”

“Of course she can drive in that thing, but I don’t think she’s old enough here. She’s fourteen.”

He gapes at me, and Mom bursts out laughing. “Martian children grow fast. Less gravity to keep them down. Come on, Lupe, let’s go.”

We head for the doors, my exoskeleton whirring softly, walking for me, our luggage following dutifully behind us. The doors open automatically, and I cringe. I know it’s safe, I know this world has air, but I have to convince myself, step by step, to walk outside. And then I stand still for a moment and think, I’m not in a dome. I am standing outside, unprotected, and I’m alive.

My mom says, “It’s okay, Lupe. The gravity’s tough for me, too. Espera aquí, I’ll go get the car.” She walks away in a weird, flat shuffle and leaves me there under the crazy, bruise-colored sky. It’s true, the gravity is crushing me, despite my exoskeleton supporting my skinny, Marsborn bones. It hurts to stand, to move, to breathe. The air is so thick and heavy and full of weird smells: dust and exhaust and something vaguely herbal. Sagebrush? Manzanita? I have no idea.

The car pulls up, a good big one. They still make them big here. The front seat is more than roomy enough to accommodate me and my exo. I slide in and sit gratefully. My feet begin to throb.

Mom eases us out of the rental lot and down the short drive to the highway. The city’s lighting up around us, a tattered blanket of glittering light stretching from the mesa to the Sandias. It makes me dizzy. The total population of Mars could fit inside Albuquerque.

As Mom drives us through the city, the restaurants and office buildings and mercados get farther apart, giving way to squat adobe homes. Traffic thins out. We can see open fields on either side of the road, glittering in the city light, covered with solar panels. Once, these fields were full of corn, tomatoes, chiles, or maybe alfalfa for pasture. Once, there was water to irrigate them all. Once, water ran freely on the surface. The thought makes me shiver.

A flock of black birds rises from the branches of a dead tree, and I squeal. I’ve never seen an animal outside of a zoo. How can they fly in this gravity? “Mom, are those crows?” I ask.

“Mm-hmm.”

“They’re bigger than I imagined.” Abuelo had tried to show me, spreading his hands like wings. His hands are so small, though. Strong, rough, with dirt under the nails, but tiny, like all Earthborn hands.

“Venga, Lupe,” Abuelo called. “You know the corn won’t grow unless you plant it.”

“Coming,” I yelled back. “I have to suit up!” I hurried to the airlock and struggled into my big, crinkly dustsuit, checked my breather mask, then strapped it to my face. I pulled on a hat my mother knitted for me, decorated with cats and stiff with Marsdust.

Abuelo stepped in after me, already in his suit, and sat to tug on his work boots. I slipped my feet into my boots—they were my brother Jaime’s before, a little big, but I didn’t care. I tugged the straps as tight as I could and then hopped up.

“I’m ready, I’m ready!”

Abuelo grinned at me, his chin grizzled with gray and black stubble, his face like wrinkled brown leather. “Let me put my breather on.” He pulled on the mask and a wide-brimmed hat, then picked up a sack of seed corn and stood up. At eight years old, I was already his height. “Okay, vamos.” He closed one airlock door behind us and hit the cycler. The little airlock grew cold, and my ears popped. A green light flashed, and Abuelo pushed open the outer door.

The dome covered five acres of beige soil. It was like a park inside an enormous glass balloon. We walked past the rows of early spring crops: broccoli, chard, lettuce, peas, and my grandfather’s favorite, quelites, also known as lamb’s quarters. “They’re weeds,” he’d told me proudly. “Easy to grow, don’t need much water, perfectly edible. No one else thought of bringing edible weeds.”

That day, though, we were planting corn. We headed out to where the bot was buzzing back and forth across the field, digging furrows and laying drip-tape alongside them. Each drip spot was marked with a bright yellow dot, so we’d know just where to plant.

“Okay, nieta,” Abuelo said. “Ready to plant?”

“How many?” I asked, though I knew. It was part of the ritual.

“Just two,” he told me, smiling. “We used to put three, two to grow and one for the crow…”

“…but there are no crows on Mars!” we finished together, and I laughed.

He sighed. “No crows, no caterpillars, no grasshoppers, but also no earthworms, no bees.” We kept the CO₂ content too high in the dome, to help the plants grow. It would kill any insects.

“Dad’s working on the bees, Abuelo,” I told him. I actually hoped he wouldn’t succeed in adapting the little microdrones. I liked hand-pollinating the crops.

“I know, nieta,” he told me. “Come on, we have work to do.”

I held out my hand in its skin-tight glove for the seed corn. He spilled some into my hand. Carefully, I dropped two kernels into the furrow beside the first yellow dot. Then I moved on exactly half a meter to the next dot and dropped two more. Behind me, with a small trowel, Abuelo covered the corn.

A bot buzzed up to him and stopped. “All furrows are ready, señor.”

“Bien,” he said. “Here you go.” Abuelo poured most of the seed into the bot’s funnel. “When this runs out, come back, and I’ll fill you up with the blue corn seed.”

“Sí, señor.” It backed up to the row next to us and started depositing seed corn, following the dots just as I did, and covering the seed. It zoomed on past us. We would only do one row.

“What’s the point?” Jaime had asked us at breakfast. “The bots do it faster and better.”

“The only way to know the soil is to be down in it,” my grandfather had told him. “If you’re not getting dirty, you’re not doing it right.”

I held out my hand, and he filled it again. The sun broke over the lip of Tharsis crater and filled the dome with a rosy glow. I dropped two kernels into the soil.

We turn west onto a small side street, Calle Otero. Panels stretch away on either side of us, green LEDs like eyes in the darkness. Maybe a hundred meters farther, I spot Abuelo’s house. Not his now, of course, but the home where he grew up. I recognize it from the photos in his scrapbook, the casement windows lit up under the protruding roof beams, the concrete block wall marking the edge of the property. All the climbing roses are gone, along with the apricot and plum trees, the grape arbor. The stump of a huge cottonwood tree still stands in the yard, surrounded by yucca and cacti and gravel. Behind the house, the fields are full of solar panels.

Mom pulls the car onto the gravel driveway and parks. “Well, we’re here.”

I can smell food as I exit the car, scents I’ve never smelled before. I’m ravenous, I realize. Mom gets to the door first, a cast-iron grillwork protecting a solid slab behind it, and rings the bell. I’m still making my way around the car when I hear the door open.

“Hola,” Mom says. “I’m Elena. Are you Miguelito?”

A boy’s voice pipes up, scornful. “Only my grandma calls me that. I’m Mikey.”

I turn the corner and face the open doorway. Mikey is tiny. On Mars I’d guess he was two or three, but here, I have no idea. Old enough to be trusted with opening the front door.

He spots me, his eyes go wide. He shrieks, “A monster!” and runs screaming from the door. Great. So much for first impressions.

Mom bursts out laughing, which just completely makes my day. “God, Mom, didn’t you tell them about me?” She just looks at me, with that sly grin on her face, and I feel my stomach sink. “You didn’t, did you? Oh, fantastic.”

A woman hurries up to the door. “Elena? Is that you?”

I have to blink. She looks so much like Mom. Slightly shorter, with a mad bush of hair tinted red, unlike Mom’s salt-and-pepper bob. Older, more wrinkled, and plump, rounded in every curve where Mom is slender, like all Martians. The same cheekbones, the same chocolate eyes, darker skin.

“Rita,” Mom says. “God! It’s so good to see you again!” And she grabs her sister in an enormous hug, yelling, “Omigod! Omigod!” while Rita hugs her back and says, “Díos mio mi vida! I can’t believe you’re back.”

Finally, Mom peels an arm loose and reaches for me. “Lupe, come here and meet your Tía Rita.”

Rita stares up at me, color draining from her face. “Miguelito wasn’t lying, then. I was gonna paddle him and send him to his room. What….” She glances at my mom. “You could have warned us.”

“I agree,” I tell her.

Mom shrugs. “What difference would it have made? If I told you before we came, everybody would have been whispering and gossiping and coming by to sneak a peek at her. I wanted tonight to be just family.”

Rita folds her arms and clenches her jaw, exactly the way Mom does when she’s mad but doesn’t want to yell. She nods, once, and steps aside. “Well, then, come on in.”

“Thanks,” I say. I have to duck my head to get in the door. My great-grandfather, who built the house, was a very small man, perhaps one-point-five meters, and though I am small for a Marsborn, with the exo adding to my height, my hair brushes the ceiling. I’m in the kitchen, beside a dining table set for six, with the sink and stove on the opposite side. A refrigerator hums in the corner.

Several pots simmer on the stove, filling the kitchen with those marvelous smells. There’s the tang of Mexican oregano, the bite of red chile, the rich, earthy aroma of corn, a sweet hint of tomato. My mouth begins to water.

I extend my hand to Tía Rita and pop it out of the exo. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you,” I say. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Mom and Abuelo. And I always wanted to see his house.”

Tía Rita blinks, surprised. She reaches out and grips my bare hand. “Of course, Lupe,” she says. “I’m glad you came. You should know where you come from.”

Hmph. I know where I come from.

“Please, come sit down,” Rita says, pulling out a chair for Mom and another for me.

I sit carefully at the table and stroke the wood. We have no wood on Mars; a table like this would be hideously expensive.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Water, please.”

She bustles away, rummaging in the cabinet for a good glass. I hear a rustle at my feet. Mikey is staring up at me from under the table with large brown eyes. There’s a faint slant to his eyes I hadn’t noticed before.

“You’re green!” he whispers urgently to me. “And you’re all covered in metal.”

“I know,” I whisper back.

He stares at me, wide-eyed. “Are you a monster?”

“Maybe,” I tell him conspiratorially, “but I am definitely your cousin.”

Mikey considers this. “Will I turn green? Am I a monster, too?”

“Only if you want to be,” I say.

“If I were a monster,” he says slowly, “maybe Paula would stop beating me up on the way home from school.”

“There are other ways to make her stop besides turning yourself green,” I tell him.

“Like wearing all that metal?”

“The exo is here to protect my bones because they’re too weak for Earth gravity. See how each piece follows one of my bones?” I tap the strut along my shin. Dad printed it specifically to fit me. “Without that, I could break my leg just by stepping too hard.”

Tía Rita sets a glass down in front of me. “Is that Mikey down there? Miguelito, come out. She’s not going to eat you.”

Mikey scuttles back out of sight and emerges on the other side of the table. “Of course she’s not going to eat me,” he says, suddenly bold. “She’s a plant. She doesn’t eat food.”

My mother laughs. “She does eat, chico. Just not as much as you do, and not all the same things you do.”

“Not meat,” he says.

“No, not meat,” I confirm. I do eat insects, but Mom warned me that’s considered gross on Earth. Like eating animals is totally normal?

“Then you can’t eat me!” he cries triumphantly.

“You’re being rude,” Tía Rita chides.

“Am not.” He disappears under the table again.

“Aí, Díos mio,” Tía Rita says. “That boy gets more stubborn every day.” She sits down with her own glass. “Are you staying here tonight?”

Mom shakes her head. “We’ll stay at the Dorado Inn. They have low-gravity gel beds for us. It’s going to take me a while to get used to the gravity again.” She glances at me. I say nothing.

“Oh,” Tía Rita says, visibly relieved. “Yes, that would probably be better.”

The front door opens. “I’m home!” A man walks in, closing the door behind him. He’s Asian, and I understand the slant to Mikey’s eyes. He blinks at me, then smiles. “So you’re our Martian relations? I’m Andy Liao.” He holds out a hand to Mom, who rises to take his hand, and then to me. His grip is gentle. “I guess you’re Guadalupe.”

“Call me Lupe, please,” I tell him.

“That’s a sweet exosuit you’ve got there. Series V?”

I nod. “Dad modified the design a little for me.” Mom shifts uncomfortably beside me.

Andy glances around. “Where’s Mikey?”

Tía Rita huffs and nods at the table.

Andy sits down and peers under the table. “Mikey? Come on out, buddy.”

Mikey clambers out, sulky. “Abuela said I was being rude.”

“Asking too many questions again?”

Mikey shrugged.

“Go ahead,” I invite him. “Preguntame. I know you have questions. Everybody does.”

Mikey cocks his head. “Did it… hurt?”

“It itched like crazy for about a week, but otherwise, no.”

“Is it growing on you, like a fungus or something? Or is it part of your suit?”

“The exosuit’s separate. I need it because my bones aren’t strong enough for Earth gravity. The green stuff is part of my skin.” I hold out my arm to him. “Touch it, you’ll see.”

Tía Rita calls out, “It’s not catching, is it?”

Mom laughs. “Not at all. It’s just algae, one of the oldest organisms on Earth, the first plant life to venture out of the ocean. It partnered with a fungus and became lichen. That lichen broke down rocks and created the first soil. In Lupe, it does the same thing as it did in lichen. It creates food from sunlight in exchange for minerals and nitrogen from her body.”

Andy reaches out and touches my arm through a gap in the exo’s struts, then chuckles. “Feels just like my skin,” he says. “Dry as paper, tough as leather.”

“Mars is a desert,” I tell him. “Just like here.”

“And you grow crops there?” he asks, suddenly alert.

“Yes, we did,” Mom says.

“We do,” I correct her.

Jaime chased me through the sunflowers, just like old times, just like he wasn’t already in college. It was a whole new field, ten more acres, a fresh dome next to our old home dome. The sunflowers were taller than me, just opening their buds to the sun. We wouldn’t be able to eat their seeds—they’d be full of lead and other heavy metals—but they’d make the soil better, get it ready for edible crops. My dustsuit crinkled as I ran, dodging and weaving between the rows.

“Ha!” Jaime yelled, lunging for me. “Got you!”

But I twisted out of his grasp. “Can’t catch me, shorty! Earthborn!”

“Jaime! Lupe!” Abuelo’s voice rang in my breather’s earbuds. “Come on in. We have something to talk about.”

Mom and Dad were sitting in the kitchen. Abuelo stood at the sink.

“We’re getting divorced,” Mom said.

My parents wouldn’t look at each other. Jaime looked shocked but not all that surprised. I clenched my fists. “You can’t get divorced.”

Dad looked away from me. “Lupe, I’m sorry. We tried to work things out. Your mother wants to return to Earth, and I want to stay here.”

I turned to Mom. “So, you’re just going to leave us?”

“I’m taking you with me.” Mom tried to take my hand, but I pulled it away. “Lupe,” she said, “this is a wonderful opportunity. The ISA has snagged a comet, a big one, and they’re bringing it back to Earth. Some of that water is coming to New Mexico. We can farm again, on our own land. We can go home.”

“Your home, not mine.”

Mom turns back to Jaime. “This would be easier if you would come with us.”

Jaime’s face is streaked with tears. He shakes his head. “I’m halfway through college in Bradbury. Mars is a much better place for astronomy than Earth—less atmosphere in the way.”

“But don’t you miss it? Don’t you want to see Earth again?”

“Mom, I was four when we moved. I don’t even remember Earth. I may not be Marsborn, but this is my home.”

“Well, I was born here,” I declare loudly. “Look at me! I started my skin treatments already. I’d be a freak there.”

Dad says, “She’s right. It would be incredibly hard for her, Elena. Her bones will be so brittle, her muscles weak. It will take years of serious therapy for her to acclimate to the gravity, and even then, she’ll probably need an exosuit for the rest of her life.”

“She’ll be among family,” Mom pointed out. “We’re so isolated here. She would have a chance to reconnect with our culture.”

Dad folded his arms. “Her eyesight will deteriorate. She’ll sprain ankles and break bones, over and over again. What kind of life is that?”

“What kind of life is this?” Mom yelled back at him. “No breathable atmosphere. The water’s full of perchlorates, the soil’s full of heavy metals, all trying to poison us. And best of all, we’re constantly bombarded by cosmic rays that give us cancer and destroy our brains. Do you remember when our magnetic shielding failed, and we had to stay in the basement for a week while the bots fixed it?”

Abuelo speaks up, finally. “It’s not that bad, Elena. We’ve found solutions for all these problems. We’re improving on them all the time, expanding.”

“Don’t you start,” Mom said. “I believed you when you said this would be better, that we’d be helping to save humanity from itself. But there’s no reason for it now, when Earth’s carbon dioxide levels are falling and there’s water coming. We have a chance to revive our way of life, to live as our ancestors did.”

Abuelo considered this. “De seguro. But I don’t believe in going backwards. We’ve built something amazing. I’m going to see it through. I’ll need help, though. Enrique?”

Dad shook his head. “I’ve got my business in Bradbury. Sorry, Ramon.”

“Then that just leaves Lupe.”

Mom bristled. “Lupe is coming with me.”

“No, I’m not,” I screamed at her. “You can’t make me! I want to stay here, with Abuelo.”

“Lupe, on Earth, you’ll never have to wear a breather again. You can walk in the open air, eat all you want. You can go to a real university, not that teensy little excuse for a college in Bradbury.”

“Hey!” Jaime said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I want to stay here with Abuelo. I want to make this the biggest farm on Mars. Dad, tell her I can stay here.” But Dad just looked away.

“I’ll file abuse charges! I’ll file for emancipation!” I told them. “You can’t make me go!”

Still in my dustsuit, I grabbed my breather and slammed through the airlock door. I’ve always done that, whenever I got angry. I’d head out to the dome and work it off.

A minute later, I heard the airlock cycle behind me. It didn’t take Abuelo long to find me among the cornstalks.

“Lupe,” Abuelo said in his soft voice, “I know you’re mad.”

“Of course I’m mad! She makes decisions for me, like I have no brain of my own. It’s not fair! I don’t want to go. I want to stay here with you.”

“I want you to stay, too,” he told me. “You have a real gift for farming, a love of the soil, just like me. You could make a huge difference here.”

“Then convince her to let me stay!”

Abuelo was quiet for a moment, then he said, “You could also farm on Earth. They need you, too.”

“Ha. Farming on Earth is easy. Any idiot could do it.”

“But you might learn something new, something you can bring back here to me.” He gave me a hug. “Venga con tu madre. You can’t make this decision without knowing what you’re giving up. Go to Earth, see what all the fuss is about. Then decide. I’ll convince Elena to respect your decision.”

I have never seen so much food before. One after another, Tía Rita lays the dishes out on the table. Chiles rellenos – green chiles stuffed with cheese, battered, fried, and smothered with red chile sauce. Blue corn enchiladas. Pinto beans and Spanish rice. Guacamole and tortilla chips. Sopapillas and honey.

“I made it all vegetarian for you,” Tía Rita says. “I hope it’s okay.”

“It’s amazing, Rita!” my mother gushes. “God, I’d forgotten how good rice is.”

“She broke out the last of the Chimayo chile powder for you,” Andy confides, helping himself to a large portion of enchiladas.

Mom’s jaw drops. “Rita, you shouldn’t have! It’s so expensive now.”

“Worth its weight in gold,” Mikey quips.

“Not every day we get visitors from Mars,” Tía Rita replies, glaring at her grandson, then turning her glare on me. “Lupe, you’re hardly eating anything. Don’t you like chile?”

I have taken less than a third of what everyone else has on their plate. “I love it,” I say truthfully. The red chile on the enchiladas dances on my tongue. “This is just a lot more than I’m used to eating.”

“Don’t you need to eat more in higher gravity?” Andy asks.

“She’s a plant, Dad,” Mikey says. “She doesn’t have to eat much.” He held a spoon next to my arm. “Look, she’s the same color as the guacamole! You should be named Guacamole instead of Guadalupe.”

“Miguelito!” Tía Rita says sharply. “Cierra la boca y no entra moscas.”

Shut your mouth and you’ll swallow no flies, something Abuelo said to me at least once a week, as long as I lived with him. I choke back tears. “It’s okay, he’s right. I’m like a giant walking avocado. I didn’t know that before. I’ve never eaten an avocado.”

“You have to have some!” Mikey cries. “I love guacamole.” He spoons a generous dollop onto my plate. I dip a tortilla chip in and taste it: smooth, mellow, a little like tofu but slightly spicy with chunks of tomato, onion, garlic.

“It’s delicious,” I tell him. “Thank you.”

“So you can’t grow avocados on Mars?” Tía Rita asks.

“No trees,” Mom replies. “They take too long to mature. They need food now, not five years from now.”

“But you grew other things, like chile?” Andy asks.

“Enough for family, not enough to sell. Conditioning the soil for nightshades is hard. They take up too many heavy metals,” Mom explains. “Greens, too.”

“Then why didn’t you use hydroponics?” Andy asks.

Mom pushes her plate away. “Stubborn pig-headedness.”

“Flavor,” I retort. “Vegetables grown in water taste like water. It takes soil to grow really good food.”

“It’s stupid,” Mom said. “Growing food in poisoned soil with poisoned water in poisoned air. If we’d done hydroponics, we could have lived in Bradbury, not out in the middle of nowhere. We could have grown twice as much. And your father would never have convinced me we should turn you into a green freak, just to reduce your need to eat. Now we can stop the treatments, and you’ll go back to normal.”

I push away from the table. “I AM normal!” I yell at her. “On Mars, I’m normal. You’re the one who brought me here and made me a freak.” And before she can reply, I get up and walk out the front door.

I’m thirty meters down the road, pacing along the fence, kicking up dust, wishing for a decent cornfield, when Mikey comes up behind me, swinging a flashlight. Redundant. The exo has plenty of exterior lighting.

“That was mean, what your mom said.”

“Nothing I haven’t heard before,” I tell him, though that’s not really true.

I stop, realizing suddenly that there’s no dome, I’m in open air. Unprotected. I shiver all over.

“Look,” Mikey says, “there’s the Big Dipper. Do you have that on Mars?”

I look up. I can barely see it, with all the city light, but he’s right. “Of course we do. The stars are the same on Mars. My brother Jaime studies them. Sometimes, in the summer, we’d go out in the dome at night and lie on the soil, looking up between cornstalks at the stars. We’d try to guess where Earth was, and sometimes we’d even find it.” And suddenly, I’m okay again, because I’m under the same old sky. 

Mikey looks out at the rows of solar panels. “I think it would be cool, growing stuff again. I want to grow grapes, like Abuelito did. Do you think we can?”

I look down at him. He looks so hopeful, one corner of his mouth trying to edge up into a smile. “Maybe. It depends on a lot of things: the condition of the soil, the availability of water.”

“Could you check it? Tomorrow, maybe?”

“Sure, why not?” I look down at him. “You’re the only one who doesn’t think I’m a freak. Why is that?”

His shoulders start shaking, silently laughing. “Have you seen my eyes? I’ve been the family freak up until you came along.”

I run the exo’s gloves along the fence, bumping over the rusted barbs in the wire. I wonder where his mom is. “Tía Rita doesn’t seem to mind.”

“No, but other people do.” He paused to pick up an empty can from the ground. “They don’t know what to make of you, or where you fit in.”

“We’re malezas,” I say, thinking of Abuelo. “Weeds. No one wants us, but we grow all the same.”

“Heh. That’s better than guacamole, I guess.”

We laugh.

“Let’s go back and have dessert.” Mikey turns back to the house.

The alarm goes off at seven a.m. on the dot. I wake up in the gel bed feeling like I’d been beaten. Every joint in my body screams in protest. In the bed next to me, Mom moans. “Oh, god, why did I ever think this was a good idea?”

By the time we emerge from the hotel, the sun has risen well above the Sandia Mountains. I’m shocked to see that they are bluish-grey in this light, fringed and dotted with green. Nothing like Martian mountains. I feel betrayed somehow.

Today, in daylight, I see nothing but wasteland, everything brown and dead, the Rio Grande dry as a bone, as it has been for fifty years. Empty buildings stare at me as we drive down into the valley. Broken windows gape open, adobe walls crumble. Sand piles in corners.

At the farm, I find the same thing. I look at the fields and want to cry. Beneath the solar panels, in the perpetual shade, I can see that the topsoil is gone, used up or scoured away down to the parched clay beneath.

Mom parks the car in the driveway. “Come on, Lupe.”

“I told Mikey I’d check out the farm,” I reply. “I’ll meet you out here when you’re ready.”

“But Lupe…”

I stride away. Behind me, I hear the door open and close.

I rev up my exo, hop right over the barbed wire fence, and prowl around the grounds, beside the neat, reflective rows of panels. I pass the bones of a toolshed, corrals for cattle, old cast iron bathtubs used as troughs, an ancient manual tractor, its tires all rotted. Shovel blades, their handles broken. A ditch, half full of sand. My feet raise puffs of dust as I walk. Everything is dead, I think.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spy movement. A bird darts under the fence in front of me. It pauses, cocking its head at me for a moment, its crest pointing back like its long tail. And then it darts forward under a row of solar panels to pull a wriggling beetle from the sand and gulp it down. Off it dashes, like a tumbleweed on the wind.

A roadrunner, alive, breathing. Now I see small signs of life everywhere. A grasshopper, a bird, the curving tracks of a snake. Tiny specks of green in hollows and along the ditches. And there, just beginning to push its way up, a spear of asparagus. How is that even possible?

I crouch down, free my hand from the exo, and push my fingers into the sand. To my surprise, it isn’t all sand, not here along the ditch. There’s still some soil, still some life. I feel an insect wriggle against my skin, something I’ve only ever felt in science class or a lab.

If you don’t get dirty, you’re not doing it right.

“Lupe,” my mother says behind me.

I stand up, turn to her. Tía Rita has come with her.

“What did you find?” she asks.

I show them the asparagus, and they both gasp. “I had no idea anything could still grow out here,” Tía Rita says.

“I’m amazed, too,” I tell her. “I think you’re in better shape than I thought.”

She squints at me, the sun in her face. “You believe that? You think we can farm here again?”

“You’ll need new topsoil, some amendments, and drip irrigation equipment. Some agricultural bots would help.”

Mom looks at me. “Will you do it?”

I take a deep breath. “No. I’m going home, Mom, you know that. I hurt everywhere. The sky is too weird. And every time I step outside without a suit or a dome, I have a panic attack. I hate it here. I want to go home.”

Mom stares at me. “I didn’t really think what it would be like for you,” she said. “I love being home, even with the gravity. Everything smells right again, everything tastes right. And there are people, family! I have been so lonely, for so long. I guess I assumed you’d feel the same way. But I was wrong. I was thinking about me, not you. I… I didn’t want to leave you behind. I’ll miss you so much.” She wiped a tear from her eye.

“Me, too,” I told her. “So how about a compromise? I’ll stay long enough to help you get the farm going again. But then, I’m going home.”

She smiled at me. “Sounds good.”

“So where do we start?” Tía Rita asks.

“Have you considered planting weeds?”