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.”

“You’re sure it’s not something you made a long time ago and forgot about?” Scylla asked. “I mean, look how worn that thing is. It had to have been buried for a few years, at least. If not a few centuries,” she added under her breath.

Mama D replied, “Definitely not. Every time I upgrade my devices, I change my maker mark so I can keep track of when something was made. See these curlicues here?” She pointed to the monogram in the trapezoid’s corner. “I added those when I got this printer”—she pointed to a machine against the back wall—“about three months ago. So it would have to be newly made.” She pulled the glasses off her nose and tucked an errant hair into her bun. “Though it sure doesn’t look like it, does it? I suppose it could be a coincidence, but I don’t like it.”

She narrowed her eyes at the four of us. “Would you mind if I held on to this for a few days, so I could get a better look at it?”

We all looked at Scylla. She was the one who had found the object, so it was as close to being hers as anything else.

“That’s fine,” she said. “We need to make sure GSAF doesn’t find out that we took it, though. After today—that is, we technically aren’t supposed to take things off-site, like you said. It’s just that there’s been some kind of weird things turning up, and after Tamara saw that mark…” She omitted the part where we’d smuggled the object off-site before Tamara had seen the monogram, of course. But it wasn’t necessary to tell the whole truth there.

“Right. Then we’d better make sure no one tells Bryn.” Delia’s voice was severe. “She’s uptight around GSAF enough as it is, but with AresTec applying for a grant to expand into Tharsis Province, Bryn’d probably have an aneurysm if she heard about this.”

“If I heard about what?” Bryn asked from the top of the stairs. My stomach jumped up into my throat, but Delia didn’t miss a step. Before I could blink, the object was back in the scanner and the lid shut.

“That Tamara’s planning on dropping out of school to join the circus,” she said evenly.

“Yeah, sorry, Mom. I was going to tell you, but I was waiting until after my eighteenth birthday passed so you couldn’t tell me no.” She shot a very convincing glare at Mama D.

Bryn rolled her eyes. “Right. I’m not even going to ask. I’ve got chicken and rice going, for whoever wants it.”

My stomach growled. We didn’t get real meat very often at home—it was expensive and hard to come by on most of Mars. Most food we had, apart from the few crops that actually could grow here, came out of a can. I felt kind of bad; I didn’t know what Mom had been planning on cooking for dinner, but it definitely wasn’t chicken and rice.

“Actually, I probably ought to get going,” Scylla said, getting to her feet. “I have to take the train back over to Curiosity Bay, and I don’t want to wait until it’s too late.” She winked at me and Tamara and pulled a face when Mama D wasn’t looking. Based on her t-shirt that morning, I assumed she wasn’t as thrilled about the prospect of real chicken as me.

Henry stood up as well. “Yeah, I think I’d better go, too. I’m technically grounded this weekend, so I suppose I should get home before the ‘rents find me out and flip their shit.”

I stared incredulously at him. “Being grounded has never stopped you before.”

“Yeah, well, I’m trying to turn over a new leaf.”

He shuffled up the stairs after Scylla. I shook my head. Henry, turning over a new leaf? That would be the day. I wondered what he was really up to.

“Well, I hope you’re not planning on sneaking out, too, Isaak,” Mama D said, turning on me. “Bryn’ll have a fit if she cooked a meal for no one.”

“Oh, no. I’ll stay,” I assured her.

Tamara’s nose crinkled as she smiled at me across the workbench. As always, that had the effect of tying my stomach into a square knot.

In my pocket, my palmtop buzzed. A text from Henry. How much of a dumbass r u? Make ur move on Tamara, moron. This was quickly followed with, & sorry I was a dick last nite.

The corners of my mouth twitched. This, I supposed, was the closest Henry could come to an apology. It was pretty noble of him to give up a chicken dinner to help me out, I gave him that. But how exactly was I supposed to “make my move” on Tamara, especially with her moms hovering over us? Henry had some unrealistic expectations there.

Still, his words from before echoed in my mind. “If you don’t get your act together, someone else is going to make a move on her, and you don’t get to say I didn’t warn you.”

He was right. I frowned to myself. It always felt like I was making excuses when it came to Tamara. “The time isn’t right, maybe another day.” It wasn’t like I didn’t want to, you know, “get with her,” romantically speaking. I’d liked her that way for over two annums—since around when I’d figured out that the way I liked people was different from the way others liked people.

But I’ll admit it: I was scared, too. Tamara had been my best friend since we were, like, eight, when her family moved to Tierra Nueva and my mom met Bryn at a GSAF fundraiser. As much as being around her made my heart race, I also didn’t want to ruin our friendship. What if she didn’t like me the same way?

But if I didn’t do anything, I’d never find out.