“So, then, you’ve found it? The key your father stole?” Emil’s voice was eager. That sour e-cig stench wafted out on his breath, contaminating the already stale air of the hallway.

“I didn’t find anything. I wasn’t looking for you,” I hissed. I started to back away, looking over my shoulder for help, but the hallway was deserted. “What did you do with David Hassan?”

Emil cackled, his laughter turning into a wheeze. “I didn’t do anything with him. I am David Hassan.”

I froze, looking back at him. “What?”

“Of course, I haven’t gone by that name for decades. Too much baggage associated with it. Emil was my father’s name. I figured he wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it, being dead and all.”

“I—but—how?”

Emil rolled his eyes. “For God’s sake, don’t just stand there yammering. Get in here. You never know who’s listening out there. And if you’re looking for David Hassan, my guess is you want to talk about something we probably don’t want GSAF overhearing.”

I nodded mutely, clutching my backpack straps as Emil guided me forcefully into his apartment. He slammed the door and locked the deadbolt behind him. I shot a glance over at the fire escape. I wanted to be able to get away quickly if I needed to.

Emil sat at a small folding table in the kitchen and gestured for me to sit across from him. “All right, then,” he said after I finally lowered myself into the chair. “If you didn’t bring me the key, then what do you want? And stop looking over your shoulder like that. I’m not going to eat you.”

I crossed my arms. “Answers would be nice. You keep demanding this key from me, but I don’t have any clue what it is, what it looks like, or where to find it. You say you knew my dad, but I’ve never heard of you. I haven’t even seen or heard from my dad in over two annums. No one even knows where he is. So why should I trust you? How do I know you didn’t kill him yourself?”

Emil frowned, running a calloused thumb over his chin. “Why did you think David Hassan would be able to help you find those answers?” he asked.

“Answer my questions first,” I said.

“Fine.” He sighed. “I take it, since you know my real name, you’ve heard of my work with GSAF.”

“Not really. I only just found it last night on an alien conspiracy website. They didn’t have a whole lot of information, though.”

He snorted. “Why am I not surprised? The only people who will give you a straight answer these days are wingnuts.”

That was pretty rich, coming from a wingnut himself. I kept that opinion to myself, though. “So, what happened?” I prodded. “With GSAF?”

“I worked,” he said, “for NASA. Back in ye olden days, before they got folded into GSAF. I was responsible for analyzing data and images sent back from their Lewis and Clark mission, one of the last rovers that was sent precolonization, to test for inhabitability. And I found evidence that indicated that not only had Mars been inhabited by lifeforms before, but that some of these lifeforms had been sentient. Intelligent. Possibly human.”

I sat up in my chair. “What sort of evidence?”

Emil narrowed his eyes at me. “I think you know what sort, boy. I’ve been watching you. I know you’ve found stuff out there in the hills.”

The room suddenly felt very cold. I couldn’t exactly put my sweatshirt on, though, without him seeing Scylla’s artifact, so I just rubbed my hands over the long sleeves of my t-shirt.

“Why did GSAF deny your findings, though?”

He snorted again. “There was a lot of money tied up in colonization. The environmental lobbies were putting pressure on Earth’s governments to decrease carbon emissions. When the big manufacturers found out that they could outsource their operations to another planet, and get a tax credit to boot? It was a land rush. There wasn’t time to postpone colonization to conduct full-scale research. So my findings were discredited, kept under wraps. Swept under the carpet until everyone forgot about them.”

“But… but what about your peers?” I spluttered. “I mean, the other scientists that saw Lewis and Clark’s data—they would have backed you up, wouldn’t they?”

“A few of them did, and lost their jobs as well. The rest of them kept quiet. Economic times were tough, kid. Sometimes it was smarter to sit down and shut up so you could keep putting bread on the table.”

I slumped back in my chair. Un-torquing-believable. It seemed ridiculous, but everything I’d seen over the last two months seemed to match up. I could feel another tension headache pulsating behind my eyes.

“So what are you doing here now? And where does my dad come into it?” I asked.

Emil stood, walking over to the kitchen counter and picking up an e-cig. “Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to give up on the find of a millennium. I changed my name, and as soon as I could get a visa to come over here and work, I took it. I’ve worked at a dozen different factories since I’ve been here, a good twenty years. Salt mines by day, excavation in the hills by night. I met Raymond Contreras at the shoe plant about five annums ago. I don’t remember how it came up, but he mentioned that his father-in-law was Hector Garcia.” He blew white vapor out between his teeth and sighed. “There’s a name with some clout attached to it. I thought he could help me, being an archaeologist and all. Maybe he’d co-author a paper with me, help me release my findings, get my reputation in the scientific community back. I didn’t realize Raymond was such a dumbass—no offense—or that he and his in-laws weren’t exactly speaking.”

I leaned on my elbows, looking down at the scuffed surface of the table. “So you guys were excavating in secret?”

He nodded.

I glanced up at him. “What did you find?”

He flashed a yellow-toothed grin at me. “Now there’s the question.”

He turned off the e-cig and moved into the living room. A tall bookcase was lined with cheap paperbacks. He pulled a couple off the shelves and dumped them on the table in front of me. “Have a look through those,” he said.

I cocked an eyebrow at him, then flipped open the tawdry-looking romance on the top of the stack. The contents were not, in fact, The Taming of the Duke. Like the Sports Illustrated in my dad’s box, every page was covered over with writing in felt-tip marker. Detailed diagrams of dig sites, intricate sketches of broken fragments not unlike the items Joseph Condor would close our dig site for—everything recorded in minute detail.

“Record-keeping by paper,” he said. “Slow and old-fashioned, but the ideal choice when you’re trying to stay off the grid. I couldn’t have GSAF finding out what I’ve been up to.”

I looked up at him in amazement. “Abuelo said you weren’t an archaeologist.”

He chuckled. “I wasn’t. I had a midlife career switch, if you will. All self-taught.”

“This data is amazing, though,” I breathed. Just as thorough as Abuelo’s own record-keeping. He would be impressed.

I flipped through another book as Emil looked on proudly. “And here I thought you were crazy,” I said.

“Maybe this will teach you not to throw words like that around.”

I colored, but nodded. He was right. Though Abuelo had always said there was a fine line between crazy and genius.

When I was done looking through the second book, I said, “So where does the coin fit into this? And the key? What is the key, anyway?”

Emil moved back over to the bookcase. “The coin and the key are, I believe, the answer to all of this.” He brought another paperback over. This one wasn’t a romance. It was an old sci-fi by Robert Heinlein—Podkayne of Mars. He opened this and flipped forward several pages to a drawing of an arch just like the engraving on the coin. A human figure passed under the vault.

He put an ink-stained finger on the drawing and said, “I’m sure you noticed a lot of talk about Atlantean Arches on those websites of yours, right?”

I nodded.

“They’re found in most major civilizations on Earth. But I’ve found them here on Mars, too. There is one exceptionally well-preserved example not far from here.”

“At Erick’s dig site?” I asked.

“No, no. Closer. There are a series of caves just past the factory district. I believe the first colonists used these caves for shelter when they came here.”

I stared at him. “The first colonists?”

“Yes, of course. Clearly the presence of these artifacts on both planets indicates prior planetary exploration by ancient humans.”

“Wait, wait, wait.” I held a hand up, trying to process his words in my brain and coming up blank. “You think people from Earth left these things thousands of years ago?”

“Of course,” Emil said. “Surely you don’t think that aliens left them, do you?” When I didn’t answer, he grumbled, “Why is it always so difficult for people to believe in the power of the human mind? Why is it so easy for us to assume that some other, smarter species did it? Is it because we can’t bear the thought of previous generations being wiser than our own?”

“But how did they get here?” I said.

Emil grinned and tapped Podkayne. “The arch,” he said simply.

I looked down at the diagram, the person walking through the archway. “So it’s, like… a door?”

“Exactly. Didn’t you ever read any books growing up? I think this arch is a tesseract.”

Tesseract. That was a word I had heard before. Of course, I wasn’t going to tell him that I hadn’t read it in a book—I’d picked it up from one of Henry’s old sci-fi flix. It was some kind of object that existed in multiple dimensions. Supposedly you could use it to travel across vast distances by bending space.

“So the coin and the key…?”

“Are the devices that open the door. They fit together, not unlike a memory chip into a deskpad drive. If programmed correctly, theoretically, they can open any coordinates. You could travel from one side of the planet to the other—and potentially between planets as well.”

“The coin fits into the key,” I repeated. “You mean like this?” I unzipped my backpack and pulled out Scylla’s artifact. The recess in the middle was about the right size for the coin to fit inside.

Emil’s breath came out in a hiss. “You did have it!” he snapped.

I put my hands up defensively. “I didn’t know it, though! You wouldn’t stop screaming at me long enough to tell me what the damn thing looked like!”

Emil didn’t answer. He just ran his hands over the key obsessively, scraping at it with his ragged fingernails, holding it up to the fluorescent light.

“How can that be the key, though?” I asked, not expecting a response. “You said my dad had it. This was buried out in the middle of nowhere—” I broke off again in horror. What if Erick was wrong about the skeleton, then? What if it really was—

“This isn’t the same key,” said Emil matter-of-factly.

“What?”

“This is a copy. Look at this marking.” He pointed to the monogram in the corner, the one that so impossibly matched Mama D’s maker mark.

“The other one didn’t have that?”

“No.”

I rubbed my eyes wearily. “So that means there’s more than one.”

Emil nodded brusquely and sat once more. “It makes sense. There were probably several dozen, if not hundreds, of these in production, to allow the Atlanteans the ability to travel freely, to several locations in one day.”

I rolled my eyes. “How do you know they were Atlanteans?”

He glared. “It’s a shorthand, Contreras. How do you know that the city Heinrich Schliemann discovered was actually Troy?”

I ignored him. A sudden thought overwhelmed me. “If this isn’t the same key, then that means my dad still has the other one. Do you think he—” I trailed off. I couldn’t begin to fathom the second half of that sentence.

“I don’t know,” Emil said. “It shouldn’t be able to work without the coin.”

“Unless he found another coin,” I said. “If there’s more than one key, there’s got to be more than one coin.”

“Dear God.” Emil’s voice was gravelly, somber. “Then he could be anywhere. Anywhere in the known universe. He might have wound up back on Earth, but he just as easily could have been transported to Pluto. ”

I gripped the flimsy table so hard my fingers ached. Emil looked at me sympathetically—as sympathetically as someone who looks like an evil version of Albert Einstein could, anyway.

“Now, don’t get too upset, kid,” he said. “Raymond’s a dumbass, but I can’t believe he’s that much of a dumbass.”

“Thanks, I guess.” I sighed and nudged the key across the table absentmindedly. “So what are we going to do with this now? GSAF is going to be all over my back for it.”

Emil frowned. “GSAF knows about this?”

“Yeah. My friend found it on-site yesterday. I thought we’d managed to sneak it out without them noticing, but they were at my school today asking about it.”

Emil stood up so abruptly that his chair folded and collapsed on itself, falling to the ground with a deafening clatter. “Why didn’t you tell me GSAF knows about this?” he shouted. His eyes had that dangerous look to them like they’d had on the train platform, and suddenly I was kicking myself for having let my guard down.

As if on cue, there was a knock at the door. In unison, our heads jerked around, staring at it in horror.

Emil crept over to the door and peered through the peephole. He cursed, then crept back over to the table. “It’s them.”

“What?” I whispered. “But how? Why?”

“Because of this,” Emil snapped. Before I could react to his invasion of my personal space, he’d yanked my palmtop out of my pocket and shoved it in my face. “Don’t they teach kids anything anymore? The government can track you at all times with these stupid things.”

My jaw moved up and down noiselessly. “So what do we do now?”

“We get the key out of here.” He shoved it back into my backpack, along with the paperback books with all his data inside. “And this.” He pulled the coin out of his own shirt pocket, thrusting it into my hands. Then he tossed my palmtop down onto the sofa and, quickly, dragged me toward the fire escape.

“But where am I supposed to go with this?” I said.

“Go into the hills. There’s a map in that Heinlein book. Follow it and wait for me in the cave. I’ll meet up with you later.”

“But what are you going to do?”

Emil scoffed. “Do you think I’d have made it this long if I didn’t know how to deal with GSAF? Now get moving!”

He pushed me out onto the fire escape and slammed the door after me. A minute later, Condor and his cronies swept into the room, fanning out through the apartment, searching for me. One of them picked up my palmtop and handed it to Condor. I saw him swipe to unlock it just before Emil’s body moved to block the window.

GSAF had my palmtop. They were going to know everything. Anything I’d texted Henry or Tamara was in Condor’s hands now.

I swallowed. Though, if Emil was to be believed, they’d had access to it all along, anyway. This was just the icing on the cake. I was screwed. To think that, a month ago, the worst thing in my future was working in an office cubicle for the rest of my life. Now I was probably looking at life in prison, if I was lucky.

I set my jaw.

That is, if they caught me.