The sun’s warmth melted over me as I stepped off the bus. I paused for a moment, blinking away the startling brightness of the open air after the dim confines of the school bus. It was near the end of April II—our spring April—of my junior annum, but it was weird for it to be this warm on Mars, even during the summer months. As my classmates filed off the vehicle behind me, I rolled up my long thermal sleeves. Here in the hills, the wind was stronger, with a cooling bite, but the undercurrent of warmth to the day was still unmistakable. I grinned in spite of myself.

“Right, right, everyone, keep clear of the steps, we need to get everyone off the bus if we’re ever going to get moving with this,” my homeroom teacher, Mr. Johnson, yelled over my classmates’ chatter. “Henry, that means you. Isaak! Would you please do something about your partner in crime?”

I started at the sound of my name and glanced over my shoulder. At the foot of the bus steps, a stocky kid with long black hair and a faded t-shirt that proclaimed “FREE MARS” in what was once bold red text was streaming music on his earpod loud enough to be heard five meters away, seemingly oblivious to the world around him.

Turning back to Mr. Johnson, I shrugged. “I don’t know what you expect me to do about him.”

“I suppose it would be too much to ask you to make him behave for the rest of the day,” said Mr. Johnson. “But for a start, you can move him.”

I rolled my eyes and tromped back toward the bus. “Come on.” I nudged Henry away from the steps.

“What? What’d I do this time?”

He looked up and caught Mr. Johnson’s eye. They exchanged matching glares.

“That guy’s got it in for me,” Henry complained.

I opened my mouth to answer, but broke off as my other best friend, Tamara, elbowed her way between the two of us. “Well, maybe if you didn’t get called into the principal’s office every other day,” she pointed out reasonably.

“I’m only in the principal’s office every other day because he”—Henry gestured toward Mr. Johnson—“has it in for me.”

“Right.” Tamara’s reply was more of a laugh than a word. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with your conscientious homework objections, or your habit of leaving class early, or the anti-government graffiti in the boy’s bathroom that I heard about last week.”

As she spoke, she glanced knowingly over at me, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips. My heart lurched momentarily, and I—discreetly, I hoped—urged it to settle back into its regular pattern. For the amount of time I spent with Tamara on almost a daily basis, you’d think I’d manage to not go into full spaz-mode every time I saw her.

Yeah. You’d think.

Fortunately, she hadn’t seemed to notice my suddenly red face. Henry certainly hadn’t. He was too busy complaining.

“Tamara,” he said solemnly, “as conscientious citizens of Mars, we have an obligation to future generations to prevent this world from falling into the cycle of imperialism that destroyed so many lives on Earth. I’m simply providing an alternative to the narrative being forwarded by the administration, to prevent the further spread of misinformation. Graffiti is the people’s tool, you know.”

He was off again. Tamara shot me a pained expression and I shrugged. She should have known better than to get him started on one of his rants.

I moved a few paces away, craning my neck to get a better look at the red hills around us. From up here, Tierra Nueva seemed to spread out before me: a small valley crammed with a rambling mishmash of tightly clustered buildings and, in the center of town where the rivers converged, the clump of high rises that made up the AresTec complex on Sparta Island. The valley was blanketed in a filmy gray haze from the factory district on the edge of town, blurring the details, but in the distance I could just see the sun glinting off the waters of Escalante Bay.

I jammed my hands in my pockets and breathed in deeply through my nose. It was nice out here, where the air smelled fresh and the acrid scent of the factory exhaust was just a wispy memory. Maybe today wouldn’t be so bad after all.

“Okay, everyone, eyes and ears up here!” The chattering voices around me tapered off at Mr. Johnson’s shout. “We’ve got a lot to get through today, so I’m just going to go ahead and turn this show over to Dr. Luna here, if everyone would please”—he narrowed his eyes at the lot of us—“give her your attention.”

A tall woman with black hair reaching almost to her knees stepped forward, smiling at us. “Hello, everybody, I’m Professor Clara Luna. Thank you for coming all the way out here to visit us today. I understand you’re having Career Week at your school right now. How has that been going for you?”

The group grumbled noncommittally. Career Week was the week-long round of field trips that the junior class at the Academy had to take every year to help pick their study emphases for senior annum. All week, we’d been visiting different “high-need” areas in the peninsula, to help the undecided kids figure out what they wanted to do with their lives—the ones who hadn’t had that predetermined for them by a scholarship committee like Henry and I had, anyway. On Monday they’d dragged us to the GSAF branch in the city, and yesterday we’d taken a tour of AresTec’s newly-completed offices. Today, they’d switched things up by busing us out to this isolated site in the hills that divided the peninsula into its east and west halves. It would have made a great horror flick premise—a group of teens brought to the middle of nowhere, only to be massacred where we stood!—but it was nothing as exciting as that. Instead, they were apparently planning to bore us to death with a presentation from these Kimbal University professors who were doing some kind of geology survey out here. But at least it got me out of Earth Lit for a week.

Mr. Johnson rolled his eyes at my classmates’ lack of enthusiasm, but Dr. Luna seemed undaunted. “It’s good to see so many fresh faces out here today,” she said, her smile never wavering for an instant. “What we’re working on is a very exciting project that is helping us to learn more about our planet’s past, which in turn will help us understand how to shape the future of Mars. I’m one of the co-leads on this project. My associate should be coming along any second—”

“I’m here, I’m here,” a man’s voice broke in, and a moment later its owner popped up over the top of the sloping crater behind her. He was tall and dark, with a head of thick black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache to match. My breath hissed in through my teeth, louder than I meant it to. Henry and Tamara both looked at me.

“What’s your problem?” Henry whispered.

“That guy.” I nodded in the direction of the newcomer. “He’s—”

“Hello, everyone,” the man said over me. He brushed off his dirt-encrusted hands on the sides of his pants. “Sorry I’m late. There’s always so much to do on a dig like this. Anyway, my name is Professor Erick Gomez, I’m the head researcher for this field survey.”

“Wait, that Erick Gomez?” Henry whispered. “That tool your mom’s dating now?” Tamara winced sympathetically in my direction as I nodded.

Maybe I was being unfair. I suppose I hadn’t really known Erick long enough to know, objectively, if he was actually a tool or not. Mom had only introduced him to me and Celeste a couple of weeks ago. Although, from the way they were acting, I suspected they’d been seeing each other for a while before Mom told us about him. I mean, they’d worked together as long as we’d lived in Tierra Nueva. They had plenty of opportunity.

And I couldn’t really begrudge her dating again. After all, Dad was the one who’d abandoned us all so unceremoniously two annums ago, during my first term at the Academy. Considering the fact that he hadn’t contacted me or Celeste once since he’d left, it was obvious he was only concerned with his own happiness. So why shouldn’t Mom be happy, too?

It was just weird to have some new guy showing up at the house all the time. Especially since this one was so… different from how Dad had been.

“I’m sure most of you are wondering what exactly we’re working on way out here in the middle of nowhere,” Erick said, smiling with way too many teeth. “It might not look like much, but it’s actually very exciting. This study is continuing work begun by the first Mars landers sent from Earth over a hundred years ago.”

“Riveting,” Henry muttered. I snickered.

“As you all know, we humans have not been on Mars for very long. There’s still a lot to learn about our new home. And here, we’re using geological methods to do just that. We’re studying the planet’s past, specifically its atmospheric makeup over the millennia and behavior of ancient and precolonial waterways. Our data will enable modern scientists currently working on Phase Three of terraformation to better understand what challenges to expect while adapting the planet for life now.”

As Erick spoke, Dr. Luna started leading the group of us down a trail that wound between ditches of varying size. A few of these had groups of people working inside them with shovels and picks, but most were empty and roped off—to keep us from wandering around inside them, I guess.

“This site we’re currently excavating is fascinating for two reasons. First of all, it’s the site of an ancient stream bed, which provides us with information about how water behaved on Mars in the past, and what sort of organic material it supported. We’ve already found fossil evidence of early ancestors of the modern spider weed, as well as extinct forms of Martian flora, and even primitive fauna. We’re hoping to uncover more evidence of other ancient lifeforms that might have existed here before atmospheric degradation set in.”

My arms were still crossed, but I have to admit, he caught my interest with “fossil.” Against my better judgment, I found myself paying a bit more attention to Erick’s little spiel.

I might never have noticed it otherwise.

Erick had turned to face the group of us, walking backward and gesturing here and there like some kind of tour guide. “The second reason this site is so interesting is that the entire hills are pockmarked with craters from various meteor impacts over millions of years. The crater walls left behind can give us a snapshot of Mars’ geological processes over time.” He indicated a smallish crater to his right that appeared to have been widened by the dig crew. The sides of the hole were striped, with a variety of different-colored rocks mashed together. It almost looked like Neapolitan ice cream, I thought as I glanced absently down at the bottom of the trench.

Then I froze.

On the crater floor, carefully dug out from the dirt by Erick’s crew, was a pile of smooth-topped stones stacked in the shape of an arch.

I cleared my throat. “Hey, Eri—uh, Professor Gomez,” I interrupted.

He stared for a moment. Then recognition washed over him and he grinned at me. “Oh, Isaak. Did you have a question?”

He seemed so pleased by my interest in his project that I nearly didn’t respond to him. But my curiosity got the better of me. I pointed to the bottom of the pit. “Um, yeah. What’s up with that pile of rocks down there?”

“Oh, that. That’s a natural rock formation. We’ve discovered a number of them throughout this site. We believe they were pushed into that formation by the movement of ancient waterways. Then they calcified, solidifying together like mortar. If you all will follow me, we’ll see a few more of those ‘arches’ on the tour.”

He turned to lead the group through a narrower part of the trail. The rest of my classmates shuffled off after him, but I hung back. Something wasn’t sitting well with me. It may have been a “natural” rock formation, but I’d seen it before—on something that was definitely man-made.

“Isaak, come on,” Tamara called when she noticed I was still hovering at the side of the crater.

I paused for a moment, still looking down at the trench floor. Then, resolved, I turned to her and Henry. “Hang on just a sec.” I ducked under the rope surrounding the ditch.

“Whoa, what are you doing?” I heard Henry exclaim as I stumbled my way down the steep, rocky side of the crater.

“I just want to get a better look at it,” I replied.

“Isaak!” hissed Tamara. “You’re going to get in trouble!”

“Just keep a watch for me, then. Let me know if you hear them coming back.”

She frowned down at me, her eyebrows knitted with worry. Henry, on the other hand, had already pushed his way under the rope and was thundering down the slope after me.

Red dust settled in a cloud around me as I crouched at the base of the pile of stones. It was only about waist high, but otherwise it looked exactly like the design on the coin. I supposed it could just be a coincidence, but that would be too weird.

“What’s so great about this thing, man?” Henry asked. “It’s just a pile of rocks.”

“Yeah, but the way they’re shaped…” I reached out impulsively to touch the arch.

When my fingers brushed the rock, a deafening klaxon shrieked.

Henry cursed at the sound. I cringed, my head jerking up. I hadn’t noticed the security drone hovering at the perimeter of the crater, but its camera was focused on us now, the red light on top of its body flashing.

In moments, our group was back at the side of the crater. Erick silenced the security drone, and in the stillness that followed, Mr. Johnson’s voice echoed.

“Contreras and Sandhu. Why am I not surprised?”

◦ • ◦

After ensuring that I hadn’t caused any damage to the site with my “reckless behavior,” Mr. Johnson had hauled the three of us back to the bus while Erick got the rest of our classmates back on their regularly scheduled field trip. As we lowered ourselves into the front row of benches, I glanced over at Tamara and felt a twinge of remorse. Her normally tanned face was white as a sheet. Henry and I were more used to getting in trouble, but Tamara had always managed to keep her nose clean. I hadn’t meant to drag her into this as well.

“All right,” said Mr. Johnson, leaning against the bus’ emergency manual drive console and looking the three of us over, his arms crossed. “What was it this time, Sandhu? Now even scientific studies are a tool of Earth-based imperialism? Kind of a stretch, don’t you think?”

Henry was aghast. “What makes you think this was my idea? I’m innocent!”

“Right. Like I’m going to fall for that.”

“He’s telling the truth,” I broke in. “He really didn’t have anything to do with it this time. It was my fault.”

Mr. Johnson gaped at me, then began to massage the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Really, Isaak? Being Henry’s accomplice wasn’t good enough for you? Now you have to commit the crimes yourself?”

“I wasn’t going to do anything to it!” I protested. “I just wanted to get a better look at it!”

My teacher sighed. “Isaak, I don’t know what to do about you. In just one annum, you went from being one of the best students at the Academy to having a C-average and being in the principal’s office every other week. What happened?”

I knew it was true, but his words still stung. That didn’t mean I had any intention to tell my homeroom teacher what happened, though—especially while he was sitting there all torqued off at me.

“Look, Mr. J,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to make trouble. I just wanted to get a better look at it.”

Mr. Johnson shook his head. “Fine. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you off the hook. All three of you are getting a one-week in-school suspension…”

“Me?” Tamara squeaked. It was the first noise she’d made since the drone alarm went off. “But Mr. Johnson, I wasn’t—”

“You’re on the drone’s security footage just like the two of them,” replied Mr. Johnson. “I know you’re a good kid, Tamara, but you need to take responsibility for your actions. Maybe it’s time to think about who you choose for your friends.”

Tamara looked like she was going to cry. My stomach knotted with guilt.

“Andy?” a voice broke in from the bus’s doorway. I turned in annoyance to see Erick standing there. “Sorry to interrupt. Clara’s finishing the tour for the rest of the students. Might I make a suggestion?”

Mr. Johnson seemed as taken aback by the professor’s interruption as the rest of us. “Regarding?”

“I looked over the crater, and there’s no damage done to the site. And it seems to me if the students are really that interested in my team’s findings, there’s a more productive way for them to pay their penance than an in-school suspension.”

Johnson folded his arms and nodded. “Such as?”

“We always could use a few more workers at the site. There’s still quite a bit of digging to do. The three of them could volunteer here on weekends and put in a few hours of community service. They’d be helping out the GSAF science division, and they might learn a few things in the process.”

It took all my effort not to leap to my feet in protest. I honestly would have preferred an in-school suspension over having to spend my free time with Erick.

Tamara looked down at the floor, her shoulders slumped. “I have voice lessons at Herschel on the weekends, though.”

Mr. Johnson’s grin was devilish. “I’m sure your schedule can be worked out. I know your parents will be willing to cooperate once they know the alternative.”

Tamara nodded glumly, and my temper flared on her behalf. Was it really necessary for him to be so happy about this? I was starting to think Henry was right about Mr. Johnson—maybe he really did have it in for us.

“Of course, we can work around your other classes,” Erick intervened. He smiled encouragingly at Tamara. “I know there was no harm meant here today. I think this can be a learning experience for everybody.”

I was just starting to feel a grudging ounce of respect for him when he turned and grinned at me. The charitable feelings I had toward him dissolved. I could just tell he was going to make a huge deal out of us “getting to know each other.”

I knew then that the rest of this annum was going to be hell.