I searched high and low for that damned thing. My first thought was that it would be in Mom’s lab, the converted garden shed in our backyard where she worked on her smaller projects. But I checked every drawer and cupboard, every nook and cranny, and found nothing. It wasn’t in the garage, either, or in the kitchen. I looked through her dresser drawers, the back corner of her closet, everything.

It occurred to me, as I slumped back on my heels after feeling around under her shoe rack, that she might have thrown the box away when she took all of Dad’s clothes to the recycling center. The thought made me sick to my stomach.

I closed my eyes, trying to remember what the coin had looked like. I was sure the arch engraved on its face looked just like the one out at Erick’s dig site, but my memory was fuzzy. There had been other things in the box that had held my attention more, things that were more definitely Dad’s, like his spare e-cig atomizer and his great-uncle’s wristwatch. And his wedding band.

That’s what I’d been looking at when Mom caught me. I still remember the way her face hardened when she saw that ring there, in a box of junk he must have buried in the garden before he took off. I still don’t know why he’d left that stuff there. I guess maybe I’d hoped he was planning to come back for it. But when Mom saw that ring, I think she knew once and for all that he wasn’t coming back.

Mom had taken the box and told me she wanted me to forget about it. Fat chance of that.

I sighed and opened my eyes. It must be long gone by now, buried in some landfill where I’d never find it. I was just starting to get back to my feet when my eye caught on the hatch to the crawlspace on the ceiling of the closet. We’d never stored anything up there, since it was loaded with insulation and Mom was worried Celeste or I would get sick. But I shoved the hatch open now and, stretching up on my tiptoes, reached inside.

I felt around for a few seconds, encountering nothing but dust and bits of fiberglass. But then my fingers struck something hard and metal.

I pulled the object out. It was the box.

It looked like some kind of vintage lunch box you’d see in flix, with the remnants of a painted cartoon character on its lid. I didn’t know how old it was, but I knew he’d brought it from Earth. The hinges were rusty, which made opening the lid difficult, but I finally managed to pry it open. There was all the junk I remembered, all the weirdly personal objects that seemed strange to leave behind. Little knick-knacks and trinkets, and a handful of memory cards and flash drives.

And amongst all of Dad’s Dad things, shoved up in the corner, was the coin.

You could tell right away that it was ancient. It was made out of some kind of metal, but it was all corroded and discolored, kind of a greenish hue now. Its reverse was engraved with nine circles, each differently sized. The front face of the coin, meanwhile, had three marks along the upper rim, but they were too worn for me to make out. They didn’t quite look like writing; more like pictures, or maybe symbols of some kind.

And beneath these markings was an engraving of an arch. It looked bigger than the one that I’d seen at the dig site—that one was only waist high, and the one depicted on the coin showed a figure standing beneath it, as if passing through a doorway—but the pattern of the flat-topped stones was identical, sort of an upside-down-V-shaped archway.

I hadn’t thought much about the coin at the time Henry and I found the box. We’d come across it, buried in the garden, while we were supposed to be yanking up spider weeds to get the ground ready for Mom to plant the new experimental seeds she’d developed to grow during the long Martian autumn. It had been clear when we’d got the lid open that it was Dad’s stuff, but there was so much else in the box that I hadn’t dwelled on the coin too much. I guess I’d figured he had probably gotten it from one of his friends at the factory. You’d never believe the kind of weird junk they’d brought with them from Earth.

Maybe arches like this were common. Erick had said it was a natural formation—maybe there were some like it on Earth, too. Or maybe it was just a coincidence. But something felt really weird about this whole thing.

I hadn’t heard the garage door go up, but the slam of the kitchen door was unmistakable. My little sister Celeste’s voice echoed noisily down the hall. She was chattering at Mom about something they’d done at her after-school program.

Crap. I slid my palmtop out of my pocket to look at the time. It was already after six. Quickly, I yanked the crawlspace hatch closed and rushed out of my mom’s room.

The idea had been to sneak the box into my own room, but as I turned the corner, there was Mom standing in my doorway.

“Oh, Isaak, there you are,” she said.

“Hey, Mom. How was your day?” My heart was pounding so loud that I was sure she’d be able to hear it, but she didn’t seem to notice anything amiss.

“Just the usual. You know, boring lab stuff.” She grinned and nudged me. “But how about you? What’s this I hear about you volunteering at Erick’s geological survey? That was unexpected!”

“Oh, yeah, well, you know.” My fingers clenched around the box behind my back. I hoped it didn’t look too obvious. “It was… fresher than I thought it would be.”

“But that’s wonderful! To see you taking an interest and engaging in something…” I thought for panicked a minute that she was going to hug me, and how exactly would I be able to conceal the box then? But she got this far-off look on her face and sort of turned, looking off into nowhere. “Ay, niño, I was really worried about you for a while there. Well, I suppose it’s only natural, such big changes at such a young age—everyone needs time to cope…”

I tried to take advantage of her reverie to creep backward into my bedroom. I’d forgotten, of course, about Celeste. I hadn’t even noticed her standing in her own doorway, watching Mom fawn over me with her ever-sticky fingers in her mouth, until I heard her say, “Zak, what’s in the box?”

Dammitdammitdammitdammit

Mom’s eyes flicked over to me and her smile faded. “Isaak, what are you hiding there?”

“Nothing.”

“Isaak.”

Her face left no room for argument. I sighed and reluctantly produced the lunch box.

She frowned momentarily, as if trying to remember where she knew the thing from. Then realization dawned. “Isaak, where did you get that?”

I hate when adults do crap like that. “Where did you get that?” You torquing know where I got it from, you’re the one who put it there. What you really want to know is, “What were you doing in my closet? Besides invading my privacy and defying my orders, that is.”

I sighed. Might as well come clean. “It’s just, I saw something at Erick’s dig site that reminded me of something I saw with Dad’s stuff—”

As soon as the word “Dad” came out of my mouth, Mom blew her stack. “That’s what all this is about?” I wouldn’t say she shouted, but she wasn’t exactly quiet. “Here I was thinking you were just expressing an interest—”

“Well, technically I am. I’m interested in knowing why, exactly, Dad had something in this box that looks like something from Erick’s dig site.”

“Like what, a piece of equipment? He probably stole it.”

“Not equipment! It was… like… a thing they dug up. There was a picture of it. Sort of. In here.” It sounded completely insane, once I said it aloud. What was I expecting, aliens?

“Isaak,” Mom groaned, “you know that’s not possible.”

“No kidding! But that doesn’t change the fact that—”

“I hid this box for a reason, Isaak. I saw the way that you were looking at it the last time you found it. Your father is gone. He hasn’t even contacted you or Celeste once since he went back to Earth. The last thing I want is for you to spend your time chasing the shadow of a man who doesn’t want anything to do with you.”

Her words stung like a slap in the face. I knew they were true, but to hear them spoken aloud hurt in a way I wouldn’t have expected.

“I’m not chasing anyone’s shadow, Mom,” I argued. “But I just… don’t you think it was weird, how he just… disappeared like that? I mean, leaving is one thing, but to take off with no warning, not even bringing any of his stuff with him?”

“No, Isaak. I don’t think it was weird. It happens every day. It’s a coward’s move.” Mom’s voice went from livid with anger to just hollow, almost dead. Maybe she wasn’t as over it as I’d thought she was. “We all knew your father was on his way out. It was just a question of when.”

My shoulders slumped. “Okay, but… why’d he bury the box? Why not take this stuff with him?”

“That, I don’t know. But there’s no point obsessing over it. Sometimes you need to know when to just let things go. Let this go, Isaak.”

So I let the box go.

She took it but didn’t go back in her bedroom with it. She would have to hide it somewhere new, now, to keep it away from me. Maybe this time she’d throw it away after all.

It didn’t matter. I wouldn’t look for it again. The coin was in my pocket.

◦ • ◦

Neither of us brought it up again, but an awkward silence hovered over us throughout dinner. I looked down at my plate the whole time and poked sullenly at my calabacitas, stirring the small squash and tomatoes together with the beans and rice until they formed a wholly unappetizing brown lump. Celeste chattered excitedly about what she’d done at school today, and how this friend and that friend weren’t speaking to each other again, and on and on and on, while Mom’s eyes bored into the top of my head. Eventually I dumped my half-eaten plate in the sink and wandered back into my room.

I had no homework, what with Career Week and everything, and for the first time in my life, I actually found myself wishing that I did. Then I’d have something to think about other than the fact that I’d alienated my two best friends, torqued off my mother, and gotten myself roped into Saturday school for the rest of the annum.

I put on my Speculus headset and browsed the internet for a while, looking for… I don’t know. Something to show that I wasn’t crazy. But I couldn’t find any information about that coin of Dad’s.

Next I tried searching for the arch. This is how I learned that corbeled vaults, as they are apparently called, are a dime a dozen. Practically every civilization on Earth had built something that looked like that. There was even a similar-looking one in Veracruz, where Abuelo’s old summer site had been. I couldn’t find any natural examples that looked like the same—most natural arches were worn out of solid rock, not stacked in a pattern like that—but I was starting to think that Erick was right. It was just a coincidence, the coin came from somewhere on Earth, and now I was stuck spending my weekends with my mom’s new loser boyfriend digging up rocks.

Way to go, Isaak.

Notification bubbles from Henry urging me to go on chat kept popping up in my peripheral, but I flicked them away. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to him and have to explain away my stupid behavior. Honestly, the person I wanted to talk to most was Abuelo, but it was 2:00 AM in Berkeley where he and my grandma lived, so I figured I’d better not. Finally I took the headset off altogether and wandered toward the kitchen in search of something to fill my growling stomach with.

As I turned the corner past my mom’s room, I heard her say, “I’m just so worried about Isaak. He’s been… drifting so much since Raymond left.”

I froze in front of the closed door. A second later, I heard the response, much fainter and somewhat tinny. My mom was using the chat app on her deskpad. She’d never been much of a Speculus person; she always insisted VR gave her motion sickness.

“It’s natural, Jess. You need to not push him so much.”

I recognized my Tia Mayra’s voice. Mayra wasn’t my real aunt, but she was my mom’s best friend, so that’s what we’d always called her. She lived in California—apparently Mom had been less concerned about time zone differences than me.

“I know, but his grades at the Academy are slipping. I’m worried about his scholarship. If he loses that, I don’t know what we’re going to do. It’s so much harder to get into a university here with a public school diploma, and without a degree, there’s not a whole lot he could do here. Apart from the factories. I don’t want that to be his only alternative.”

“What about a school here on Earth? He’d be a third-generation student at Cal, that must count for something. If his grades aren’t high enough, he could start at a community college and transfer.”

Mom’s voice shook a little when she answered her. “I thought about that, but I don’t know if I could bear him going back to Earth. I already had to leave behind my parents and my friends when I came here. And then Raymond… you know. So to lose my son, too?” She sniffled. “But if he can’t get his act together here, what choice do I have?”

My chest clenched. This was ridiculous. Everyone had been planning my life out for me when I was a straight-A student, and now here they were, doing it again when my grades slipped. Was I ever going to get to have any input on anything?

“Have faith in the kid, Jess,” Tia Mayra said. “He’s going through a lot of crap in his life. He still has another year of high school left. He’s smart, and you said his grades in his language classes are fine. He’s probably just bored with his G.E.s. Happens to the best of us.”

“I know. You’re right. Maybe I’m just stressed. My last round of crops didn’t come out any better than the ones before, and there’s pressure from GSAF...” She sighed. “I just… deep down, I worry. Isaak is so much like his father. I just pray he’s not like him in the ways that count.”

I couldn’t listen to any more of this. All thoughts of snack food forgotten, I rushed through the kitchen and out the back door. I clumsily made my way across the small yard, taken up almost entirely by Celeste’s playset and Mom’s vegetable garden and orchard of fruit trees, and vaulted the waist-high fence. My mind was a blur as I stormed down the alley behind our house. I tried to keep it focused on the sound of the rolling waves in the bay, to let it drown out the echoes of the conversation I’d just overheard. The disappointment in my mother’s voice. The crushing guilt that I’d been trying to avoid all day.

Why’d she have to compare me to Dad like that? I was nothing like him. For one thing, I’d never abandon her and Celeste the way he did.

But I was nothing like Erick Gomez, either. Why did all these adults keep trying to stick me into some kind of box, like they couldn’t make sense of me without comparing me to someone else? Why couldn’t they just let me be myself? Make my own choices, do what I want to do? Maybe my grades at the precious Academy wouldn’t have dropped so much if everyone in my life wasn’t hell-bent on giving me so much shit all the time!

My feet unconsciously led me down to the wharf that lined the water’s edge. There were lots of people out tonight, couples on dates and families out to dinner. A large and noisy group of Earth tourists clamored past me to get down the stairs to the beach. They nearly collided with four girls coming up from the ferry docks, and I stepped back to give them some room. The tourists were chattering to themselves about wanting to catch a glimpse of “authentic” Martian life, rather than sticking to the more upscale and artificial areas the northern waterfront had to offer. I snorted. If they wanted to see the real Mars, they should take a tour of the factory district. That would dash their little sci-fi dreams in a nanosecond. The idea was almost funny enough to snap me out of my bad mood.

I was so preoccupied, I didn’t even notice one of the girls detach herself from the group that had just come up the stairs. I nearly jumped out of my skin when Tamara clapped her hand down on my shoulder. “Isaak, what’s the matter?” she asked. “You stomped right past me back there, you didn’t even notice when I said ‘hi.’”

“I’m sorry, Tam. Nothing’s wrong, I was just… thinking.”

Silence hung heavy between us, and I thought back to what had happened on the field trip this afternoon. One more thing I’d screwed up. More than anything, I just wanted to wake up and find that this day had never happened, that I could have a do-over.

“Look, Isaak,” Tamara said. “I’m sorry about earlier.”

I blinked. “Why are you sorry?”

“I was acting like a brat, not speaking to you after what happened with Mr. Johnson. I guess I really am a goody-two-shoes, like everyone says.”

“You’re not—” I started, but she held up a hand.

“No, seriously. It was lame of me. So can we just pretend it didn’t happen? And you can just tell me what’s wrong? Because, seriously, you’re not fooling anyone. I can tell you’re torqued. You’ve been acting weird all day, and I just…” She trailed off and shrugged. “I just want to help you.”

The breeze off the bay picked up, biting at my face and playing at the wisps of hair around Tamara’s face. A couple of meters away, the girls she’d been walking with—probably classmates from Herschel—were watching us pointedly. One of them tried to cover a giggle with her hand.

Awkwardly, I turned to face the water. The smaller of our two moons, Deimos, was setting in the west. It hovered over the bay like a bright star. The lights of the city glinted off the waves, vibrant dashes of white and gold.

“Okay,” I said. “But it can wait, honestly. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you tomorrow before class or something.”

Tamara rolled her eyes. “I don’t think so. Where are you headed, the beach?” When I nodded, she said, “I’ll go with you.”