I was only eight when it happened, so I didn’t really understand what was going on, but I remember that no one in town could shut up about it. It was this huge opportunity for people on Mars, and here in Tierra Nueva at that. And I definitely noticed that things in town changed after AresTec opened its doors. It wasn’t just that they’d built Sparta Island and the huge AresTec campus—the whole face of downtown changed. The older, kind of rundown areas in the business district got bulldozed, replaced with high-rises and tourist traps, coffee shops and kitschy boutiques. Then the mansions started appearing, dotting the cliffs on the northwest side of town. The Academy had opened not long after. In what seemed like a really short amount of time, Tierra Nueva got really, really big.

Actually, all of Mars was getting really, really big.

With so many people from so many different backgrounds coming and working and living together, GSAF had a lot of work to do to keep the new world in order. And that was the “use” that the Academy had seen for me. I was being groomed for a translating job with GSAF, the details of which I still didn’t really know. But I guess the idea of a native Martian who could speak eight languages—and that wasn’t even counting the dead ones, like Olmec and Mayan, that Abuelo had taught me—had been very appealing to the scholarship board at the Academy. So I’d been offered a full ride, with my linguistics emphasis already laid out for me as an incoming freshman.

My parents had been ridiculously pleased by this. I suppose they’d been a little bit worried about my future beforehand. My mom’s a GSAF bioengineer—basically a hacker for plants, splicing them together like a jigsaw puzzle in a laboratory in the hopes that she can take a plant that had evolved for life on Earth and change it into one that can survive on a totally different planet. She loves her job, but it’s not exactly known for its spectacular pay grade. My dad, on the other hand, had worked in a factory. They’d met here on Mars, and if my abuela’s lengthy rantings about how they “always knew he was no good” are to be believed, it wasn’t exactly a match made in heaven.