“But it’s raining out!” I protested. Although I have to admit, I was less concerned about my mom getting wet and more about her turning up on site at all. It was bad enough having Erick around all day when I was working. The last thing I needed was my torquing mom showing up, too.

“Exactly. You’re going to get soaked enough working all day. You don’t need to deal with walking and changing trains and waiting for the shuttle on top of it. Message Henry and Tamara and see if they’d like a ride, too. I’ll drive you all straight to the site.”

I tried arguing with her, but she wasn’t having any of it. So an hour later, there we were—me, Mom, and Celeste—parked in the circular drive outside Tamara’s house.

Tamara lived on the northwest side of town, not far from the Academy, in what skirted the line between a large house and a small mansion. Tamara always prided herself on not living in the sprawling “smart house” compounds some of our classmates lived in, but it still was a stark difference from my family’s duplex, let alone the apartment Henry had grown up in. Tamara’s moms were about as high up at AresTec as you could get, so they weren’t exactly short of funds. They’d been with the company since its startup and had even worked at GalaX for some time on Earth before relocating here to Mars when Tamara was a baby. Bryn was now the chief marketing officer for AresTec, and Mama D—her name was actually Delia, but she always insisted that Tamara’s friends call her by that nickname—was some kind of technical whiz, responsible for designing all their latest gadgets. She’d actually designed the A-Top 8, the newest model of AresTec’s palmtop that most of the kids at the Academy were using now.

Coming here always served as a reminder that, no matter how close we were, Tamara and I really came from two totally different worlds.

As my mom’s sedan rolled up the driveway, Tamara came dashing out, the hood of her jacket pulled tightly over her head. Mom had opted to sit in the back, next to Celeste in her carseat, which left the front for me and Tamara. “Thanks for the ride, Professor Garcia,” Tamara said, slamming the passenger door.

“Hi, Tamara!” Celeste shouted, grinning her gap-toothed grin. “We’re going to watch Isaak and Dr. Erick dig up rocks for science.”

“Oh, do I not count?” Tamara teased.

“No! You count most of all. I was going to say you. How many rocks are you going to dig today?”

“At least a thousand.” Tamara looked at me. “Where’s Henry?”

“He’s coming later. He had to go in to the Academy. Apparently, he got busted for more graffiti, so he’s got Saturday detention.”