“My mom gave us a ride straight out to the site,” I explained, “so we were there when GSAF showed up.”

“Really? Fresh.” She looked between the two of us expectantly. “Well, give me the dirt!”

So Tamara and I told her what all had happened the day before. This time in the retelling, I found that my mind dwelled on the stranger details more than it had before I spoke to Henry. Especially how quickly Joseph Condor had appeared. Had he really planned to drop in on the site all along? Or was GSAF actually watching us?

Scylla nodded as we finished explaining. “Yeah, that’s happened a few times this semester alone.”

“Does it make sense to you?” asked Tamara. “I mean, I get that if these things are GSAF property, we need to return them, but why are they shutting the entire site down for the whole day over pieces of scrap metal?”

“That’s been bothering me, too,” Scylla admitted. “You know, some of the things we’ve found… I’ve never really gotten a chance to get a good look at them, but they never really look like anything that would come off a satellite. They’re just weird, random things, like coins and stuff.”

I nearly choked. “Coins?”

“Yeah. I mean, not exactly, but the thing I dug up was flat and round like that. It was super corroded, though, so I couldn’t really tell what it looked like. Joseph Condor snatched it right out of my hand before I could even blink.” She swiped at me, her fingers curled like claws.

“The thing we found yesterday looked like an old earpod,” Tamara said. “I mean, I suppose it could be an antenna, but…”

Scylla said, “You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said, Isaak. About the glass not looking like tektite. I looked it up online and you’re right, natural tektite is all dark and rocky looking. I think something’s going down. Do you think it’s a GSAF cover-up?”

I thought back to what Henry had said last night. On the one hand, it seemed so crazy conspiracy-theory. But on the other…

“I don’t know. But I think we should keep our eyes open.”

◦ • ◦

When we got to the dig site, we split into our usual groups and started working. It was a bit surreal, to see how normal everyone else was acting when I felt so on edge. Between Joseph Condor, everything that Scylla had said, my fight with Henry, and then finding that Emil had been inside my house without any of us knowing, my skin felt prickly with nerves. Every sound made me jump. Every shadow that passed over my head was sure to be a GSAF drone, surveilling my every move.

Across the trench, Scylla smiled tensely at me. I wasn’t the only one on edge.