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 Professor 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.”