“I dunno. It’s all really complicated. GSAF keeps butting in, and—” I broke off quickly. I wasn’t sure if they really were monitoring me, but I didn’t want to say anything, just in case.

Abuelo chuckled. “The old wheels of government bureaucracy keep on turning, don’t they? I guess red tape is a nightmare no matter which planet you’re on.”

“Yeah,” I agreed hollowly. “Anyway, Abuelo, I wanted to ask you something. Did, um… did my dad ever talk to you about anything? Like, maybe a key of some sort?”

His face darkened at the mention of my dad. I knew my grandparents hated him even more than Mom did, but I needed to find out.

“Your father never talked to me about much of anything,” Abuelo said. “Why would he tell me where he kept his keys?”

“Well, not his keys keys. I mean… a different sort of key.”

“Mijo, what are you even talking about?”

A tension headache was building in my skull. I pressed the heels of my hand against my eyes to try and abate it. “Sorry, Abuelo. I know it’s random. It’s just that I found this box with some of my dad’s stuff in it, and… it said something about you,” I said.

His eyebrows furrowed. “About me?”

“Yeah. There was all this writing about these archaeological sites, and something called the Atlantean Arch. He’d written Ask Hector on it.”

“Ah.” Abuelo hopped down off the stone head, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Yes, Raymond did contact me shortly before he left Mars. He’d gotten wrapped up in some conspiracy theory, another of his ‘get rich quick’ schemes, I assume. He didn’t say anything about any keys, though. He wanted information about a man who’d taught at Berkeley when I was finishing my Ph.D. there. I couldn’t really tell him much—the man was a physicist, so of course I’d never taken any classes with him. Different fields. I had heard his name, though, because he was working with the Ames Research Center on the biological survey of Mars precolonization, so it was all over the news. David Hassan, I think it was.”

“My dad wanted to know about that?”

“Yes, I know. I was shocked as well. I’ll tell you what I told him: I never met David Hassan. Not long after I started working at Berkeley, he was discredited and lost his job with the university. It was quite the scandal. He kept insisting that the findings GSAF released weren’t consistent with his research about Mars’ habitability.”

“You mean, like, he thought it was dangerous to colonize? But terraformation went ahead. Everything seems to be fine here.”

“No, that wasn’t it. He claimed”—Abuelo laughed, shaking his head—“that he’d discovered evidence of sentient life on Mars, and that GSAF was trying to cover it up.”