The skin on my forearms started to prickle. “Do you know what he found?”

“No, no. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories, so I didn’t pay it much attention. But the fringe picked up on it for sure. You know, those people who go on the TV and insist that all of Earth’s major archaeological sites were built by aliens. I think that’s when the Atlantean Arch theory started to go around.” He eyed me. “Oh, come on, Isaak. I know you. You’re smarter than that. You’re not buying into all this nonsense, are you?”

“Of course not.” I forced out a weak chuckle. “I was just curious what the note I found was about. I guess it was pretty stupid, huh?”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Mijo, I know what you’re thinking. It’s only natural to wonder about your father. No one really quite gets over something like that.” He smiled reassuringly, his salt-and-pepper mustache drawing up with the corners of his mouth. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. You can talk to me as much as you like. I’m just sorry that I can’t tell you anything more about it.”

“It’s all right, Abuelo,” I said, forcing a smile in return. “You’ve told me more than enough.”

◦ • ◦

An hour later, Henry and I were in our guild hall on Speculus, poring over the internet together, searching for anything we could find about this David Hassan. Apart from archived news articles, there were a ton of websites dedicated to him—most of them old, 2-D slabs that didn’t translate over to VR very well—but none of them actually had any of his data. They were all conspiracy theory sites, most with subpages about Roswell, New Mexico, the Loch Ness monster and the pyramids at Giza. I found more information about “Atlantis” than about Hassan himself.

“I don’t get it,” I said, closing yet another window and turning to Henry. “All these sites, they just say that the Atlantean Arches are evidence of aliens. They only mention David Hassan briefly in passing, and there doesn’t actually seem to be any connection between him and the arches themselves. It’s all just about the existence of aliens as tangential proof for all their other conspiracies. So why did my dad ask Abuelo about him, and not about the arches in Veracruz or anything like that?”

Henry sighed, swiping through another mountain of text blearily. “Search me, dude. The most I can get is that this guy may have found evidence of precolonial life on Mars. But what sort of evidence? Like, the stuff at Erick’s dig site? Or something else?”

I flopped back on the virtual sofa—a large, stuffed thing, complete with mastodon-tusk embellishments. “If only we could actually talk to this guy. We could ask him ourselves.”

Henry stopped scrolling. “Do you think he’s still alive?”