I jumped. “Yeah?”

She shook her head irritably. “The alert system. You’re being paged.”

I hadn’t noticed the red banner at the top of my deskpad. Now it was flashing on the top of Mrs. Cheng’s pyramidal display as well. I’d been called into the principal’s office. Why were they calling me into the principal’s office? I hadn’t even done anything—today, anyway.

“We don’t have all day,” Mrs. Cheng said, her voice growing testy. Apparently she didn’t appreciate her lecture on twentieth-century white guys and their midlife crises being interrupted.

Twenty pairs of eyes bored into me with great interest. “Right. Sorry,” I said. I shoved my deskpad into my backpack and hurried out the classroom door, ignoring their stares.

Earth Lit was on the second floor of the comparatively small and plain liberal arts building. No part of the Academy was shabby by any means, but since most of the school’s funding came from AresTec, the STEM department was the real hallmark of the school. Any building would look dowdy next to the chrome magnificence of Tyson Hall, with its six gleaming stories towering alongside the red bluffs.

The administrative offices were located on the ground floor of the building, while the classrooms and labs occupied the floors above. An anxious knot built in my stomach as I crossed the sky bridge and headed down the stairs, past the Foucault pendulum and into the lobby of the administration department.

The receptionist looked up as I came in. “Hi, Isaak,” she said, her voice bored. I wasn’t exactly a stranger to the principal’s office these days. Too much time spent around Henry could do that to a person. “They’re waiting for you in the boardroom down the hall.”

I blinked at her. “Not Mr. Culver’s office?”

She merely shrugged. I glanced down the hall. Like the rest of Tyson, the administrative offices had been specially tailored to fit the Academy’s “image,” that pseudo-sci-fi look that all the GalaX trustees on Earth seem to associate with Mars. The last door on the right was slightly ajar; I could just see a large rectangular table at its center, with curved chrome legs and a smooth black Plexiglas top.

I knocked on the door hesitantly. Mr. Culver yanked it out from under my knuckles, his teeth clenched in a smile that looked more like a grimace. “Ah, Isaak,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”

He seemed even more uptight than usual. I realized why as soon as he stepped away from the door, giving me a full view of the boardroom. Three men sat at the table—and the man in the middle was Joseph Condor.

“Hello, Isaak,” he said. “Please, have a seat.”