The sun crept over the rooftops of the neighborhood. Thin October light spilled through the kitchen window in pale strips. Page stood at the sink, hands still wet from last night’s dishes done this morning.

  She dried her hands on the dish towel, staring out at the front yard. Dew still clung to the grass in that particular way it did before 7 AM, each blade catching the early light and holding it. Her SUV sat parked on the driveway. Argent, she called it, because it was the specific shade of silver deserving such a name. Its hood and windshield were filmed over with condensation.

  She turned back to the stove. The eggs sat in the pan, scrambled, deeply orange. Too orange. The carton had explained it. Pasture-raised, marigold-fed hens. Natural beta-carotene produces a richer yolk color. She’d bought them because the regular brand was out. She was making a mental note never to do that again.

  “Hannah,” she said, without looking up. “I can tell you’re not eating.”

  The clock on the stove read 6:02 AM.

  Her daughter shifted in her seat at the small kitchen table. Not the dining room table. They almost never used that one. This one was plain, rectangular, slightly wobbly on its back left leg that Paige had been meaning to fix for six months. It seated four but they always used two chairs. It had no particular charm and required a folded paper towel under that leg to keep it from rocking. It was, in every measurable way, boring. But it was where they ate breakfast, where Hannah did homework, where Paige paid bills and scrolled through research papers at midnight with cold coffee. It was the table that actually knew them. Simple, and perfect, and in every way.

  “Martian rocks don’t need food, do they?” Hannah asked.

  Paige looked over at her. “What?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I’m not hungry.”

  “You’re nine.” Paige crossed to the table and pulled out the chair across from her daughter, the back legs squeaking against the tile. “Still growing. Eat.” She sat down. “And what do Martian rocks have to do with food? Is that a double entendre?”

  Hannah blinked. “A double what?”

  “Entendre. Double meaning. Like, you don’t want to eat, and you’re comparing yourself to rocks, so the subtext is that rocks don’t eat, therefore neither do I, which falls apart pretty immediately because rocks are inanimate objects and from everything I can observe, you are extremely animate.”

  “Am I?”

  “The jury is in. Very animate. Eat.”

  Hannah shrugged again.

  “That’s twice,” Paige said.

  “What?”

  “The shrug. Twice. You’ve got something going on? Either tell me, or wait, are you developing a tic? Because if I have a daughter with a tic, I’d want to know. I feel like that’s a thing parents need to be briefed on.” She leaned forward. “Here’s the thing about tics. You could be eating, right now for example, which you should be, and a tic hits at exactly the wrong moment and suddenly there’s egg on my kitchen ceiling. Or you reach up to scratch your head and the tic fires and you miss and get your ear instead. The ear, Hannah. Not a scratch zone. Danger zone.”

  Hannah stared at her. “You’re weird, Mom.”

  “That’s what I’m here for.”

  Hannah looked down at her plate. Then, quieter: “I’m nervous. That’s why I’m not eating.”

  Paige softened, leaning closer to her. “About what, honey?”

  “Dad.”

  Paige looked at her lap for a beat. “Yeah, I’ve noticed.” She paused. “It makes me nervous too.”

  “How come?” Hannah asked.

  “He’s on Mars, that’s how come.”

  Hannah made a face.

  “That’s not why you’re nervous,” Paige said.

  “No.”

  “So spit it out. Or I come over there and laugh it out of you.”

  “Laugh it out?”

  Paige waved a hand. “I have methods. Highly specific, extremely effective, borderline illegal in fifteen states.” She wiggled her fingers in Hannah’s direction.

  Hannah almost smiled. “I just have this feeling. That he’s not okay.”

  “I’m a little nervous too, but he’s okay.”

  She gave Paige a look, that look, the confused one. “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s the best at what he does. He wouldn’t be there otherwise.”

  And yet here we are, Paige thought, him up there and you down here and me in the middle, running the whole thing. She kept that part to herself.

  She pointed at the plate. “Eat, or I’m serving you gas station sushi for the rest of the week.”

  “That’s not food.”

  “Debatable. Eat.”

  Hannah ate. Slowly. Scooping eggs onto the corner of her toast and chewing without enthusiasm.

  Paige pulled out her datapad.

  The news cycled through its morning rotation. President Alexandria Boone had signed an executive order restricting autonomous drone deliveries in metro airspace, the third transportation order this month. Below that, the Nordic-Pacific Climate Accord had reached a tipping point in negotiations, something about carbon allocation that Paige would need to read properly later. Underneath that, a piece about a proposed constitutional amendment on AI voting rights that was either brilliant or catastrophic depending on which expert you asked.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  She flicked past a small item from Tree of Life Mining Corporation. Started to move on.

  Stopped.

  Scrolled back.

  Minor geological anomaly reported near Olympus Mons extraction zone. Company spokesperson cites routine seismic variation. Operations continue as scheduled.

  She read it again.

  On its own, it meant nothing. Geological anomalies on Mars were common. The planet was always settling. But Paige’s institute, the Pacific Climate Research Collective, housed in a converted warehouse in Portland’s Pearl District, used Mars atmospheric data as a comparative baseline. They were building climate models that mapped Earth’s current trajectory against planetary precedents, and Mars was the closest thing to a controlled experiment they had. A planet that had once been warm, wet, and alive, and was now not. Understanding how Mars died helped them understand how Earth might not.

  The data they pulled from the Olympus region had been part of her team’s baseline for eight months. And the energy signature buried in this article, vague as the language was, framed as seismic and minor, didn’t match anything in her atmospheric models. Seismic activity left one kind of fingerprint. This read differently. She couldn’t have said exactly how, not yet, but her brain snagged on it the way it snagged on errors in datasets. Something not adding up.

  She flagged the article in her system. Most likely nothing. She moved on.

  “Where did you get that?”

  She hadn’t noticed. Hannah had pushed her plate to the side, well, mostly to the side, eggs still on it, and pulled her coloring markers and sketch pad from her backpack, which she wasn’t supposed to have at the table, a rule Paige had enforced with varying degrees of commitment. The drawing covered most of the page. Mars, obviously. Red, heavily shaded along the edges where the terminator would be. Hannah had gotten the color right, that deep rust-oxide hue Paige had seen in a thousand satellite images. In the upper left corner, Phobos hung beside it, lumpy and cratered, half-colored in white with gray shadows worked into the craters in a way that was, to Paige’s eye, pretty damn good for a nine-year-old.

  But it was the thing in the foreground that stopped her.

  Two triangles. Interlocking. One pointing up, one pointing down, their points touching at the perfect angles. Hannah had colored the upper triangle in red, the lower one in blue, the overlapping section in purple.

  It looked like a star of sorts.

  “That’s Mars,” Hannah said, keeping her eyes on her drawing.

  “I gathered. And the... shape? In front?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. It just looked cool in my head, so I drew it.”

  “Cool how?”

  “Like...” Hannah tilted her head, studying her own drawing. “Like it’s just… supposed to be there, maybe? With Mars. I don’t know why. I like it.”

  Paige stared at the interlocking triangles. Nine-year-olds didn’t draw something like that by accident. They drew houses with smoke coming out of chimneys. They drew people with stick arms and circle heads. They didn’t draw this.

  “Did Dad show you this shape?” Paige asked.

  “No.” Hannah picked up the red marker again, adding more shading to Mars. “I just thought of it. Is it bad or something?”

  “No. It’s... really good, actually.” Paige sat back, trying to shake the feeling crawling up her spine. It was weird for a child to draw sacred geometry, something people carved in wood, engraved on stone, spoke about, and revered thousands of years ago, especially if the parent, either parent, hadn’t shown or educated the child on said shape. “Where’d you learn to draw shapes like that?”

  “I didn’t learn it.” Hannah looked at her, confused. “I just... knew what it looked like. In my head. Like when you know what a song sounds like, but you can’t remember where you heard it.”

  “So you saw it somewhere.”

  Hannah tapped on her head while still coloring. “In my head. And probably somewhere else. I don’t know.”

  Paige opened her mouth. Closed it.

  She glanced at the eggs, about half gone, which counted as a win, and then at the time. “You want to call your dad, don’t you.”

  Hannah’s marker stopped moving. “Yeah. Can I? Please?”

  Logan’s shift schedule had changed twice since she’d last checked with his team coordinator, and she wasn’t current on where he was in the rotation. Mars operated on a 24-hour-37-minute day, which meant his schedule slid against Earth time constantly, a slow drift making “is he awake” a genuine calculation and not just a guess. He was probably between survey blocks right now.

  “Two bites,” Paige said.

  “Mom—”

  “Two real bites. Not the scraping-it-around-the-plate thing. Actual bites.”

  Hannah took two bites, like she’d just conformed to Big Brother and would get back at mom later.

  Paige reached across the table and slid the HomeLink emitter toward her. The device was a civilian-grade unit, a flat disc about the size of a hardcover book projecting a holographic interface and connecting through a commercial satellite relay. Not the military QuantumRelay Logan carried. That cut transmission lag to near-zero. The HomeLink worked through the civilian Ares Network, the commercial infrastructure that had gone up in preparation for the first wave of Mars colonization to give future settlers and their families something that felt like a phone call, even if it wasn’t quite. The lag ran twenty-two minutes each way, depending on orbital positions. Not a conversation. More like a very slow exchange of voicemails, or rather, video mails, or vidmails for short.

  Hannah tapped in her password, going slowly, her tongue slightly out, in hopes to concentrate hard enough not to mistype. The holographic interface bloomed outward. She navigated to Logan’s contact and pressed call.

  It rang. Rang again. A third time. Then the Ares Network auto-routed to his message buffer, a small Mars-side server storing incoming transmissions and queuing them for playback when the recipient was available.

  Paige leaned back in her chair, watching from the corner of her eye. Hannah had this thing when she called her dad. She wanted her mother nearby, but she also wanted the illusion of privacy. The sense that this was her call. Her conversation. Not something being supervised. So Paige had learned to be present without being visible about it. To find something else to look at. To be close enough, but somehow still distance.

  The recording tone chimed.

  Hannah straightened, a smile beaming across her face. “Hi, Dad.” She paused, trying to find the words. “Well, um… uh… well, did you find aliens yet?”

  She said with a lightness to it. An ease.

  She clicked off.

  “That’s all you want to say?” Paige asked.

  Hannah shrugged. “He’ll voice back. He always does. I asked that last time, but he didn’t reply yet. Kinda reminding him about the alien thing.”

  “So, you believe in aliens?”

  She didn’t look at her mom. “Yeah. Everyone does.”

  “They do?”

  “Yep.” Now she looked at her mom, nose scrunched up. “Don’t they?”

  “Not everyone.”

  Paige glanced at the clock. 6:48. Right. Time to go.

  “Okay, let’s move. School is happening whether we participate enthusiastically or not.”

  “Can’t I wait until he responds?”

  “That’ll be forty-five minutes from now, minimum. And that’s if he sees your vidmail right away.” Paige was already up, stacking the plates. “You’ll be in second period.”

  “What if it’s important?”

  “Then it’ll be important in forty-five minutes.” She set the plates in the sink, grabbed Hannah’s backpack from the floor, held it open. “Markers. In.”

  Hannah capped her pens and tucked each one back into the tin. The drawing sat on the table. Mars and its lumpy moon. And those interlocking triangles, perfect and strange. Paige looked at it for a second before Hannah picked it up too and pushed it inside the sketch pad.

  At the front door, Paige handed over the backpack, then held up one finger.

  “Okay. I’m going to let you take the HomeLink to school.” She pointed at her daughter. “And I want you to hear what I’m about to say very carefully, because I’m going to say it once and then act like I never said it, because I don’t entirely believe in what I’m agreeing to right now.”

  “Agreeing to?” Hannah made that I don’t understand face at her mom.

  “Yep, agreeing to. Now, just for today, I’m allowing you to put that device in your bag. But, listen, listen, and… listen carefully. Every word, okay? It doesn’t come out during class, do you understand? It doesn’t come out during lunch unless you’re eating and not talking to it at the same time. It doesn’t leave your possession, it doesn’t get sat on, and it doesn’t get anywhere near Maddy Law, who I have it on good authority broke Julia Renfro’s graphing calculator last spring for reasons no one has fully explained.” Paige picked up her own bag from the hook. “If your dad responds, you listen to the message. You don’t play it out loud in the hallway. You don’t show it to anyone. You listen to it, you feel whatever you feel, and then you put it away.”

  Hannah nodded, very serious-like. “I will, mom.”

  “Good.” Paige opened the front door. Morning air spilled in, cool and smelling of wet grass. “Now go be nine somewhere that isn’t my kitchen.”

  Hannah stepped outside. Paige followed, pulling the door shut behind her.

  The HomeLink sat in the front pocket of Hannah’s backpack, zipped in, its screen dark. Waiting.