Did she make a mistake letting Hannah take the HomeLink to school? Probably. Almost certainly, actually. But maybe when Hannah was thirty and Paige was old and slightly unbearable, her daughter would remember the morning her mom did something that made her feel like the world wasn’t entirely out of her control. That counted for something.

  Paige hoped.

  Her office sat in the northeast corner of the warehouse, a glass-walled box elevated just enough above the main floor to see everything happening below without being part of it. Small desk, two holomonitors, a plant she kept alive mostly out of stubbornness, and a view of Portland’s Pearl District through the one window facing the street. The Pacific Climate Research Collective occupied the whole building, thirty-one staff, a federal sub-contract getting renewed every three years in language so dense it required its own translator, and a mission statement basically amounting to: figure out where Earth is headed before it’s too late to matter.

  And the word “collective” in the title. What was that about? A nest of ants. Was she of the ant mind, or in a bee’s case, the hive mind? Just a drone?

  She pushed the thought out of her head, like she did on the daily.

  Her title was Senior Atmospheric Research Lead. In practice, that meant she built the models, ran the data, and then explained the data to people who made policy decisions with the confidence of people who hadn’t read the data. Roger Flagg, her direct superior, Director of Federal Research Partnerships, was one of those people. Not a bad man. Smart enough, which was to say he understood structure and process and very little else. He made her feel approximately two feet tall in meetings without ever saying anything technically wrong, which was the more sophisticated version of condescension and therefore harder to argue with.

  He passed her office now, slowing and glancing through the glass at her holoscreens. She gave him a small wave. He nodded and moved on.

  She’d call him Roger Dodger on her way out later. He hated it. She’d do it anyway.

  She couldn’t get the article out of her head. Minor geological anomaly reported near Olympus Mons extraction zone. She’d flagged it at breakfast and told herself it was probably nothing and then thought about it for the entire forty-minute commute, which suggested her brain had already made up its mind and hadn’t told the rest of her yet.

  She tapped her datapad and pulled up MARCO.

  Mars Atmospheric and Radiometric Comparative Observatory. She’d built it two years ago with her team, a modeling application pulling live atmospheric data from seventeen sensor arrays across Mars and laid it against Earth’s own historical climate record. It was the institute’s primary research tool, cleared for federal use, shared with partner universities in six countries. The interface bloomed up from her desk in a slow spread of holographic light, data columns and model overlays filling the air above her desktop.

  She navigated to the Olympus Mons region data.

  The comparative climate models loaded. Earth’s Permian-Triassic boundary event on the left axis, Mars’s own atmospheric collapse sequence on the right. Her team used the overlap between them to build predictive curves, places where the two trajectories matched closely enough to be useful. The models ran clean. They always ran clean.

  She pulled up the Olympus sector specifically and ran the last seventy-two hours of atmospheric data against her baseline.

  There.

  She leaned forward.

  A localized disturbance in the electromagnetic field readings, low frequency, consistent. Not the scattered noise of a dust event. Not the signature of the base’s own transmitter array. Those she knew cold. This was different. Narrower. More deliberate, almost, though she wouldn’t put that word in a report. EM activity at that frequency and that location didn’t come from geological settling. Geological events spiked and dropped. They didn’t hold a steady output for… she checked the timestamp… going on a few hours now.

  Something was putting out a signal, and the news, at least the article she read, picked it up quickly. Reported it. Maybe journalists, at least those journalists, weren’t as dull as she thought. Well, in the sense of getting this information out quickly. Good on them.

  She pulled the data window wider and checked the surrounding sensor readings. Outside her office, someone laughed loudly down on the main floor, a rolling, too-big laugh bouncing off the warehouse ceiling. Keyboards. Someone’s chair rolling across concrete.

  She looked back at the model.

  The article had called it a geological anomaly. Which was technically accurate the way calling a hurricane some wind was technically accurate. These journalists weren’t wrong, exactly. They just described the shape of the thing without knowing what was inside it. Geological anomalies happened on Mars constantly. The planet was old and unsettled and full of them.

  This was not that.

  The EM signature had a point of origin. MARCO was placing it at approximately 2.3 kilometers below the surface, which ruled out atmospheric interference and ruled out surface-level equipment malfunction, and left a very short list of explanations, none of which were nothing.

  Near Olympus Mons. Near Logan’s hab unit.

  She sat back.

  Knowing Logan, he’d already found it. That man couldn’t leave a question alone. She used to think that was the problem, that he was all work and not anything else, but that wasn’t entirely fair. She had plenty of play in her. Too much, probably, by his measure. Too loud, too scattered, too many directions at once, and he’d never quite figured out what to do with that. She’d never quite figured out how to shrink it down for him. Twelve years of two people who genuinely liked each other trying to sand down their edges enough to fit, and neither of them ever fully managing it. A fling that turned into a pregnancy that turned into doing “the right thing” with marriage, which, in hindsight, was maybe the wrongest thing either of them had ever done, though Hannah was very much not included in that assessment. Hannah was the one part of the whole arrangement working out exactly right.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  She tapped her teeth with her fingertips. Ten times. Then stopped because she’d been trying to break that habit for years.

  The EM signature was consistent in a way that natural sources weren’t. Natural sources decayed, fluctuated, responded to environmental changes. This had been steady for two hours through a wind shear event and a fourteen-degree temperature swing. Steady meant either a machine or something behaving like one.

  Neither of those answers was on the list of things that were supposed to be 2.3 kilometers under the Martian surface. So, whatever was broadcasting, it wasn't the surface layer. It was underneath it.

  She grabbed her datapad. The hologram collapsed inward, pixels pulling back to a single bright point above her desk before winking out.

  She tapped the vidcom, a slim slate panel mounted flush to her desk.

  Audio only.

  “Hey Paige.”

  “Roger, I need you to see something. Bring Lance and Karla.”

  A hesitation. Two seconds but it said considerably more. “You know, most people ask their supervisors things. Gently. With some kind of preamble.” His voice was flat, like a feigned patience. “I’ll be there when I’m there.”

  “Not your there. My there, please.”

  “Of course. Happy to rearrange my afternoon for a data point.” Another hesitation. “I’ll be right over, Paige.”

  She smiled at the panel. Couldn’t help it.

  “Roger Dodger.”

  Click.

  She shrugged, just like Hannah shrugged, which she’d noticed recently and wasn’t sure how to feel about. “He took that well.”

  Five minutes later a blonde, a redhead, and a bald guy walked into her office. It wasn’t a joke, but her brain filed it away as one anyway, for later, for someone who would appreciate it. Her best friend would appreciate it. She made a mental note.

  Joking aside, she straightened in her seat.

  She walked them through it. The MARCO data, the EM signature, the eleven-hour consistency, the frequency range, what it ruled out and what it didn’t. When she finished, Karla, the redhead, had claimed the only seat in the office when Paige stood, which was Paige’s own chair, and she swiveled to face the room with a pen pressed to her lips like she was solving a crossword.

  “This is too localized and too sustained to be background noise,” Karla said. “Atmospheric interference scatters. It doesn’t hold a point source reading for two and a half hours through a wind shear event. Whatever this is, it has an origin.”

  Roger crossed his arms. “Could still be dust interference. It’s not uncommon, particularly in the Olympus region. High-silica particulate in suspension affects magnetometer calibration in ways that can look like a stable signal on older array hardware. We saw it in the Hellas Basin readings. Spent three weeks chasing what turned out to be a calibration artifact compounded by a regional storm. It cost us a full reporting cycle.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I wouldn’t want us getting ahead of ourselves on incomplete data.”

  Lance had been leaning against the wall with his arms loose at his sides, and he gave Roger a sideways look. The type of look you stopped hiding after year three of working for someone. He straightened up.

  “With respect, sir, the Hellas readings were coming off the old Santiana-2 array, and those sensors hadn’t been recalibrated in fourteen months. MARCO’s pulling from the updated network. Different hardware, different error profile.” He had a slight Georgia curl on the edges of his words, unhurried, as if he had all day to be right. “I’d want to look at the harmonic structure before I called it dust. Natural interference tends to drift. This one isn’t drifting.”

  Roger looked at Lance exactly how he always looked at Lance. As if Lance was just a useful appliance.

  “Thank you, Paige, for bringing this to our attention,” Roger said, and turned toward the door as if the matter had been discussed heavily enough and filed away. “We’ll leave that up to you. It’s your fish, your catch. Run it down, document what you find, and loop me in before you put anything formal on paper.” He adjusted his jacket. “And let’s not be calling anyone outside this building until we know what we actually have. Professional courtesy.”

  He walked out.

  Lance was last to follow. He stopped at the door and turned back, and he said it quietly, like it wasn’t for anyone else. “Good catch, Paige. Genuinely.” Then he was gone.

  She flagged the anomaly in MARCO. Tagged it, labeled it, dropped a priority marker on the dataset so the system would alert her to any change in the signal. Then she closed the application and the hologram pulled back to nothing.

  She sat down.

  Her chair was still warm from Karla.

  She put her elbows on the desk and looked at the dark space above it where the data had been. Two and a half hours of a signal that matched nothing in her geological database. Not a seismic event, not a volcanic remnant, not an atmospheric artifact. She had three hundred and fourteen comparable events catalogued going back nineteen years of Mars observation data.

  This didn’t match any of them.

  Not even close.

  The vidcom lit up before she’d finished the thought. A stream of light rose from the panel, pixelated outward, and resolved into a woman with her hair pulled tight in a bun at the back of her head, deep lines carved around her mouth and eyes.

  “Mrs. Wells-Writ?”

  “That’s me. Kinda. Call me Mrs. Writ or, no, actually, just call me Paige.”

  “Very well.” The woman’s expression suggested she’d file that under unnecessary informality and move on. “This is Mrs. Reese, from Gladstone Middle School. I’m the assistant principal. I’m calling because Hannah had an episode this afternoon. Quite unusual for her.”

  Paige sat up straighter. “What kind of episode?”

  “There was an incident with another student. A boy took issue with Hannah’s use of the HomeLink device during free period. He felt she was monopolizing a shared resource and made his feelings known.” Mrs. Reese paused as if the next part was going to be complicated. “There was a scuffle.”

  “Like, what kind of scuffle?”

  “Your daughter gave him a black eye and a bloody nose.”

  Paige’s mouth opened. Nothing came out for a second. “Oh, dear.” She was already reaching for her bag. “I’ll be right there.”

  “There’s another thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “While waiting in the principle’s office, she started drawing and became unresponsive.”

  “She likes to draw. Is there a problem with that?”

  There was a pause. “She’s rocking back and forth, humming while drawing, and acting as if she was in a different world. I waved my hand in front of her face. No reaction.”

  That was odder than odd. “Okay. I’m leaving now.”

  She stood up, pushed her chair back, and grabbed her jacket off the hook by the door.

  Behind her, on the desk, the MARCO alert chimed once.

  She almost didn’t hear it.

  She turned back. The panel had lit up on its own, the anomaly flag she’d set pulling a single line of text across the screen.

  SIGNAL VARIANCE DETECTED. EM OUTPUT INCREASE: 340%. ORIGIN DEPTH: REVISED. PREVIOUS: 2.3KM. CURRENT:

  The panel flickered.

  Then the reading jumped again before she could finish reading it.