Roger served himself two razor-thin slices of steak-colored protein and a few meager spoonfuls of instant potatoes. There were fresh frozen peas and even a cheesecake for desert. This was a gourmet experience for Mars, but Roger only picked at his food.

Hoshi shook a finger at him. "You're insulting our table. Eat, eat." She shoveled peas onto his plate. He smiled, but he didn't look like he was going to touch them.

"We're shipping out tomorrow," he said. "The network swore they'd have hamburgers and fries waiting for me on the ship. I'm saving room." He poked the peas with his fork and cocked his head at Althea. "Well?"

Althea put a piece of protein into her mouth without looking at it. It tasted fine, but on the plate it had the texture of soggy bread. "Well what?" she said, distracted momentarily by the thought of hamburgers.

"Well," said Roger with exaggerated patience. "What about the bone?"

Althea just managed to swallow without choking. "The what?"

Roger rolled his eyes. "The finger bone." He jerked a thumb at the dig site. "It's why you came here, right?"

Althea glared at Hoshi.

"Roger found out from one of the labs," said Hoshi. "I told him not to say anything until you'd had time to study it."

Roger spread his hands in a placating gesture. "Everyone knows you found something in the ruins. There's all kinds of speculation. Debris from a UFO? An underground city? Live Martians? I've heard all sorts of things, Professor Mendez. It's about time to spill the beans." He gave her a big TV grin.

"No," said Althea flatly.

Hoshi leaned forward and lowered her voice. "The secrecy is hurting us. The longer we wait to release the information, the more trouble I'll have getting an extension on the OSA grant." She meant the Oxford School of Antiquities, which Althea had convinced to pay for Hoshi's banishment.

Althea opened her mouth in amazement. "You haven't told them about this?"

"Althea, I was waiting for you."

The expression in her eyes was distinct this time. It was self-doubt.

Althea looked down and found her hands clenching the arms of her chair. If Hoshi had gone boldly forth and announced the bone as a genuine find—like she might have when Elliot was alive—the archaeological community would have laughed her off the pages of every professional magazine. The academics at Oxford alone would have been merciless. But if Althea was the one to make the announcement, her reputation would protect her. She was rock-solid, conservative, respectable, without any self-indulgent flashes of fame.

Althea looked up at Hoshi again. The only change was the exhaustion in her face. If there was a game going on here, Hoshi was too worn down to play anymore. For a second, Althea felt a profound gratitude toward her former student, her understanding of the academic hierarchy and her willingness to submit to it for the greater advancement of the field. Althea felt her own cheeks flush. She'd won. The bone was real. It was hers.

She put her hands in her lap and turned to Roger. "I'll discuss the bone with you, but I want to see what you plan to broadcast, and I want full editorial purview. Understand?"

"Whatever you say, Professor Mendez." He stood up to leave. "I'll tell my boys we'll be staying a few more days."

She'd done her post-graduate work at Princeton, where her sponsoring professor, Canton Ramsey, was younger than Elliot, with more to prove. Rumors about him said that he stole his candidates' research, cultivated favorites, then dumped them. It didn't pay to be too original because no matter how supportive he acted, Canton was, bottom line, a thief. Althea remembered a defining conversation with a bitter post-doc in the back of a coffee shop six months before her dissertation was due. How did she think Ramsey got to be chair of such a prestigious institution? Honest research? Original papers? The post-doc let out a skeptical laugh and hunched over his coffee. That wasn't the way the real academic world worked. Not at all.

And so, by the time Althea was ready to present her dissertation, it was a masterpiece of sand-bagging—not like Hoshi, who went all out, without any fear of plagiarizing profs. If Hoshi treated her dissertation like opening a bottle of champagne, Althea's was plain tap water. Her moderate conclusions shed only a newish light on research already picked over by many others. Her paper lacked invention, but it was also rock-solid and worthy of the degree. In the end, it would have looked peculiar if her work hadn't produced a PhD. In the end, it was one of the reasons she thought Elliot had hired her.

Now, on Mars, she sat shivering at her desk despite the hot air blowing down from the ceiling, trying to imagine her department and every student she'd ever taught watching CNN as she held up Hoshi's un-conservative, barely documented, utterly inventive finger bone, knowing exactly what she had to lose.

The next afternoon, Roger sat down with Althea, the bone, her laptop, and, against her better judgment, a camera.

He looked at the bone carefully but didn't touch it. "How old is it?"

The camera was about as big as Althea's two fists, silent as it recorded their conversation, but its presence in the room was enormous. "Between three and four thousand years." Her mouth was dry. The ends of her fingers were cold, and her feet were freezing. "Its DNA originates in the British Isles."

Roger took a palm reference out of his pocket—it was stamped with a blue CNN logo—tapped the screen and studied the results. "Neolithic? That would more or less coincide with the construction of Stonehenge."

She put her cold fingers between her knees. "Mr. Dodd, I'm not here to entertain any stupid speculations. I'm here to tell you what this is, where we found it, and what it seems—seems—to indicate. But I'm not going to talk about Chariots of the Gods or any other idiocy. Am I making myself clear?"

Roger, who had been televised interviewing far bitchier authorities, just nodded. He leaned over the bone. "Can I touch it?"

"Carefully."

He picked it up between his thumb and forefinger and turned so the camera could have a good look at it.

"Do you know if this is from a man or a woman?"

"We don't. There's not enough of a skeleton to tell. You need a hip, or a jaw, or at least part of a leg." In his hands, the finger bone was tiny, and for the first time, she wondered if it could have belonged to a child. Roger turned the bone gently but Althea tensed. Kidnapped Neolithic children on Mars, probably chopped into little pieces and eaten by Martians in lost cities. She could hear it now.

Roger put the bone back on the desk and turned to her with warm, undemanding brown eyes. There was nothing in his face that resembled the predatory questions of her doctoral inquisitors. He was anything but threatening. His expression simply said Explain this to me.

She turned to her laptop and brought up the site map. "Let's start here."

He let her talk, never interrupting except to clarify some point. He never led her with the kind of moronic questions she considered typical of the press and never once speculated about abducted Neolithic children. She showed him the minimum—where the bone had been found, when, how, and by whom. She talked about its veracity but the impossibility of using one fragment to date an entire site. "It could be that these foundations are three to four thousand years old," she said, "but without native organic material to use for carbon dating, there's no way to place these ruins in a time line with our own history."

"So they could be much older than the bone itself," said Roger.

"Much older," said Althea. "We just have no way to know."

"And no other ruins have been found on Mars?"

"Not yet. But it's a big planet, and we're constantly expanding our survey."

"So there's reason to believe that civilization existed elsewhere on the planet, not just in this small enclave."

"It's unlikely that this is the only place where there are signs of an organized community. Mars has water, and on Earth at least, where there's water there's life."

He nodded with enthusiasm, and she instantly regretted what she'd just said, even if it was true. Next he'd be asking her about the Martians. Instead he smiled and leaned back in his chair. "That's a good place to end it, Professor Mendez, unless there's something you want to add."

She shook her head. "It's more than enough."

He retrieved the camera, and she held out her hand for the disk. "I want to see that before it goes anywhere."

He glanced at her computer. "The camera runs on an industry standard platform. I'll have to format it so you can run it."

She wasn't sure she believed that. "I don't want it to leave the camp." She didn't want him to have a copy, but to say so sounded even more paranoid.

"It won't." He stood up and stretched. "You were great. You have a good voice for broadcast, and I think you'll come across as knowledgeable but not scary knowledgeable, know what I mean?" He yawned. "Ever thought about consulting for a news program? You could make a few bucks."

She shook her head.

He put the disk in his pocket. "I'll send someone back with it. Mark anything you don't want aired and give it to me tomorrow. Okay?"

"Okay."

The door thumped shut behind him, and the room was finally quiet. Althea let her breath out and slumped in the chair.

Maybe she would erase everything.

"Did Roger copy this thing?"

"I don't know, ma'am." The intern cringed. "I really don't. But the original can't run on your system, so he probably did."

"Get out of here."

"Yes, ma'am." The young man bolted for the door.

She worked on it all night, cutting here, inserting there, making notes for Roger on parts of the interview she thought needed to be reshot. She closed her eyes for a minute, and when she opened them, it was daylight and Hoshi was standing over her, shaking her shoulder. She was dressed in a dusty pressure suit, her rebreather hanging by its straps.

"Wake up, Althea," she said. "We've found something."

Jeff uncurled himself with a groan and stood stiffly. "I can't feel my feet."

"Come out," said Hoshi. "Let me. Or …?" She looked at Althea with a strange expression. "Would you? Like to do the honors?"

Althea could see the corner of something down there. It was white, stained reddish by the mud, straight, like the edge of something. Maybe a jawbone. She helped Jeff out of the hole and climbed down. The dental pick was lying at the corner of the hole, and she started scraping with it, gently. Icy slush oozed under her boots as she picked out the entire edge of the object. It wasn't a bone. It was something manufactured, ruler-straight with square corners. It was coated in something like a thin plastic, but that hadn't kept it from getting soggy. Liquid water was seeping into it as she released it from the ice, making it soggy, like paper.

"We have to seal it as soon as we get it out." Her heart was pounding. She would have felt like she was dreaming except that her feet were so cold. "Is somebody taping this?"

"I am," said Hoshi.

Althea made an undercut with the pick. She could almost get her fingers around it. The thing was maybe fifteen centimeters long and the thickness of her little finger. She smoothed red mud away from the white edge—there were distinct marks on it. She thought of the distant obelisk on Neznaiyu and almost laughed. Who needed to spend twenty-five years sleeping on a spaceship? She jiggled the edge of the object. It was loose enough to pull.

"I'm going to remove it now," said Althea. "Hoshi, are you sure the camera's on?"

"Absolutely."

Althea pulled. Her gloves slipped. She got a better grip on it and eased it from the mud. Even as she did, she realized she was holding something familiar, out of place and out of context. Even as she pulled it out of the Martian mud she understood that there should have been more people to witness this event. Her mind made the connections with slow precision as she pulled the book out of the mud.

It was a hardcover, a children's book, and the title was just legible through a half-frozen slick of red mud. Robinson Crusoe on Mars.

Althea stood up in the hole, laid the book on the top edge, and climbed out. Both Jeff and Hoshi squatted silently on the other side, faces half hidden inside their helmets.

Althea looked around the dig site. The three of them were the only ones outside. The tractor, which was usually parked by Hoshi's boxcar, was nowhere in sight.

"Where is everyone?" demanded Althea.

"They went to Alba Fossae," said Hoshi. "I told them they could have the weekend off."

"Alba?" Hours away. No witnesses. This was a private hoax. "Where's Roger?" she asked, already knowing the answer.

"They all left together," said Jeff.

"With the disk with the interview on it, right?" panted Althea. "How many more fakes did you plant around here?" She waved her arms at the rest of the site. "Is any of this real?"

"The site's real." Hoshi picked up the book and wiped the cover. "Obviously this isn't."

Althea wondered for the first time if the two of them were lovers. That would explain Jeff's complicity in Hoshi's single-minded revenges, but not Roger's. Was she sleeping with all of them? Had she convinced them that Althea was so evil that she needed to be lied to by everyone? Althea looked down into the hole again, trying to see the consequences of this tape, of Roger's facetious interview, without allowing herself to feel anything.

"What do you want, Hoshi?" Althea said finally.

"I want you out of my way."

"How far out of your way?"

Hoshi aimed a thumb at the Martian sky. "I'd say about four-point-three light-years."

"Neznaiyu?" The wind came and kicked dust over her suit. Grit rushed past her faceplate. "I'll go back to Oxford. You'll never hear from me again."

Hoshi shook her head. "We can't be in the same time zone, so to speak. The minute you get home, the School of Antiquities'll start asking for details. I know you too well."

"You're afraid I'll tell everyone the truth about all this bullshit."

Hoshi shook her head. "You'll embarrass yourself trying. You'll have wild accusations and no proof. On the other hand …" She tapped the camera. Even in the framing shadow of the helmet and rebreather, her eyes were sharp, vindictive. "You look like you'd do anything to advance your career."

"I don't need to do anything to advance my career!"

"I know," said Hoshi blandly. "You did it all for me."

Althea lunged to her feet, but Jeff stepped between them.

"Apply for the Neznaiyu team," said Jeff. "It'd be something real."

"Then you should go," she snapped, and bit back the rest of what she wanted to say.

"Go inside," said Hoshi.

"And do what?" said Althea. "Pack my things?"

"That," said Hoshi, "and call Oxford. Tell them you're going to Neznaiyu with the Academy of Sciences team and you're recommending me as Chair in your absence."

Althea snorted. "What if the Academy isn't interested in me?"

"Oh, they are," said Hoshi. "I've already told them to expect your call."

How long had she been planning this? Althea turned, too quickly in the damned low gravity, and nearly twisted her ankle. She limped back to her boxcar quarters and stripped off her suit. The mirror over the sink showed her so tight across the mouth that her lips were barely visible. She walked around the room twice and then sat down at the desk. She felt like getting into bed and pulling the covers over her head until this nightmare was over.

Instead she turned on her laptop and accessed the communications node at Alba Fossae. She pulled up a blank email and slowly, angrily, addressed it to the Department of Antiquities at Oxford.

She bent her elbows and her knees. Everything hurt, and her feet felt just exactly like they'd been asleep for a quarter of a century. She groaned and made herself sit up.

"Are you feeling dizzy or nauseous?" said Salvia. "Are you in any pain?"

She shook her head and looked around. The rest of the sleep units were open and empty. Everyone else was probably already awake and hard at work. She'd met the rest of the crew briefly before they'd all lapsed into unconsciousness—fifty-seven bright young things who were just too, too happy to be sent into oblivion. She'd felt their irritating enthusiasm even in her coldest, deepest sleep.

Salvia gave her a water bottle with a pink drinking tube. She took it with blunt, clumsy hands. He was her age, anyway, and that was a relief. "Have we landed?"

"Not for another six weeks." Salvia turned off the scanner, got up, and offered her a hand. "Everybody's got gravity rehab, and then there's final logistics and landing prep."

She stood unsteadily. Gravity rehab didn't sound so hard, but Althea couldn't imagine how she was supposed to participate in final logistics and landing prep. She could go over the footage the robots had taken of the archaeological site again—there were only thirty hours of it, after all—but there wasn't much else to do. Despite digital enhancements and extreme close-ups, it was impossible to make out the lettering on the obelisk. The site was still a mystery, too, so overgrown that all she could see were the tops of irregular stone walls. The robots had been instructed to observe, not to dig, so the place would be exactly the same when she got there. She tottered a little, and Salvia caught her arm.

"Come on," he said. "I'll buy you a cup of coffee." He gave her a surprisingly boyish grin, obviously putting all the charm he had into it. "Or if you prefer, I could prescribe a wake-up shot."

It took her a minute to realize he was talking about booze. "Listen, Dr. Salvia …"

"Don," he said. "Everyone calls me Dr. Don."

"Then listen, Dr. Don," she said. "I'm not in the habit of—of—" She waved vaguely at the empty cold-sleep units and abruptly knew she didn't have the energy to fight this engineered fate. Not yet anyway. She rubbed her eyes. "What the hell."

First, gravity rehab was hard. Not for anyone else. Just her. The bright young things were disgustingly fit and stretched and bent and jumped and twisted, smiling, uncomplaining, and were never, as far as Althea could tell, sore the next day.

Second, it turned out that the Academy of Sciences had designed the Neznaiyan base without any input from a field archaeologist. Instead of her own lab, Althea was assigned a corner of the tectonics unit, which didn't make anyone happy.

Third, the head of the team, Dr. Waylon Nelson, finally told her that although she would have assistants for her excavations, they weren't going to be human assistants. They were the robots which had been sent to Nez for the initial survey fifty years ago. "I'm sure they still work," said Waylon.

Her only really positive discovery was that Dr. Don had enough "medicinal" hooch to last for years, even if he shared.

Althea tightened her seatbelt. It was cold on the shuttle, although that didn't seem to bother anyone else. Don was beside her in the window seat, his nose pressed against the glass, fogging it. "God, it's gorgeous!" he said for the fifth time.

The pilot, who was in plain sight and easy earshot, stood up and bellowed over the excited racket. "I want everyone tied down, goddamn it!"

That dampened the enthusiasm, but not much. The oceanographers settled into their seats, still chirping as the lights went off in the cabin. The shuttle detached itself from the ship with a lurch and began to fall.

First it seemed slow and strangely leisurely. Then high clouds iced the windows. Thin air roared against the shuttle's skin as it plunged into the upper layers of atmosphere. A sudden mist obscured everything and turned the cabin even darker. Althea heard one of the zoologists across the aisle suck a breath in through his teeth. The shuttle fell though the clouds like a cannonball and then broke out into gentle sunlight. The untouched continents revealed themselves below. Lush greens and gleaming lakes. Iridescent snow on high mountains. White beaches beside transparent oceans. It looked like the beginning of the world.

Dr. Don turned to Althea with tears in his eyes. At a different time in her life, she might have laughed at him. Instead, she gave him a clumsy pat on the arm. Despite Hoshi's revenges and her own greedy mistakes, despite the fact that she was surrounded by overly enthused young people, maybe this lovely planet was where she was supposed to be.

The residence building had also become a point of interest for the local wildlife, and it was a mistake to leave the doors open even for a few minutes. Her first day on Nez, Althea found a scaly, mouse-sized creature regarding her gravely from the windowsill as she threw trowels, brushes, dental picks, and a camera into her daypack. The zoological template for vertebrates seemed to be six-legged and vaguely reptilian. She opened the window and shooed it out. The thing scurried away, clinging to the outside wall like a gecko. Althea shut the window and checked the rest of the room. So far, the largest lizard anyone had seen was about the size of a house cat. Most of the ground creatures were able to rear up and use their front limbs in an arm-like manner. Some even had a sort of opposable thumb. None of them seemed to be dangerous. The bright young biologists referred to them broadly as "Rugby-Shirt Lizards," which Althea thought was inane.

Don knocked on the door and poked his head in. "I thought you were already down at the site."

"I'm on my way." He was going to ask to come along. She wasn't sure she wanted that. She needed time to study the obelisk. She needed to see exactly how to grid it, how to approach it, and how to make it into her redemption.

"Want company?" Don cocked his head. Sun from the window caught in his hair, showing blond and silvery gray.

She fumbled with the zipper on the pack. "Don't you have a hospital to put together?"

"Should I take that as a no?"

Successful redemption might require a witness. She zipped the pack and swung it over her shoulder. "Okay," she said. "Okay. But you can't touch anything."

They walked single file, Althea leading in silence until the forest thinned and Don pointed ahead into the brightening shade. "Aren't those your little metal helpers?"

They were. Her robotic assistants had parked themselves in a dapple of sunlight at the edge of the site they'd cleared. They were knee-high things with an antique armored look, like prehistoric insects with treads. They were coated with bits of freshly cut brush.

"Looks like they just mowed," said Don.

Althea didn't say anything. She stepped past him and the robots into the breezy, sun-washed clearing and shaded her eyes. The foundations were off to the right, emerging from a stubble of leaves and vines. The ruined walls were about waist-high, uneven but unmistakably built. Althea took another step. "Where the hell's the obelisk?"

Don came up beside her, crunching in the shorn brush. He pointed to the left. "Is that it?"

The obelisk's pointed white top stuck up out of a shaggy, obscuring mass of olive-colored brush that looked like long-needled pine. The robots had shredded everything around it, leaving swaths of dead vegetation, but they hadn't cleared the object itself since they'd first found it more than half a century ago. Althea picked her way toward it, sweating under her breasts. The obelisk had a tilt to it, she noticed. That hadn't been obvious in the videos. It wasn't in the middle of the site either, like Captain Rowanoake had said. It was off to the side of the foundations. And there was something wrong with its size.

"Why is it so short?" She realized she was clenching her teeth.

"The robots are short," said Don. He was right behind her. "They were looking up at it."

So much for its monumentality. It was no taller than she was. Shorter, actually. It was no taller that Hoshi. But that didn't matter. It was the writing that was important. She shoved through the dry, prickly vines, dragging stickers and brambles in the cuffs of her pants. She pushed her hands into her gloves and picked at the weedy growth at the base of the obelisk. Tiny white flowers—they looked like flowers anyway—festooned the three-sided column. It was so disappointingly small, she could have put her arms all the way around it. And that tilt. The vines were obviously dragging it loose from its foundation. She grabbed a fistful of woody stems and gently pulled them away.

"It looks like it's ready to fall over," said Don. He put his hands out, just in case.

"Don't touch anything!"

He put his hands in his pockets and stood there, silent, as she peeled away the olive-colored needles and miniscule blossoms that didn't have a smell. Where was the writing? She dropped her pack and pulled out a scraper. Carefully, with her tongue between her teeth, she cut away the needled vines and flowers from a good square foot of surface. The obelisk was coated with something like white plaster. It had a texture. It had marks. But they were random, like the stuff had been put on with a putty knife. Althea wiped sweat out of her eyes and crouched down to robot-level under the bright noon sky, down to the robot-level point-of-view of the tapes she'd watched so many, many times. Closer to the ground, the random marks seemed closer together and more regular, but only because whoever had coated the obelisk had worked methodically, smoothing and slapping, smoothing and slapping. The shadows and root trails from the plants added a little more texture, more mystery. But the bottom line was, there was no writing.

Althea stood up, hot and unsteady. Don peered at her with real concern. She turned away, afraid she'd start to cry right in front of him.

"What's the matter?" he said.

"I," she said and had to take a breath. "I want to look at the rest of the site." Another breath. "By myself."

He didn't say anything. When she had enough control to look back, he was gone.

Althea stood at the edge of a tumbledown stone wall, her hands pricked with thorns and her clothes soaked with sweat. What did all this add up to? A race of aliens capable of interplanetary travel who couldn't build themselves a decent house? Intelligent creatures who left tantalizing signs of civilization—but no artifacts? She'd stared into the darkening forest for any revelation and asked herself the next question. How much had Hoshi known about this? Roger Dodd had certainly shown her the tapes from Nez. Had she recognized the building styles through the weeds? Had she seen through the distorting angles of the robot view of the obelisk? Had she known there was nothing new here? Had she planned not so much an exile, but a one-way trip to a perfect kind of hell?

Althea took her gloves off, put her sweaty face in her sweaty hands, and let herself sob until nightfall.

Althea avoided Don as well as she could, retreating to the ruins each morning with her antique, retooled robots. While they cleared brush in a hundred-meter radius of the Obelisk, she gridded and numbered the site. It didn't take long to discover that the site was exactly the same as the one on Mars, right down to the corner in grid 34L. Althea dug a small test-trench there, stomach churning, but there was no finger bone. She sent a sample of the coating over the obelisk to the chemical-analysis crew for testing and found that it was just plain plaster. It could have been made from local calcium carbonate. Then again, it could have been made in a factory in Delaware. She sent a request to the orbiting transport to run subterranean scans of the site and the surrounding three hundred kilometers, but she felt like she already knew the answers and she was right. There was no sign of midden, and no graveyard. She gave the orbiting transport the long-term job of scanning the entire planet for geologic anomalies that might indicate other building sites, but she knew there was nothing else out there.

When she stood at the edge of the woods with her camera in hand, she found she couldn't make herself take the pictures she was required to send back to the Office of the Chair of Archaeology at Oxford. For one short second, she understood exactly how Hoshi must have felt in her freezing exile on Mars, dutifully digging and recording. For one short second, Althea felt a pang of sympathy. It vanished almost immediately. Hoshi had been close enough to home to make plans and set them in motion. There was no such option here. Althea put the camera into her pack without even taking the lens cap off. It would be years before anyone knew what she'd found—or not found—here. There was no rush to send proof of her failures. There was no need to think about Hoshi at all, if she could help it, but the truth was, she thought about Hoshi almost all the time.

"Altheee-a …"

She sat up straight in the lawn chair, jerked out of her half-nap. The cool evening breeze was just starting to rise. Soon the downy lizards would climb to the tops of the trees and begin to sing, claiming their section of night-blooming forest and the nectar that dripped from the flowers after dark.

She shot to her feet and looked around in a sudden panic. The robots had finished clearing the brush weeks ago, and the site was trimmed and mowed. Today all they were doing was burnishing the bare dirt into attractive pathways. It would be obvious to anyone that she was fully stuck, faking any progress. Don appeared at the edge of the woods and smiled and waved. Althea stood where she was, feeling criminal, breathless and false.

He meandered over and squinted at the robots rolling back and forth. "What're they doing?"

She wanted to lie. He wouldn't know the difference. Her mouth was too dry to say anything. She shrugged instead and sat on the lawn chair.

He plopped down beside her and watched the robots for a while longer. "Correct me if I'm wrong," said Don, "but isn't this the most exciting find of the millennium?"

"Oh," she said, "definitely."

He rubbed his hands on his knees. He was wearing shorts these days, and his legs and arms were tanned to golden brown. "When're you going to tell me what's going on out here, Althea?"

"Nothing's going on."

"That's what I mean," he said. "It's the most exciting find of the millennium. You've got the whole thing to yourself. You're the luckiest woman in the galaxy, but you're not happy."

Her lower lip started to shiver, and she covered her mouth with both hands. She felt the whole stupid story that went from Oxford to Mars welling up in her throat. The shame of it made her eyes feel scratchy. He put an arm around her, and she let the truth spill out—Mars, Hoshi, her chair at Oxford—and the finger bone. When she was finished, it was dark, and the flowers were wide open. The night wind carried the briny scent of the forest, and lizards sang and creaked, chirped and whistled their desires. Don ruffled her hair and kissed her under the indigo, alien sky.

When he told her none of it mattered, she almost believed him.