I was a month into the Endangered Species Initiative when my case manager decided I was acclimated enough to Martian society to start working. When she told me what the job was, I almost told her to keep it. Laboratory Mechanics Specialist—a glorified repair technician. But money was tight. I’d been sending most of the ESI stipend back to Earth for Mama. Being the second human on Mars in five hundred years had its perks; so far, I’d been able to survive on food from my curious neighbors who’d wave to me through the glass of the Biosphere and leave offerings outside the airlock like I was a stray cat. I’d tasted all the Martian staples: potato and protein paste stew, tofu tacos made with cricket flour tortillas, and so many bags of candied grasshoppers. I had enough cricket bread to outlast an apocalypse. But their generosity was running out, and I needed to eat.

I called Mama on the holo to tell her about the job. I paced the cramped studio apartment the ESI paid for in a frenzy. I kept hitting my head on the doorways because I was too tall for the buildings here, even the ones designed to mimic Earth.

Mama’s hologram flickered in the dim light. There were no windows. The signal was terrible, so Mama’s figure glitched like a reflection caught in a river rapid. My brain filled in the details: the stern lines of her face, that critical glare, those lips pursed for argument, her hair cropped in short, contained curls.

“I feel like a Neanderthal,” I said as I rubbed my bruised forehead.

Mama crossed her arms, refusing to spare me any sympathy. “It’s only natural to feel a little out of place.” Her voice crackled out the apartment speakers, so I was submerged in the sound. That was another thing that made me a dinosaur here; every Martian had implants in their heads, so they didn’t need to use external computers or phones. Back on Earth, we were still trying to standardize interplanetary communications. If the ESI wasn’t footing the bill, Mama and I wouldn’t even be able to communicate.

“That’s the point, Mama,” I said. “I’m the best robotics engineer on Earth, and they’ve got me fixing automatic doors.”

“You may have been the best here, but you’re one in three billion there. Thank the Ancients they gave you anything.”

My predecessor—we dared not speak her name—the first human in the ESI, failed the initiative after three months. She failed not only herself but the entire human race in the process. We’d needed her. All eleven thousand of us were in such need; the Earth shuddered under the weight of it. We needed the ESI because we needed the Martians, and we needed the Martians because they promised a human haven on the red planet. We needed a haven because we were living at the edge of extinction, and Martians, in all their humility, needed proof that we were worthy of being saved.

I slumped on my bed and gazed at the pockmarked ceiling. Martian constructions were made of mycelium brick, so I always felt like the walls were breathing. My predecessor was an architectural engineer, and in her short time on Mars, she’d designed a prototype human complex with artificial grass to mimic Earth’s landscapes and holo-screen ceilings that showed Earth’s sky in real time. I wished she’d lasted long enough to build it. I shut my eyes to picture the night sky over Cape Canaveral back home. Endless stars. Ocean air. Breeze that whipped up sand instead of dust. But when I opened my eyes, all I saw were spores. Then Mama’s fuzzy face leaned over me.

“Sit up,” she said. “You’re too blessed to slouch.”

Shoulders back, I met her holo eyes. “I can do more than repairs.”

“Of course. But you do what they tell you to do. The Earth watches, Teri.”

---

My first day of work, I didn’t have to take the public shuttle. My new employers—the engineering department at Eberswalde University—booked me a private cruiser, and I was grateful because the shuttle pilots flew like mosquitoes buzzing over a pond. The zipping back and forth always made me sick, and I couldn’t afford one of the anti-motion sickness implants the Martians had. The shuttle passengers—and all Martians, really—always looked at me with an odd mixture of pity and disgust. Last time I took the shuttle, someone asked me if I had a “human illness” and if it was contagious. I’d been tempted to put on my EV suit and walk.

I got in the back seat of the cruiser and strapped in for the hour-long ride. My place in Landfall, Mars’ largest port city, was halfway across the colony from work and my ESI case manager, but I liked living near a port. Mama always said humans like to stay close to the lifeboats.

Every Martian city was built into a crater. Landfall was nestled in Schiaparelli. My apartment lay in the city’s center inside the Biodome, an ancient terrarium built when humans first settled on Mars. Landfall’s founders modeled the quaint, Earthlike village after an American city block (one of the founders was from New York). It was just Central Park, built from the memory of a rich colonist with the resources they brought from Earth. This meant my neighborhood was full of plastic trees and too many nonfunctioning fire hydrants and a fountain that’d been dry for centuries. Martians didn’t need the Biodome any longer; centuries of genetic engineering and isolation from Earth had transformed their human ancestors into an entirely new species, one capable of braving the planet’s harsh environment without the oxygenated Biodome. Now the place was nothing but empty houses and monuments to long-dead settlers—oh, and the only place I could survive without an environmental suit on.

Surrounding the Biodome were Landfall’s real buildings, abstractly shaped mycelium towers. The mycelium gave the city a warm, beige hue, and apparently, the Martians’ ancestors didn’t think to bring a can of paint with them when they abandoned Earth five hundred years ago, so Landfall was dotted with spongy, mushroom-brick sandcastles.

On my cruiser rides, I liked to look out the window and watch the city shrink away; Landfall was just a big termite hill. Mama said that was a rude observation, but why would Martians care about being compared to an insect so extinct even their ancestors never saw one? Really, I was being rude to the bugs, who, as a zoologist, Mama should’ve respected more than genetically engineered clowns cheating at the evolutionary game.

On the ride, I got a message from Mama. A picture of a gorilla flashed across my phone screen along with the caption: “mountain gorilla.” I asked her why she sent it, but she didn’t respond. It was probably related to her work. The monkey frowned at me, seemingly as confused as I was. I looked out the cruiser window and tried to imagine him out there in the crater. There were no animals on Mars besides the insects and fish raised for food. Ever since communications with Earth were reestablished, Martians had been clamoring for animals to be imported. They wanted cows and dogs and giraffes and whatever else they’d seen in old Earth nature photography. Maybe they’d bring a mountain gorilla. I could picture its silver-black hair against the desert landscape: a shadow of life in the barren wastes.

The cruiser landed outside Eberswalde before I could think any more about gorillas. As I clambered out the door, I bumped my head on the ceiling.

“All this empty space in the crater, and they can’t make room for you,” the cruiser pilot said.

I knew that voice. The pilot was concealed in an EV suit with a darkened faceplate. I could tell they were short like most Martians because their knees didn’t bump against the dashboard, and they didn’t have to contort to fit into the seat the way I did. But that voice—I’d heard it on radio broadcasts and in interviews and on speakerphone last year as Mama, the rest of our community, and I gathered to hear the first human on Mars announce her arrival.

I couldn’t say anything, though there were so many things I wanted to ask. I didn’t know she was still alive; everyone on Earth spoke of her as if she were dead. Where was she living, if not in the Biodome where they stuck me? Why hadn’t I seen her? But I knew what Mama would want me to do. I backed out of the cruiser without responding to her, as if her failure would somehow contaminate me.

She deflated as I backed away. “Mind your head,” she said before the doors shut.

---

The university grounds spanned a series of towers, each one designed by a different Martian architect. The shapes of the towers were meant to read artsy and non-Euclidean, but they just looked like the washed-up sea pork Mama and I used to find on the beach. Impressive, for a living building to look so dead. All these towers were engineering nightmares, but that was Mars—style over substance. The engineering tower had far too many windows, so everyone was always sweating. Thankfully, the micro-engineering lab was on the floor with the fewest.

I was crouched in the corner of a laboratory the size of a swimming pool and just as cold in design. Rows of 3D printers lined the east end of the lab, looking like a bunch of overdesigned ovens. My knees hurt if I spent too long kneeling on the stone floor, so I was in an awkward squat, leaning against the printer I was repairing.

“I didn’t know they taught things like this in Earth universities,” my new manager, Thames, said. His skin was the color of a bad spray tan and stained with this awkward, plastic smile. He was squat, probably five foot two, tall for a Martian. “And with such quaint technology.”

I was using a soldering gun from my tool kit—one of the only things I brought from Earth, since weight restrictions on interplanetary flights were harsh—and everyone kept looking at it like it was some ancient artifact. I hoped they stopped gawking soon. After I finished here, I needed to troubleshoot the holoprojectors in the lecture halls.

“University,” said Dr. Adri, who oversaw the micro lab. “There’s only one.” Dr. Adri was bald, squat, and round, an orange come to life.

“Right. I mean there’s only, what . . . ” Thames looked at me. “A few thousand of you left?”

I shot him a polite smile and ducked behind the printer to avoid more questions, burrowing into the clumps of wires spewing from the broken machine. I busied myself with work and held my tongue so hard I drew blood. “It’s just curiosity,” Mama would say, “like the rover.” The lab doors opened—and opened well, if I do say so myself—and someone new shuffled in.

Dr. Adri spoke to the new person, “Oh, you got my ping. You’ve got to see this old tech. The kind of stuff your xenoarchaeologist friends would love.”

The stranger said, “You called me out of office hours to look at a soldering gun?”

“Just thought it might interest you. I know you’re into all that human stuff.”

“She’s right there, Adri,” the stranger said.

Then she crouched behind the printer with me and held out a hand, the first handshake a Martian ever offered me. They weren’t big on physical touch here, a relic of living in EV suits for so long before they figured out how to alter their genomes. My chivalrous stranger was a slender Martian woman with skin the color of the desert at sunset, glistening with drops of recycled water. I was lost—either in the image or her bright, emerald eyes—for a moment before I remembered her outstretched hand. I shook it.

“Nile,” she said. “You’re Teri, right?”

I nodded because I could not speak. I was still roaming her sunset skin, tracing the way her body curved like sand dunes, floating in the cloud of curls atop her head.

“Teach me how to use your oh so ancient Earth tech?” she asked with a grin that nearly killed me.

I nodded again and hoped she only asked yes or no questions until my voice returned to me, which I anticipated would be a long while.

---

Nile took me out for drinks—or rather, drink, since I couldn’t survive outside my suit long enough for a single shot—after work to a bar I’d avoided thus far. Curiosity’s Bar was close to Eberswalde and therefore frequented mostly by college students. Tonight was slow. “These are the best times to come here,” Nile said when we entered. Curiosity’s had the same strange, abstract art character as every other place cursed by Martian design. But the bar also had a gimmick: Curiosity’s Frankensteined corpse sat on a pedestal in the center of the bar. The poor rover reeked of vodka. Some drunk students were pressing a button on the pedestal that made Curiosity sing a facsimile of its once poignant rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

“Such a disrespectful way to treat artifacts, don’t you think?” Nile asked.

I agreed, but I was used to shrugging off disrespect. “It’s just a robot,” I said.

Nile looked surprised. She seemed to appraise me. “Interesting.”

We settled into a pod in the back corner. My knees hit the chrome tabletop. She told me she was a PhD candidate studying human society and culture. When she completed her degree, she would become Eberswalde’s youngest doctoral degree holder. Her thesis tracked the rise in human culture in Landfall since Mars and Earth reestablished contact twenty years ago.

“Human history has always fascinated me,” she told me. She sipped a deep blue cocktail called Martian Sunset. The dim lights of the bar cast indigo shadows across her tangerine skin. “I mean, it’s everyone’s history after all. We should all be fascinated by it.” She gestured around the bar, spilling a little of her drink on the table. “At our core, we’re all human.”

“I keep trying to tell people that. They just don’t listen,” I said.

“Sorry everyone here’s so ignorant. Don’t mind the faculty. Dr. Adri is self-centered, and Thames tries. Just not enough. They’re good people once you get to know them.”

Synth music hummed over the muffled sounds of bar patrons. Even tucked away in the back, I could not escape the prying eyes of Martians whose parents never taught them not to stare. I sank into the pod’s squeaky, faux-leather seat.

“Back at the campus, you didn’t have to do that,” I said.

“I’m resisting the urge to reference an old Earther quote. Something about the triumph of evil, and good people doing nothing?”

“Sorry, never heard of it.” If I wasn’t so stunned by her, I would’ve asked why everyone assumed I understood all their Earth references.

“Well, I suppose being human doesn’t automatically mean you know every famous thing a human has ever said.” That smile blossomed. White teeth flashed against coral skin.

“I suppose it doesn’t.”

“So, tell me, Teri,” she said, and I braced myself for the questions Martians always had about humans. But then she asked, “What’s your favorite ocean?”

Martians never wanted to know anything about Earth because they thought they already knew everything. All their questions were about humanity. “Is it true humans are living in caves again?” “How do your people survive without neural implants?” “Are your eyes naturally that color?” I remembered Mama reading me poems written by the first poet on Mars. There’s a monument to them somewhere in the Crater. There was a long line in there about blue sunsets. Before I left Earth, I told Mama I’d tell all these Martians about real sunsets, when the red dusk bleeds into night. But no one here cared about nature or classic poetry.

Except for Nile.

“Don’t have one,” I said.

“Really? Mine’s the Atlantic.” I looked at her sideways, and she continued, “It’s where all the space junk landed when the satellites went down.”

I remembered space junk washing up on the shore in Cape Canaveral, fishing it out of the sea to scrap the once-space-bound hunks of metal for parts, designing water purifiers to cleanse the lakes and rivers infested by the fallen waste. It made me sick to think about. But then I looked at Nile, and she was giddy.

“God, it’s my dream to take a team to Earth and fish those out of the ocean. It would be the archaeological find of the century. In collaboration with human researchers, of course. Underwater archaeology is a lost art. I can’t imagine it. A real ocean!” She motioned wildly with her hands and banged on the table when she wanted to emphasize something.

I’d seen Martians get excited about water before. They had this thing for it. I guess I understood; few people on this planet had ever seen an ocean or lake or river in person. They even named their kids after bodies of water on Earth, some odd means of reverence. I wondered how many of them knew twenty percent of the oceans had dried up in the last century, and most of the rest of the water was too polluted to drink. I thought of mentioning it, but Nile’s eyes were shimmering like the sunlight on her favorite ocean, so I kept my mouth shut.

That night, my too-short bed felt like the soft sand along the Cape. I was dizzy, like I’d been floating in water all day, and I closed my eyes to imagine waves rocking me back and forth. I was picturing Nile’s sea green eyes when I got another message from Mama. “Hawksbill turtle.” In the picture, the little guy was covered in sand. He would fit right in on Mars, I thought before I fell asleep.

---

In the weeks following, I spent almost every day after work with Nile. I didn’t feel time moving, unlike before I met her, when each moment spent on this planet weighed on me like gravity. The only reference I had for days passing was Mama’s texts. Black rhinos the morning Nile and I had our first official date. Asian elephants the night I invited her over and cooked a “human delicacy”—it was just spaghetti, with cloned beef, of course. Woolly mammoths when she stayed the night. Sea lions the day Nile tried to make her own Martian spaghetti using ground crickets—it tasted like cardboard, but I didn’t tell her that.

The day Mama sent sea cows, I had an evaluation with my ESI case manager. The Department of Human Affairs was near the university, so Nile walked me there after work. The DHA offices were in the back room of the Transportation Administration tower. The tower was wide at the bottom to accommodate the curving line of Martians renewing their pilot licenses, and it narrowed into a curly loop for what Nile said was some greater aesthetic purpose. Something about the swirls being reminiscent of ocean waves. I just thought of soft serve—oh, how I missed dairy ice cream.

The sign outside read: “Transportation Administration Services” and in much tinier print: “Department of Human Affairs.” They’d stuffed the DHA in some converted storage room.

Nile waved dismissively at the sign as though shewing away a pesky insect. I’d told her how overqualified I was for my job at the university, and I think she was angrier about it than I was.

“This is ridiculous,” she said. “You have to demand more. I’m sure there’s a better opportunity available for you.

“I don’t want to cause any trouble,” I said quickly.

“Standing up for yourself isn’t trouble. When my classmates—and even a few of my professors—said I was too young to pursue my degree, I still applied, got in, and every day I prove them wrong.”

I bristled. I guess Nile noticed because she added, “But I understand that can be scary.” After delivering that understatement, she took my hands. She’d changed the LEDs on her EV suit to match mine, so behind the faceplate, her cheeks held a cerulean glow. “Just try?” She squeezed my hands, her grip even tighter against my EV suit gloves.

“I’ll do my best.”

---

My case manager Loch’s office was larger than my apartment despite being essentially a closet. Her walls were covered in inaccurate illustrations of oceans and rivers. They were too blue, almost indigo, and so sparkly. When I met her, I said I liked her nebula art, which offended her greatly.

“Have you learned anything interesting about Martian society?” Loch asked.

Every time I met with her, she wore her EV suit. Martians didn’t really need the suits, seeing as centuries of genetic engineering made them perfectly suited to the planet’s rough environment, but most wore them anyway. I asked Nile once if it was a fashion choice. “No,” she’d answered, “it’s much deeper. It’s cultural. Our ancestors lived in these suits, and we honor them by wearing them.” I wondered if my case manager was truly honoring her ancestors right now or if she just didn’t want to breathe the same air as me.

“I’ve learned a lot about the significance of environmental suits,” I said.

She took diligent notes as I spoke. Her data pad linked to her neural implant, so she only had to think, and the words appeared on the screen.

I added, “I guess I understand it, the whole ancestor reverence thing.”

“Don’t you have something similar on Earth? The Ancients?”

I smiled and nodded, but in my head, I was cringing. Our beliefs were similar in the way Mars and Earth were similar: both planets in our solar system with at least one human milling about on top. We didn’t revere the Ancients. We feared them. We remembered them only to avoid their mistakes. Martians had an unquestioning love for their ancestors that made me uneasy. But Loch needed to think Martian beliefs complemented my human culture, so I did not disagree with her.

“I’m pleased with your progress, Teri. We’ll make a Martian of you yet.” She blinked, and new words scrolled across her data pad, but she angled it so I couldn’t read them. “Even found yourself an interspecies relationship. Interesting.”

My pocket dinged. I sneaked a peek at my phone while my case manager finished her notes. A message from Mama: “Sea cow.” Then I received another message, this one from Nile: “You are stronger than you think.”

“Are there any other job positions open?” I asked tentatively. “I just feel like my skills are being underutilized.”

“Well, think about the big picture. You have no history on Mars—work history, I mean. Working hard in an entry-level position will pay off down the line.”

“But I can do more. My predecessor, she did more.” I felt a pang in my stomach as I spoke; despite the millions of miles, the Earth was holding me back. “Whatever happened to her anyway?”

She stared into me. “It’s best to mind the sinkholes, Teri,” she said. She saw the confusion on my face and added, “Your people would say, ‘let sleeping dogs lie.’” She continued to stare like she was awaiting a response.

“Sure, but I’m just curious. We don’t talk about her back home. No one ever told me exactly what—”

“Perhaps the rest of your species has the right idea then.” She leaned in. “You are making such progress.”

I wanted to insist. But for a moment, I caught a glimpse of her data pad. The bottom of the screen read: “OBSTINANCE.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Forget I said anything.”

She concluded the meeting and rushed me out of her office. In her hurry, she left the door cracked. I caught a glimpse of her through the opening before I walked away. She slipped out of her EV suit and took a deep breath.

---

After my meeting, my trial period was extended an extra month. “An extended cultural adjustment period.” Nile was furious. She didn’t understand, but I did. Mama was right. Nile’s stand your ground advice was going to get me kicked out of the ESI altogether.

“I need you to know I completely disagree with the way the ESI is going about all this,” Nile said on the cruiser ride back to my place. She gestured wildly, her indignation too big for the small vehicle. “I mean, why should they force you to be more Martian when really, we should be acting more human?”

“I just want to keep my head down until my trial period is up. Then, maybe, they’ll finally start bringing in more of us.”

She pulled her data pad from the pocket of her suit and started searching for something. “The first human, she’s still here. Perhaps you and she may find some common ground? I’m sure I know someone who can put you in contact with her. Her name is—”

“No. I can’t speak to her,” I said. “It’s not allowed.” Nile looked confused, so I continued. “She’s dead to the Earth—she failed us, so we pretend she doesn’t exist. We don’t even say her name.”

I could tell Nile was stunned. She opened her faceplate as though getting a better look would explain my predecessor’s shunning. Apparently, it didn’t. “That’s a rather cruel cultural practice,” she said.

“The stakes are high,” I responded.

She nodded, but I wasn’t sure if she truly understood. If I angered the ESI, my entire species would suffer for it. The Martians barely wanted to help as it was, and they would not waste resources on a species that could not manage a few months of assimilation. I’d be trapped here, cut off from my family, forced to pilot pretentious Martians in cruisers. Humanity would die the worst kind of death, the slow violence of a prolonged extinction. The way the dinosaurs choked to death on smog, long after the meteor hit.

But there was no way to say all that, no way that wouldn’t feel like an attack. If I started speaking, I knew I wouldn’t stop until a lifetime of anger poured out of me in a wave.

I looked out the back window of the cruiser. We were moving faster than any of the cruisers or shuttles on Earth were capable of. How long would our civilization remain stuck in the technological past, dust kicked up in the cruiser’s wake?

I glanced down at the data pad on Nile’s lap. She’d added a note without ever taking her eyes off of me. It read: “For dissertation: humans and shunning. Pressures of extinction?”

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Sometimes,” I muttered. “I just think about the dinosaurs.”

She rested her head on my shoulder, stroked my knee, and said, “Me too.”

The engine hummed. I placed my hand over hers.

“I think a lot about the stegosaurus,” she said.

---

With Nile at my side, I never needed to stand up for myself. She was always ready to stick up for me, even for minor things. When people avoided me on the shuttles, she’d call them ignorant and tell them to read A Human Perspective of Mars or watch Earth after Exodus: How Humanity Persisted, which had brought her such enlightenment as an undergraduate. When her fellow xenoanthropologists found me at work and tried to watch me use my “old Earth tools,” she’d tell them to stop gawking because I wasn’t a museum exhibit. When my coworkers joked about humans being unable to fly space shuttles because we had no space technology, Nile would jump in before I could and say, “That is a xenophobic stereotype.” She would only ever use the word xenophobic for the way people spoke to me because she said “speciesist” was dehumanizing and “racist” brought up too many negative, pre-Collapse memories. Well, she said Exodus, not Collapse. Humans called it the Collapse. Martians called it the Exodus. Nile asked if I’d prefer she use the term Collapse, then decided against it before I could answer.

“That’s your word. I won’t co-opt it,” she said.

I didn’t really give a damn, but Collapse was more accurate. If they had to go Biblical with the term, the Flood made more sense. The entirety of human civilization faced an unprecedented cataclysm: global water shortages and rising temperatures threatened to wipe out our entire species. Those who could afford the space shuttle ride to the then-fledgling Mars colony left in a hurry. It was no Exodus. No Pharaoh angrily chased the Martians’ ancestors down when they fled Earth. It was just millions of starving people, begging for a seat on the ark. But Martians didn’t care much for Earth religions or poetry, so it figured they got their metaphors mixed up.

“I appreciate your sensitivity,” I said to her.

“No need to thank me. It’s the bare minimum.”

Nile was weird with compliments. She didn’t compliment me much. Sometimes she would start but get in her head about it and stop herself. Once when she was staying over at my place, we were lying in bed, and she was tracing the freckles on my arms like a game of connect the dots.

“I love these. Little sunspots. No one has these anymore. They make you so unique. Ex-tra-or-di-nar-y.” She tapped out each syllable on my skin like she was playing piano.

“That’s sweet,” I said.

She went quiet for a moment, then sighed. “But I don’t want you to think I see you as a curiosity.”

“It was a good compliment, Nile.”

I wanted her to stop overthinking it. It made me feel strange complimenting her. If she couldn’t call my freckles sunspots without kicking herself, how could I tell her that I loved the way her grapefruit skin turned indigo in the evening sunlight?

“No, no. I need to do better.” Then she turned over and pulled out one of her textbooks. “So much unlearning to do.”

I read physical books, so Nile started reading them too. I just collected them out of habit. After I sent money back to Mama, I used the rest of my paycheck to buy books at the vintage stores. They were a luxury on Mars, where everything was digitized, and no one had to worry about the power grid failing periodically. Nile started buying me books too. Nothing I liked, just any book. But she was trying, which was endearing.

I was falling asleep when I got another message.

“Your mom again?” Nile asked.

“Yep. She’s been sending me random animal names. This time it’s ‘Tasmanian tiger.’ Never heard of it.”

“I have. It was native to Tasmania when it was still above water. It went extinct sometime after the first settlers arrived in Australia.” She sat her book down and turned to face me. “What other animals did she send you?”

I listed them out. The gorilla, the turtle, sea cows. And like the freckles on my skin, Nile connected the dots. Each animal had gone extinct before the Collapse. Mama was sending me wildlife obituaries.

“Is this a human tradition I’m not familiar with?” Nile asked. “Do you have some kind of connection to these animals?”

“No,” I said.

“Then why is she sending you these?”

“I’m not a mind reader,” I answered. But I had an idea. Mama wasn’t sending me names of extinct animals as some kind of spiritual memorial. No, it was a cryptic memento mori. As if to say, “This is what’s at stake. Here is why you cannot fail.”

---

A couple days later, Nile sent me a file with the message, “Happy One Month! You are an inspiration. I hope this distracts you from all those extinct animals.” The name of the file turned my blood cold: Dunia Amal, my predecessor. Her name still felt like a curse. Nile had gathered the information on Dunia even though I told her not to. I hesitated to open the file but curiosity got the better of me. I displayed the documents on the holo in my apartment. Pages upon pages stretched from the floor to the ceiling. I closed the files and began dictating a reply to Nile. I thought of calling her, but I was too afraid of how I’d sound, how my face would twist in resentment. “If I had wanted to learn any of this, I would have found a way. I told you no. Why couldn’t you respect that?”

I stopped. I called Mama instead; she’d be angry for me. Maybe then, I’d be more articulate in my response.

As soon as her holo appeared, Mama put one hand on her hip and looked at me like I was a nuisance. I’d forgotten she was at work.

“Other people have jobs too, you—” Mama stopped. She was looking at something on her side of the call that I couldn’t see. “Teri, you know better,” she said.

Then I realized I’d left a file open and accidentally shared it with Mama on the call. Dunia’s first paystub—a whole dollar more than what I made—lurked in the corner. I explained to Mama what Nile had done, and after I did, her anger melded into understanding.

“She was just trying to be helpful,” Mama said. “You should thank her, then delete these files.”

“Helpful?” I half-shouted. Mama glared, and I lowered my voice. “I told her no.”

“She doesn’t understand our customs. How could she?”

“She’s an anthropologist!”

“Don’t raise your voice to me.”

Mama stepped closer to me. She held her hands over my head and mimed stroking my hair. I cried for the first time in months.

“Don’t cry. Tears are a waste of water,” she cooed. “You just have to be patient.”

I tried to sink into her holo like I’d sink into her arms at the beach when she taught me how to swim. I imagined the certainty of her embrace. I tried to trust Mama the way I had back then, when I believed she knew everything. Mama held a catalog of nearly every animal that walked the Earth in her mind. Surely, she held all the answers to my questions. Surely, she wouldn’t let me drown.

“Did you get the pictures I sent?” she asked, her digital hand disappearing into my shoulder.

“The extinct animals?”

“Yes. You understand why I sent them, don’t you?”

I stepped away from her and studied the cracks in the floor. I couldn’t meet her gaze while I was still sobbing like a child. I bottled up my tears and anger and put them on a shelf with the rest.

“We’re not sea cows, Mama.”

She tented her fingers, and I knew she was preparing for a lecture. “We may have lost the last alligator today. Some incompetent intern contaminated the enclosure. It took us a week to notice. By then, the entire congregation was infested with Sebekia oxycephala. Half of them are anorexic now, the other half have permanent respiratory damage. It’s in the hatchlings too. We’ll be dealing with the ramifications of this infestation for years. If only the parasites died as easily as their hosts.”

When I was a kid, Mama never let me meet the animals she cared for, no matter how much I begged. As a teenager, she told me not to follow in her footsteps. She said I wouldn’t be able to handle the “realities of this line of work.” I resented her for it then, but now I was glad I wasn’t her. I was glad I didn’t have to watch those hatchlings suffocate. She was right. I wasn’t strong enough.

Mama continued, “Eighty-five million years of evolution, beaten by some stupid kid who doesn’t know how to properly decontaminate a uniform.”

Another voice came through the speakers; someone was calling for her.

“I have to work. Remember: no one is above extinction.”

After Mama hung up, I deleted my unsent message to Nile. Instead, I sent, “Thanks,” and congratulated myself on my cool headedness. Some things weren’t worth ruining.

---

Work was better when I knew Nile was nearby. Her presence in the building comforted me. She wasn’t there often; the anthropology building was on the other side of the campus, but she’d still bring me lunch (she kept forgetting I couldn’t eat outside of the Biodome).

I was filling out maintenance reports in the empty office I’d claimed on the least-windowed floor. The desk was too short, and all the furniture was trying and failing to look like wood. They’d “humanized” the room for me.

Thames knocked on my door but entered without waiting for an answer.

“It’s so damn quaint in here,” he said. He took a long sip from a metal tumbler full of sparkling water, unflavored. I didn’t know if his taste in beverages was a Martian quirk or just a Thames problem. I’d have to ask Nile.

“What can I do for you?” I asked. I pasted a smile on my face.

“You probably think about extinction a lot, huh? Yeah, I’m sure you do. But how much do you really know about it?”

I braced myself for this discussion. He did this a couple times a week, interrupting my work to intimidate me with his vast knowledge of my own history. Last time, he asked me if I knew that after the Exodus, humans had to start living in caves again. I told him I hadn’t heard that before, which was true, because he’d certainly made that “fact” up. Nile said he’s a nice guy deep down. I wondered how deep I’d have to dig.

“I know a fair amount,” I said. We were wearing matching fake smiles.

“Humanity almost went extinct before, one million years ago. Ninety-eight percent of the whole species,” he snapped his fingers, “gone just like that. No one’s exactly sure what caused it, but the leading theory? Climate change. What’s that thing you guys say? Fool me once,” he paused and waited for me to complete the phrase. I did not. “Anyway, I’m really rooting for you guys this time around. So I’d encourage you not to blow your second chance.”

He sipped his drink, hiding his smug smile behind the cup.

“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” I said.

Thames swallowed, walked toward my desk, and sat his mug on the faux wood with a loud clang.

“I’ve heard some things. You know, crater walls hold whispers. That’s an idiom.”

“I gathered.”

“Someone said you’ve been digging in the wrong sandpits. That’s—”

“Another idiom?”

“You’re quick. So you should be able to follow this advice, superior to,” he clicked his tongue, “employee. Some business is better left buried.”

I breathed in the filtered air of my EV suit. I remembered the sand-covered turtle, lost to time.

“Thank you, sir. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Thames picked up his cup, leaving a wet ring on the tabletop. He paused in the doorway.

“I really am rooting for you. If someone had told me twenty years ago that I’d be talking to a human right now, I’d’ve said the radiation had gotten to their head. You’re a living relic.”

He shut the door before I could tell him how flattered I was.

---

When I got home, I peeled my suit off immediately. I got in the shower and turned the water as hot as I could stand. Mama spent her days holding dying baby gators, but at least she didn’t have to endure Thames or Loch or even Nile, in all her helpfulness. She didn’t have to fold away her emotions into the corners of her mind. Mama and her team would cure the gators, but there was no treatment that would make life on Mars easier.

I lay on the apartment floor, still wet. I wondered if the mycelium would sprout mold. Maybe the fungus would do me in before the end of my contract. Mama would find that morbid, but she wasn’t here.

I opened Dunia’s file. I felt like a misbehaving child, sitting on the floor in the corner with all the lights off, reading forbidden texts, defying Mama and Thames and Loch with this small act of rebellion.

Dunia worked in the biology department at Eberswalde. At first, she was well-liked. Her performance reviews emphasized her ingenuity and competence. But after a couple months, opinions shifted. Coworkers said Dunia was too full of herself, too good at her job, as though her competence had mutated into arrogance. There were five documented disputes between her and her coworkers. One anonymous review read, “Amal is an alright architect, but she won’t get far with that attitude.” Dunia’s caseworker told her to “adjust her personality to better suit Martian culture.” Dunia did not heed that advice.

Right when production began on her human habitat prototype, the fifth dispute occurred, this time with her supervisor. Witnesses saw them arguing. They say Dunia became violent, that she started yelling at her boss. The lab had this industrial 3D printer, large enough to build entire habitats. Then—and this part had conflicting reports—she pushed him into one of the printers. Or, he fell, depending on who you believe. The authorities believed the majority of employees who insisted that Dunia, in a fit of rage, used “her far superior height and strength” to shove her supervisor. He got caught under one of the lasers as it fired. Reconstructive surgeries repaired his superficial burns but with his skin barrier compromised, he became hypersensitive to solar radiation. And it’s almost funny. Martians were so terrified of catching human diseases. Then Dunia went and gave her supervisor cancer.

Something about the story clashed with my memories of Dunia. When she was accepted into the ESI, she toured Earth’s remaining cities and spoke of her plans to bring more humans to Mars. Her joy radiated off of her. She spoke of humanity’s Collapse, the Ancients’ arrogance and their subsequent downfall, their failure to safeguard our future. She would not be so prideful. We all chanted with her, “Remember the Ancients. The Earth watches.” Surely, she felt the same pressure I did. How could she risk all our hopes?

I put some clothes on and dried the wet spot on the floor before I called Mama. I didn’t bother lying. I confessed to reading the documents. She refused to look at me.

“By the Ancients, Teri! Your boss tells you not to meddle, and what do you do? I don’t understand you, child. You have a job! You have friends. You have a future. They accept you. Isn’t that enough?”

Mama shook with frustration. The glitching holo made her appear as if the anger was clawing its way out of her, breaking her stone façade. The light of the holo display was so bright it hurt my eyes.

“Did you know she was still alive? Did you know she’s a cruiser pilot? Did you know she hurt someone? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“She’s dead to the Earth,” Mama snapped. “Remember, failure kills. We are all at risk.” She hung up, plunging my apartment into darkness.

Not long after the call, while I was sitting on the floor by my bed trying to slow my breathing with pictures of gorillas, I got a message from her: “Denisovans.” But there was no animal accompanying it. Just the top half of an archaic skull. Almost human.

---

Dunia wouldn’t be hard to find. I knew at least one of her cruiser routes, since it was the route I was meant to be taking to work, but I’d started taking the public shuttle instead to reduce the chances of seeing her again. I wasn’t as superstitious as Mama, but still, something about her felt like bad luck. So, on the way home from work, I called cruiser after cruiser until I got hers. It only took four attempts and too much money in cancellation fees.

I ducked into the cruiser and sat in the passenger seat. I fiddled nervously with my seatbelt.

“Dunia,” I said.

“Teri,” she replied. “Are you sure you should be speaking to me? My failure might rub off on you.”

“I’m sorry about before. I was rude.”

“It’s alright. I’m used to being ignored.”

She started flying us back to the Biodome. I studied her EV suit while I tried to figure out what to say next. Hers was a different model than mine—the faceplate was smaller, so her field of vision was reduced. Still, both our suits were hand-me-downs, designed years ago and retrofitted for modern needs.

“Is there something you wanted?” Dunia asked. She seemed calm enough. She kept her eyes trained ahead and her hands on the controls. She was so different than I remembered, as emotionless as the robots I repaired.

I asked the only thing that came to mind. “Where do you live?”

“Same place you do, except I enter through the maintenance door. We work opposite hours.”

“Didn’t want to show your face?”

Dunia finally looked at me, and I realized how much I’d missed being seen.

“It wasn’t up to me,” she said. “It’s part of my rehabilitation. I’m allowed limited contact with others. Especially with you. I guess they didn’t consider the cruiser loophole.” She started to laugh, but the sound died like a balloon losing air. Still, I got the sense that she might actually have been happy to see me.

I tried to imagine Dunia’s life: limited contact, shunned by the Earth, reviled by Martians, ignored by the only other person who could possibly understand.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Not your fault.”

“Right, I’m not the one that pushed a man into a printer. Just tell me, it was an accident, right?”

“Does it matter? You still wouldn’t understand.”

“I’m in the same position you were in; of course, I’ll understand,” I said.

“No.” Dunia’s voice remained level and calm, like she was just giving one of her old radio updates. “You still think these people see you, and they don’t. You are a project. You’re just as real to them as those monuments outside the Crater.”

We were nearing Landfall, and I was glad for it because I was growing frustrated enough with her vagueness and condescension to push her into a 3D printer. Dunia’s life was so sad. This was why Mama wanted me to stay away from her. Failure was poison.

“They’re not all like that,” I said, my voice shaking. “Maybe your supervisor was an ass, but that doesn’t mean every person on this planet is. Even if you were right, it doesn’t change the fact that we need them, so we endure. Because that’s what humanity does, right?”

“There are worse things than extinction, Teri.”

---

After three months of dating, Nile finally decided I could meet her friends. She said she had to make sure they were ready to check their biases. Thames was included in that list of friends, so I wasn’t sure how ready they were. I wished she’d put it off for a few more months. My interaction with Dunia had soured my mood and left me ill-equipped to endure questions from curious Martians. And all of Nile’s friends were curious. They were fellow grad students, dedicated to appreciating human culture and society. I was sick of them. Sick of researchers and archaeologists and goddamn linguists who were always so impressed by how similar human and Martian English were and so surprised by my ability to hold conversations with them. I was sick of history, sick of the pressure to persevere lest my whole species die and fade from memory. I was sick of being preserved like some caveman on ice. If cryogenic freezing wasn’t still in its infancy, I’m sure they’d have put me in a museum freezer already to show me off to some school child a century from now.

But I wasn’t sick of Nile, so I put on the happy-go-lucky mask I’d been wearing for my entire stay on Mars. At least with my EV suit on, it was hard to see me rolling my eyes. We were touring the sand sculptures in the outskirts of Schiaparelli Crater, where the first Mars mission landed. There was a collection of statues of the astronauts who visited pre-Collapse. The tour started on the ridge above the Crater. The sculptures were elevated above the actual landing site, so the figures could be seen from a distance. Their faceless bodies loomed over Landfall’s lumpy skyline. The Biodome shone in the distance, sunlight catching the metal and glass so beautifully that the Biodome finally reminded me of Earth. I could make this planet home. I would. I had no other choice.

One of Nile’s friends dragged her off to look at a statue of some famous ancestor they had. I stayed back to find the statue of Mama’s astronaut-poet, but all the statues looked the same. Only their poses varied. I decided the one resting their hand on their chin looked artistic. Or, maybe the one staring up at the sky? No, it was definitely the sculpture at the end of the line, reaching a hand West, toward the Biodome. I wished we were visiting during sunset. I wanted to tell Mama I had seen the same horizon as her poet.

Thames hovered near me, taking sips of sparkling water from his tumbler. I tried to ignore his staring and take pictures of the statues. I knelt in the dirt to get a shot from below.

He came up behind me and said, “You know, I’ve been wondering something ever since you and Nile started dating.” He put air quotes around “dating.”

“Yeah?” I said.

He took a long sip from his tumbler. “What are your reproduction plans?”

“I’m sorry?” I responded.

“I’m thinking of writing an article on the possibilities for guided human reproduction,” he said, as though that clarified anything.

I stood up slowly, so I was face-to-face with the poet statue.

“Guided?” I asked.

“You know, to encourage repopulation. It’s important that the population grows at a steady rate. Don’t want your kind going the way of the Denisovans. So, are you going for synth-surrogacy or lab grown? Maybe even natural? Though natural birth is quite the ordeal for your people.”

I turned away from the statue to face him. He wasn’t wearing his EV suit, so I could clearly see his self-satisfied grin. “Did you say Denisovans?”

“Yeah, Nile was telling me about the significance of extinct animals in human culture. I had no idea.”

My fists clenched involuntarily. I tried to relax. I tried thinking of dodos.

“Did she now?” I asked. I could tell by his reaction that I wasn’t concealing my anger well. He looked confused, but he kept talking.

“Do you think you two will try and reproduce? That would be quite the scientific achievement. The articles Nile could publish . . . ” He trailed off, and I prayed to the Ancients he was done speaking. But he wasn’t.

“It’s likely half-breed offspring are sterile.”

Dodos and Denisovans and damned gorillas fled my mind. I clenched my fist tighter and punched him square in the face.

Nile returned to find Thames groaning in the dirt, blood dripping from his nose and turning the regolith a deep burgundy.

---

I told Nile that Thames had agitated me, and she believed me, or at least she wanted to. She convinced my case manager that I wasn’t a danger to anyone else. That it had just been a clash of cultures. That I needed even more time to adjust, maybe a new work assignment under different leadership. After all the shit she’d talked about the ESI, I didn’t expect her to plead and pander and beg their forgiveness on my behalf, but at least it worked.

There were no prisons on Mars because they believed in restorative justice, so initially my punishment was helping the nurses patch up that racist asshole’s face. But then Nile told the ESI that would be triggering for me, and they were so worried I’d punch someone else that they listened to her and had me volunteer at Landfall Memorial Hospital instead. Nile insisted on volunteering with me.

Landfall Memorial was the only building besides the Biodome that wasn’t made of mycelium. Turned out mushrooms weren’t great for maintaining sterile fields. The hospital predated most of the other constructions, which meant it was shaped like a normal fucking building, so I didn’t have to see any more shapes that contradicted the principles of engineering. The walls were limestone, and even though I was still furious, the familiar material comforted me. I was reminded of limestone caves I once visited with Mama. I could close my eyes and pretend I was on Earth. Unfortunately, when I opened them, I was greeted by overwhelming white light and chrome floors.

Nile and I were in the oncology wing repairing radiosurgery machines used to treat cancer. I was shocked they even let me in this part of the hospital; anything to do with radiation damage was especially important on Mars. Then I learned the machines weren’t really in need of repair; I was just doing preventative maintenance.

I was examining the gantry, a large robotic arm hanging from the ceiling in the proton beam therapy lab. Nile was standing on a step stool and pretending to help while I made sure all the bolts were tight and the sprockets were in good condition. I didn’t want to talk about it. I hoped she wouldn’t, but she asked anyway.

“Why did you hit him?”

“He looked at me like he wanted to dissect me,” I answered without looking up from my work.

“If you would’ve just waited for me—”

“I can fight my own battles, Nile.”

I overtightened a bolt and lost my grip on my wrench. It clattered to the ground, and I didn’t bother to pick it up.

“I would’ve said something. I would’ve educated him,” Nile said.

“Like you educated him on the messages from my mom?”

She stepped off the stool. I abandoned the gantry and studied her. She kept starting to speak and stopping herself. She gesticulated nervously and said, “It was purely an academic discussion. We were theorizing ways human societies cope with the threat of extinction. I merely provided an example.”

“An example? I thought I wasn’t an exhibit.”

“Teri, you’re misunderstanding me. I’m just looking out for you. They’ll never see your potential at this rate!”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“The ESI, my friends, my colleagues, all of Mars!” She counted off each group and spoke slowly like I was a toddler. “You have to meet them where they are.”

“I’m sick of meeting you all where you are! Why don’t any of you ever come to me?”

Nile flinched. She backed away, hands raised defensively.

“Calm down, can we talk about this?” she said. I hated the condescension in her coaxing tone.

“Can we? Because when we talked, and I told you not to look into Dunia, you did it anyway.”

“I was only trying to help.” Nile shook her head, looking helpless. “Honestly, I don’t know what you want from me. I’ve done so much for you. I invested in you when no one else did. And this is how you thank me, by violently attacking my friend?”

“What happened to standing up for myself?”

“You punched him, Teri! That’s not how we settle disputes here. I understand human culture is different but—”

“Stop talking.”

“What? What did I say now?”

“I just need to go outside before I punch something else. Since my culture is so violent.”

I grabbed my tool kit and left Nile there with the machinery. I went to clock out of the hospital early. The secretary at the counter—more goddamn chrome—looked at me sadly. Earrings in the shape of cartoon grasshoppers dangled from her ears. They smiled at me, and I pictured the Rocky Mountain locust, its paper wings crumbling as some scientist pinned it to a board.

“What?” I asked.

“An unaltered genome. Poor thing. It must be so hard for you.”

“I do just fine, thanks.”

“But aren’t you worried you’ll get cancer or something?”

I turned and left without finishing my checkout. The ESI wouldn’t appreciate it, but I didn’t have it in me to care.

I caught a cruiser home, not ready to deal with more nosy Martians. The silver panels of the cruiser captured the fading sunlight. The sun was setting. I watched the sun’s blue halo bloom in the cruiser’s reflection. Then the door slid open, the sun split, and I was staring face-to-face with Dunia, her faceplate clear so I could see her eyes. I froze in the doorway. I finally recognized the emptiness and apathy in her gaze. Extinction was coming, and she didn’t care. I couldn’t blame her, not anymore. Look where caring had gotten her: exiled from two societies, stuck in the middle of divergent worlds like Thames’ fucked up hybrids.

“Does it ever get any easier?” I asked because I didn’t know what else to say.

“When have our lives ever been easy?” she answered in a soft voice.

“Shit,” I said. Then I collapsed to the ground outside the cruiser in a fit of sobs. Tears clung to my faceplate. I couldn’t even wipe my eyes. “They gave me this awful job. They keep asking me all these questions . . . ” And I explained everything about the past few months. Mama’s extinct animals. Thames’ bloodied face. Nile. At some point, Dunia sat next to me and rubbed small circles on my back.

I understood now. I was an artifact, and my life was their dig site. What did it matter to them whether I lived or died? They’d get to study my bones either way.

We sat in the dust as the sky turned indigo. My phone chimed irreverently. Mama again. “Passenger pigeons” and a picture of a couple dozen stuffed bird skins lying in a drawer. They looked like they were sleeping; I wished they were. I tried to imagine how they looked when they swarmed in the thousands, their peach underbellies painting the midday sky into a sunset. The blue was washed away by Martian earth.