Fourth World

by Lyssa Chiavari

  Tamara bit her lip, turning fully toward me, her shoulders bathed in moonlight. Focus, I thought.

  “Like, someone is trying to copy her work?” she asked. “Maybe they think that if her name is on it, it will be worth more money.”

  “I wish I still had that coin. Now that Emil’s got his creepy hands on it, we may never be able to figure out—” A thought struck me, and I froze. Emil. What if Emil tried to come after this thing? He was so desperate to find that key, whatever that was, so anything that resembled the coin may be something he’d want.

  Cristo. Thinking about Emil coming after me, putting my mom and Celeste in danger, made me sick enough. Now this was in Tamara’s house.

  “Tamara, you have to let me take it.”

  “What?” Tamara stared at me, mouth agape. “Why?”

  “Emil—you could be in danger,” I hissed, raking my hand through my hair. “Emil is a total whack job, and now you’ve got that thing in your house. No way. No way am I putting you at risk.”

  Tamara reached for me, small hands gripping my wrists and pulling them down before I could yank my hair out by the roots. “Isaak, listen to me. It’s okay.” When I shook my head, she went on, “He doesn’t even know about the object, okay? It can’t be that key he wants, because your dad had that, and this was out in the middle of a heavily guarded site, buried under three meters of sediment.”

  “Yeah, but, I mean—he came into my bedroom, without anyone knowing, and stole the coin. I assume he did it when none of us were home, but what would happen if he came face to face with someone? With you? You didn’t see him, Tam. He’s strong, and he’s a psycho.” I shook my head fervently, placing my hands on her elbows. “No. I will not let that happen.”

  “So, what? You’re saying you’re the only one allowed to deal with this? Isaak, we’re all in this together.” With that, she raised her hands to my arms and gave them a gentle squeeze. “You are worrying way too much, okay? I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself.”

  The breeze picked up just then, sending her long brown hair cascading across her face. She moved to brush it away, but I stopped her, lifting one hand from around her to carefully remove the soft strands from her eyes. In that moment, the light from the two moons bathing her face, the cool breeze from the bay billowing around us, and my hand resting on her cheek, I knew I’d found my chance. “Tamara, I...”

  Tamara’s cheeks, I swear, reddened under my touch. She turned her chin up, looking me square in the eye.

  I sucked in a breath to work up my nerve, and leaned forward, my face centimeters from hers. I closed my eyes. There was no turning back now.

  And then my palmtop rang at top volume.

  Tamara leapt away at the sudden blare as if she’d been burned. I cursed violently. If it’s Henry, I swear… Swiping my hand across the screen without looking at the caller ID, I snapped, “What?!”

  “Isaak, it is now nine-thirty. If you are not home in fifteen minutes, you will be grounded for the rest of your life. Do you understand me?”

  I held the palmtop away from my face and cringed. “Tamara, I’m sorry,” I whispered over the top of my mother’s tinny rantings. “I… I gotta go.”

  Tamara didn’t look at me. She just nodded, staring silently down at the railing as the wind whipped her hair around. I sighed and turned away.

  I really didn’t have any luck, did I?

  My ears were ringing by the time I trudged into my bedroom. What Mom had lacked in coherency by the time I got home, she made up for in volume. I’d tried to tell her that I’d lost track of time, but that wasn’t good enough. I was grounded for the next week.

  Whatever. As if it wasn’t punishment enough to have blown it with Tamara again.

  I frowned as I switched the light on. Dad’s box was still sitting there on my nightstand, covered in dirt and rust. Well, if I was stuck here, I might as well make myself useful. Tamara may have been convinced that her house was safe from Emil, but I wouldn’t rest easy until I was sure he was out of our hair for good. And the best way to do that was to find him that key.

  I pulled the lid off the lunch box and began rummaging through the contents, removing everything one by one. The cap on one of the containers of e-cig fluid had loosened, and sticky liquid had leaked out of it, gumming up some of the objects beneath. I pulled out his atomizers, his ring, great-uncle Hugo’s watch, long-stopped. There were no key cards or even any old-fashioned metal keys. As I dug deeper, I realized with alarm that there was nothing like what Emil might have been looking for.

  At the bottom of the box was an old print magazine, folded in half to fit inside the small space. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition from 2039, when my dad was thirteen. The cover proudly proclaimed, “75th Anniversary Collector’s Issue,” over the top of a barely-clothed blonde. Real classy, Dad.

  Its back cover ripped off as I pulled it out of the box—it was practically glued to the bottom thanks to the spilled flavoring fluid. The corners of the front cover were stuck together, but eventually I managed to pry them apart. I started to leaf through the magazine’s sticky pages, figuring a key card might be stuck inside it somewhere.

  But that’s not what I found.

  There was writing on every page, scrawled in black felt-tip marker over the top of every skimpy bikini. I swallowed hard. Some of it was written in Dad’s handwriting. But other pages were written in the handwriting I recognized from the note: Emil’s. It was difficult to make out the writing on many of the pages. Several were permanently plastered together with the spilled flavoring. On many of the pages that I could separate, the marker had smeared to oblivion. But the centerfold was still relatively intact. I unfolded it and turned it lengthwise.

  Known Atlantean Arch Locations, it read across the top. This was underlined, and underneath was a tally of sites on Earth: Santorini, Greece. Angkor, Cambodia. Orissa, India. The list went on, taking up the length of the centerfold. And at the bottom, Veracruz, Mexico. That one was circled, and below it, in my father’s handwriting: Ask Hector.

  Abuelo, too? I folded the glossy paper back up and wiped my clammy hands on the sides of my pants. It was starting to feel like my whole torquing family was wrapped up in this. Who next, Celeste?

  I glanced at the clock on my palmtop. It was quarter to eleven. California was eight hours ahead of us. I didn’t know how early Abuelo got up now that he was retired, but I couldn’t go without answers any longer.

  So at midnight, I put on my Speculus headset and called him.

  While the call connected, Abuelo’s chatspace loaded around me, a full 3-D scan of the jungle around Laguna de los Cerros—an ancient Olmec city Abuelo had worked on when he was younger. He’d taken the scan himself, years ago, so the textures weren’t quite as high-res as some of the newer chatspaces, but that added a rustic, old-school feel to it. Between the impossibly tall trees, Olmec colossal heads were strewn, some on their sides, all overgrown with thick tropical vegetation. Over my head, a bird squawked noisily, and I looked up, almost expecting to see it there in the trees. But, of course, it was just ambient sound.

  “Isaak.”

  At the sound of my grandfather’s voice, I turned. Abuelo stood behind me, in the same flannel shirt and worn blue jeans his figuscan avatar always wore. “It’s good to see you, mijo,” he said. His voice was rich and deep, with the faintest hint of an accent he’d never quite lost, even though he’d come to America as a small child. Hearing his voice was like coming home.

  When he moved to embrace me, I felt the familiar pang in my heart that I did every time I saw him on Speculus. As great as VR is, it still wasn’t the same as having him right here with me. I could almost feel the hug, but it wasn’t really there. It was just in my mind. It lacked the weight of reality—the smell of spices that lingered around his clothes, the rumble of his voice in his chest, the heavy solidness that I always felt when I’d visit Earth with its stronger gravity.

  “You’re getting tall,” remarked Abuelo. �
��It’s been awhile since I’ve seen you. And what are you doing calling me at this time of night? It must be past midnight where you are. Don’t you have school in the morning?”

  I laughed. “Yeah, I know, I know. I just… you know, wanted to talk to you. You’re right, it has been awhile. School has been hard this year.”

  “And you’ve got a lot going on now,” Abuelo said, nodding. He moved over to one of the colossal heads and hefted himself up onto it, gesturing for me to sit beside him. “Your mom tells me that you’ve been following in my footsteps, working as an excavator on the weekends.”

  I grinned and scrambled to the top of the stone head. “Sort of. It’s a geology dig, not archaeology.”

  “Still, it’s excavation. Are you having as much fun as you used to when you’d come down here with me?”

  “Not quite,” I laughed. “But it is pretty fresh. Or it was, anyway. There’s been some weird stuff going on recently.”

  Abuelo frowned. “‘Weird’? How so?”

  “I dunno. It’s all really complicated. GSAF keeps butting in, and—” I broke off quickly. I wasn’t sure if they really were monitoring me, but I didn’t want to say anything, just in case.

  Abuelo just chuckled. “The old wheels of government bureaucracy keep on turning, don’t they? I guess red tape is a nightmare no matter which planet you’re on.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed hollowly. “Anyway, Abuelo, I wanted to ask you something. Did, um… did my dad ever talk to you about anything? Like, maybe a key of some sort?”

  His face darkened at the mention of my dad. I knew my grandparents hated him even more than Mom did, but I needed to find out.

  “Your father never talked to me about much of anything,” Abuelo said. “Why would he tell me where he kept his keys?”

  “Well, not his keys keys. I mean… a different sort of key.”

  “Mijo, what are you even talking about?”

  A tension headache was building in my skull. I pressed the heels of my hand against my eyes to try and abate it. “Sorry, Abuelo. I know it’s random. It’s just that I found this box with some of my dad’s stuff in it, and… it said something about you,” I said.

  His eyebrows furrowed. “About me?”

  “Yeah. There was all this writing about these archaeological sites, and something called the Atlantean Arch. He’d written Ask Hector on it.”

  “Ah.” Abuelo hopped down off the stone head, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Yes, Raymond did contact me shortly before he left Mars. He’d gotten wrapped up in some conspiracy theory, another of his ‘get rich quick’ schemes, I assume. He didn’t say anything about any keys, though. He wanted information about a man who’d taught at Berkeley when I was finishing my Ph.D. there. I couldn’t really tell him much—the man was a physicist, so of course I’d never taken any classes with him. Different fields. I had heard his name, though, because he was working with the Ames Research Center on the biological survey of Mars precolonization, so it was all over the news. David Hassan, I think it was.”

  “My dad wanted to know about that?”

  “Yes, I know. I was shocked as well. I’ll tell you what I told him: I never met David Hassan. Not long after I started working at Berkeley, he was discredited and lost his job with the university. It was quite the scandal. He kept insisting that the findings GSAF released weren’t consistent with his research about Mars’ habitability.”

  “You mean, like, he thought it was dangerous to colonize? But terraformation went ahead. Everything seems to be fine here.”

  “No, that wasn’t it. He claimed”—Abuelo laughed, shaking his head—“that he’d discovered evidence of sentient life on Mars, and that GSAF was trying to cover it up.”

  The skin on my forearms started to prickle. “Do you know what he found?”

  “No, no. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories, so I didn’t pay it much attention. But the fringe picked up on it for sure. You know, those people who go on the TV and insist that all of Earth’s major archaeological sites were built by aliens. I think that’s when the Atlantean Arch theory started to go around.” He eyed me. “Oh, come on, Isaak. I know you. You’re smarter than that. You’re not buying into all this nonsense, are you?”

  “Of course not.” I forced out a weak chuckle. “I was just curious what the note I found was about. I guess it was pretty stupid, huh?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Mijo, I know what you’re thinking. It’s only natural to wonder about your father. No one really quite gets over something like that.” He smiled reassuringly, his salt-and-pepper mustache drawing up with the corners of his mouth. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. You can talk to me as much as you like. I’m just sorry that I can’t tell you anything more about it.”

  “It’s all right, Abuelo,” I said, forcing a smile in return. “You’ve told me more than enough.”

  ◦ • ◦

  An hour later, Henry and I were in our guild hall on Speculus, poring over the internet together, searching for anything we could find about this David Hassan. Apart from archived news articles, there were a ton of websites dedicated to him—most of them old, 2-D slabs that didn’t translate over to VR very well—but none of them actually had any of his data. They were all conspiracy theory sites, most with subpages about Roswell, New Mexico, the Loch Ness monster and the pyramids at Giza. I found more information about “Atlantis” than about Hassan himself.

  “I don’t get it,” I said, closing yet another window and turning to Henry. “All these sites, they just say that the Atlantean Arches are evidence of aliens. They only mention David Hassan briefly in passing, and there doesn’t actually seem to be any connection between him and the arches themselves. It’s all just about the existence of aliens as tangential proof for all their other conspiracies. So why did my dad ask Abuelo about him, and not about the arches in Veracruz or anything like that?”

  Henry sighed, swiping through another mountain of text blearily. “Search me, dude. The most I can get is that this guy may have found evidence of precolonial life on Mars. But what sort of evidence? Like, the stuff at Erick’s dig site? Or something else?”

  I flopped back on the virtual sofa—a large, stuffed thing, complete with mastodon-tusk embellishments. “If only we could actually talk to this guy. We could ask him ourselves.”

  Henry stopped scrolling. “Do you think he’s still alive?”

  “I dunno. He’d probably be pushing a hundred if he was.”

  “Maybe not. The pics of him on the news articles made him look pretty young. Like maybe your grandpa’s age now, or just a little older.”

  “But even if he is still alive,” I said, “how are we supposed to track him down? I haven’t seen any record of him at all after the 2040s. He could be anywhere, on either world.” I glanced at the giant steampunk grandfather’s clock against the masonry wall and groaned. “It’s nearly two in the morning. We’ve got to be up for school in four hours.”

  “Fine. If you’re tired, go to bed,” Henry said.

  “But what about you?”

  “I just want to check this out. You go catch some Zs. Try not to have nightmares about royally screwing up with Tamara.”

  I paused, my hands halfway up to my headset. “Do you just get joy out of being a dick or something?”

  Henry grinned. “You know it. After all, I passed on a real chicken dinner for you.”

  I scowled and pulled the headset off.

  Yawning, I looked out the window for the tenth time in five minutes. Somehow I’d managed to get through all my classes without collapsing, but final period was Earth Literature, and that was enough to bore me to sleep even on my best days. Through the window, the sun glinted off the river that ran alongside the school, meandering out from the delta in Gale Valley toward Escalante Bay. In the distance, the snow-covered peak of Mount Sharp disappeared into the clouds.

  And somewhere in between, GSAF had our dig site under lock and key. My fist clenched involunta
rily.

  A buzzing sensation in my back pocket brought me back to reality with a start. I threw a surreptitious glance up at the teacher, but her attention was fixed on dissecting the quote on the pyramidal display at the front of the room. Mrs. Cheng seemed to have enough enthusiasm about Death of a Salesman to make up for my own disinterest with plenty to spare.

  I quickly pulled the palmtop out of my pocket and held it under my desk, shielded from view by my knee. It was a text from Henry. He hadn’t been at the train station this morning. I figured he’d overslept, considering how late we’d stayed up. Of course, it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Henry to just not show up for school, in general. He didn’t seem to share my concern over losing our Academy scholarships.

  I found it, the text read. No further elaboration.

  I rolled my eyes. What? I texted back.

  The reply was almost immediate. D.H.’s address. Below this were map coordinates. I stared at them a moment, my eyes bulging.

  David Hassan lived here. In Tierra Nueva.

  Before my brain could process this information, Mrs. Cheng cleared her throat and loudly said, “Isaak.”

  I jumped. “Yeah?”

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

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

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

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

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