Zed went back to his seat at the grow silo but didn’t attempt to get any more schoolwork done. His mind was reeling from everything Johns had said. He hadn’t felt much hope of his situation changing before, but now he had confirmation that it truly was hopeless.

  No one was coming. Nothing would change.

  His mind kept looping on the thought of things staying like this for the next two years. It washed over him again and again, wave after wave of loneliness that he felt helpless to change.

  Or was he?

  For the next several hours, Zed sat there. Bit by bit, an idea began to take root. The idea grew into a plan and a sense of relief. There was something he could do. It was a long shot—the longest of long shots—but it was something. A glimmer of hope returned to his world.

  When Zed was six, he had stolen a cookie while sitting in the nurse’s office of the school he’d been attending at the time. With so many moves over the years, he didn’t actually remember where that had been, but he remembered that day.

  He’d felt so guilty that he’d thrown up the cookie shortly after eating it and then given a tearful confession to the shocked nurse. She had wiped his tears and thanked him for coming clean. The nurse had tried to suppress a crooked smile as she warned him never to steal again.

  As far as Zed knew, she had never mentioned the incident to his parents. He spent the next few days waiting for his mother’s wrath to fall, but it never came.

  As Zed lay in his bed, waiting for midnight, he realized that this wasn’t the same kind of sick he felt now. This wasn’t a twisting stomach ache brought on by guilt.

  Sure, he was about to break rules far beyond whatever code governed cookie stealing, and yes, he certainly hoped his parents never found out about it, even though it was pretty much impossible that they wouldn't.

  This time, the knot in his guts was pure excitement, and he recognized it. Adrenaline, not guilt, was driving his heart rate tonight.

  For the last two weeks, Zed had been different. Even his parents had noticed. They’d made some comments about being happy he’d finally accepted the realities of life, etc. Zed smiled and nodded, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

  He seemed at peace because he finally had a purpose. That purpose was to not accept the status quo in any way. He didn’t like where he saw life going, and he was going to do whatever it took to change it.

  Zed didn’t generally like taking risks, particularly when they involved his life, but this need to shift the trajectory of his life off its current path had changed the balance of what he felt was an acceptable amount of danger.

  There was no doubt that danger was exactly what the crater cave held. It also held the only hope Zed could find for a way out of his current situation.

  The last two weeks had been filled with secret preparations. When he was supposed to be doing his homework, he had mostly been poring over scans of the crater cave passages. The path that Jacob Ens and his team had taken still appeared to be the only viable option. Zed just had to hope his fate wouldn’t be the same.

  He’d also been stocking up on supplies. He felt bad about it, but he had taken Johns's custom sample case from under his workbench. Zed hadn’t asked for permission, but he didn’t think Johns would mind if he knew that Zed was going to put the case to good use.

  Getting to the chamber entrance was going to be the easy part, at least relatively speaking. Once there, he would have to find a way to navigate the narrow tunnel that connected the main tunnel to the mysteries hiding inside.

  He had a solution, or at least a potential one, but it came with certain risks that Zed really didn’t want to think about until he had to.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Based on what he remembered of his trek to the crater cave entrance with Johns, it would take about forty-five minutes to get there. Zed figured another 15 minutes to lower himself into the cave itself. That was where timing got a little fuzzy.

  He’d poured over the scans that the drones had sent back, and he had conducted virtual spelunking expeditions to get a feel for the space, but Zed knew that was a far cry from actually traversing the rough interior of the cave in a turtle suit while carrying gear. Even with the suit's exoskeleton leg augmentation to ease the load, it was going to be slow going, and that assumed everything went to plan.

  Another major risk scratching at the back of Zed’s mind was the oxygen supply. Since he was going by himself, bringing extra pack refills wasn’t practical. He could refill from the Chariot right before going in, but after that, he had approximately 12 hours to get in and out. In theory, that was plenty of time unless something went wrong with his attempt to get into the side chamber. But there was no point in dwelling on that now. Aside from just surviving, the real time constraint was whether or not he could get back before he was missed.

  And that was why Zed found himself lying awake, watching the clock in his overlay tick down the seconds to midnight. That was the time he had decided was the earliest he could sneak out without drawing the attention of his parents. Maybe it was the lack of social media, but most people in Naug seemed to hit the hay fairly early. The downside was he probably only had until six the next morning to get back. He wasn’t too worried, though. There were plenty of excuses he could come up with if his parents even noticed he was gone.

  Zed’s visual alarm went off. The default CIG alarm was apparently his AGI avatar, in this case, Douglas, doing the old floss dance until it was stopped.

  “OK, Zoomer,” Zed muttered under his breath as he swiped at the alarm controls. That told him plenty about whoever had designed the software. Zoomers sure loved their emotes.

  Zed slid silently out of bed and took the two steps to his bedroom door. He cracked it ever so slightly and listened. He could hear his father snoring like a jackhammer. Music to his ears on this particular night.

  Two more steps took Zed to the front door. He slid it open just enough to fit his body through, smiling at the quiet roll of the door on its track. A few days ago, the door would have produced a corpse-waking screech if he’d attempted the same motion. His dad had been so proud of his “surprising initiative” when he’d been caught spraying oil into the offending rollers. He felt a little bad knowing his own motivations weren’t quite so noble. Not bad enough to change his mind, though.

  Zed closed the door with care and turned to make his way down the dim hall. He needed to get to the hangar bay. He’d made sure to drop by at the end of his shift and check that there was at least one usable Chariot in the exterior airlock. He didn’t have authorization to cycle the giant hangar airlock, but if a Chariot was parked in the section that was left out in the Martian atmosphere while the interior door was shut, he could just walk right up to it, as long as he approached from the outside.

  He couldn’t use the turtle suit hub nearest that hangar, though. That would force him to walk through too many high-traffic sections of Naug, and he didn’t want to risk bumping into anyone if he could help it.

  Instead, he turned toward the suit hub nearest his quarters. It would force him to walk a ways around the outside of the crater rim, but since there weren’t that many exterior windows, it wasn’t likely anyone would spot him. Sure, there were exterior cameras, and if someone actually watched the footage, they might see him on a late-night stroll, but that chance seemed remote. It wasn’t like there was an exterior threat of attack on Mars.

  Zed entered the round room and saw that there were half a dozen suits docked. Instead of climbing into one, he turned toward the lockers to the left of the entrance. He used his CIG to verify his identity, and the locker farthest to the right popped open, revealing the ribbed metal surface of Johns’s sample case. He pulled it out and took it to another section of the curved wall, this one facing the exterior. A handle protruded from a square hatch, which Zed grabbed and pulled. It pivoted out from its base like an old package deposit. He placed the case inside and pushed the hatch closed. With a quarter turn of the handle, the little airlock cycled, and Zed heard the exterior hatch unlock with a dull pop.

  Satisfied, Zed climbed into the nearest suit. When it had finished its familiar constriction and release, Zed stood up straight and retrieved his case from the waiting airlock shelf.

  So far so good, he thought. The odds of discovery were low at this point. Now he could focus his attention on the adventure itself. Zed started his long march to the hangar.

  A smile spread across Zed's face as he walked. This was the first time he’d truly done something on his own since arriving on Mars. Not just doing something alone, but genuinely striking out to accomplish something without anyone’s help or, in this case, approval. He allowed himself a brief moment to daydream about the reaction he’d get if he really did come back with proof of life on this desolate rust ball. No one would remember how he had obtained it, just that he had. At least, that was the hope.