“Excuse me,” I muttered, extricating myself from the seat, untangling my legs, which seemed to get knotted up in the chair legs and my own uniform pants. I finally managed it and marched out of the room, angry enough to spit.
Colony One was the largest of Mars’s four established colony settlements, but it still wasn’t big, not by Earth standards, and there weren’t very many kids there. A hundred, tops. So we all went to one big school and chose courses based on our interests. We had age brackets but not really class groups. Apart from a handful of designated instructors, other workers and officials around the colony volunteered to teach special courses. By the time most of us got to be teenagers like me and Charles, we’d been all over the colony, we knew just about everyone, we’d learned about basic operations, and we had a pretty good idea what area of study we wanted to go into. I’d had my eye on the astrodrome as long as I could remember.
There wasn’t anything wrong with the way we did school, it was just different. And sure, we had cliq
ues and groups and older and younger kids and the rest of it. But this, George and the others … something else was going on here.
I needed to be alone, to think. But I didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t know where anything was. All I could do was pace back and forth between the dining hall and the dorm room. Back home I’d escape to the garage, take out my scooter. Or if I couldn’t do that because of a dust storm or whatever, I’d go to the atrium and run. Just to get away for a little while.
The thought of running here, three times heavier than I ought to be, made me ill. Even pacing along the corridor made me gasp for breath. This place was awful. Everything about it was awful.
There had to be a way out of this building. So I kept walking.
I found the garage where the bus had let us out last night. Now, in daylight, I could get a good look at it. It was another large room, like the dining hall, with a high ceiling and a row of distant windows to let in light. Daytime revealed a couple of transport buses, like the one that had carried us; some smaller vehicles that could carry three or four people lined up on the far side; and a row of two-wheeled individual transports that seemed useful and intriguing. Most of them looked muscle operated—foot pedals connected to chains and gears that turned rubber-coated wheels. But a couple of others seemed to have motors, like my scooter back home, but with wheels for riding on hard surfaces rather than hover lifts for going over sand. I wondered what I’d have to do to learn how to operate them. Maybe I couldn’t run too far right now, but one of those could probably help me work out some frustration.
In the meantime, a door to the outside stood open, and that was all I wanted at the moment. To get out.
Across the garage’s concrete floor, to the door, and through it, and I was outside.
Air blew at me like a gentle breath from a vent grating. A flat drive led away from the garage, around a curve and out of sight. Away from it on both sides spread a lawn, trimmed grass, bright green—just like the atrium’s lawn, I thought smugly.
Then I looked up. And up, and up, at no roof, no ceiling, no dome, nothing holding the air in. Open sky meant no air. I choked, gasped, covered my mouth and held my breath. I didn’t have my mask on, what was I doing outside without a mask? But then I remembered this was Earth. Breathable atmosphere. The atrium writ large. Had to remember that. And the sun, just hanging up there, huge, monstrous. I could feel it on my skin, a burning warmth. I could actually feel the UV rays burning me.
A shiver touched my spine, and I forced myself to take a slow, careful breath. Then another. I pressed against the wall of the garage and forced myself to stay there, to feel the sun and breathe the unfiltered air. The lawn, it kept going.
Everything was fine, just fine.
I shut my eyes, took several deep breaths, and imagined I was in the atrium back home. The air didn’t smell right, of course, and I couldn’t have said exactly why it didn’t smell right. But it wasn’t going to kill me. I’d had all the inoculations. When I opened my eyes again, I could almost stand away from the wall without feeling like I was going to fall down.
So. This was Earth.
“Polly?” Charles stood in the garage doorway, leaning out. “You okay?”
I pointed out to the endless lawn and roofless sky. “Why didn’t anyone warn us about this?”
“They did,” he said. “You didn’t listen.” He turned his own gaze up to the endless blue sky, ducking just a bit, as if he expected something to fall on him. “And the warnings don’t really help.”
I looked over his shoulder into the garage, expecting to see … something not good, anyway. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not yet. I told you to let me do the talking.”
“Then you should have stood up for us. Why didn’t you stand up for us?”
“I didn’t need to. The more attention you pay them, the more power you give them. It doesn’t matter what they say. We have as much right to be here as they do, and we’ll prove it in time without arguing.”
I slouched against the wall. This planet was sucking the life out of me. “I don’t know how much of this I can take.”
“Think about it for once in your life, Polly. These Earth kids—a lot of them have been to school together before, or they’ve known each other their whole lives through their families. They’re Earth’s elite, and they’re going to use that. Montes’s family owns the shuttle that we flew in on—they control forty percent of Earth’s suborbital transport. Elzabeth’s mother is a representative in the European Union government.”
“So? Why does any of that matter?”
“They’re used to getting their way. They think this is a game, and they expect to win. You don’t want them to win, don’t play the game. Understand?”
Stanton arrived then, a frowning automaton. “Mr. Newton, Ms. Newton, this area is off-limits to students without supervision,” she said in a kindly voice, like she was talking to toddlers. But her next line sounded like a threat. “Is everything all right?”
I opened my mouth, but Charles talked over me. “We were just taking a walk.”
“You should have asked permission or waited for the designated PE period. I won’t penalize you now, because I can understand that you may not be familiar with the rules here like the other students are. But from now on, don’t go anywhere without permission or supervision.” She gestured back to the building’s interior, indicating we should go inside.