As soon as the airlock cycled open, I was off, running across the endless red plain. It wasn’t allowed, but what could they do to me at this point? My boots hit the packed dirt of the trail in a steadily increasing rhythm as I pushed myself faster and faster. The servo fans in my suit began to wail as they worked to wick the hot air away from my moist skin.
“Jessica Li,” said the automated voice, “you are not permitted to leave the base alone.”
“So, ground me!” I hollered back.
But the automated voice only kept repeating its emotionless message. 
It was a hazy day, but then again, weren’t they all? The sky was pink, and the horizon obscured. Directly ahead was an ombre fading of dark red to light pink, like I ran towards a cloud, like I could run off the end of the world. The distorted reflection of my own face obscured the left side of my view and I jerked my chin to darken my visor until it went away.
“Hey,” crackled a voice over my comms. “I gave you a head start.” Meena, with that infuriating laugh of hers.
I put on a fresh burst of speed and fancied I could hear her footsteps far behind me. But there was not enough atmosphere to carry the sound of footfalls, or the swish of someone moving in a space suit. There was only the ragged sound of my own breathing echoing around inside my helmet, its sides too opaque for me to have much peripheral vision.
That meant I didn’t see Meena until she passed me, her long legs soaring over the ground in a way that looked like she wasn’t wearing her weights. Only she was; obviously she was. She wouldn’t be able to move that fast without them giving impact to her strides.
“Okay, I’m done warming up!” she announced. “You ready to race?”
Only a fool would take the bait. I put my head down and pressed myself to speed up yet again, barely gaining on her before she put her own head down and powered on ahead, leaving me behind in a cloud of red dust.
I did not have the patience for this today. She was lucky that this plain didn’t have any rocks, or else I would certainly have picked one up and hurled it at her. That was also against the rules, of course, even though our suits were so armored that she would barely feel it. I could imagine what Dr. Faroush would say when he had to add it to my record. “But Jessie, you always had such control. You were always so good at finding productive outlets for your aggression.”
“Productive outlets” hadn’t prevented the Space Council ruling to send me and the rest of the minors in the base home. While I’d toed the line and been a model citizen, adults on a planet millions of kilometers away had decided that while that was all well and good, the right thing to do was rip me away from my parents and return me to the cradle of humanity. Best to get all the kids on the next ship while the transit time from Mars to Earth was lowest, they reasoned. 
This also cut off all further discussion of having kids in space for a couple of decades. The next seventeen missions were planned and only one had room for kids. The one that would take us “home.” All of the space agencies were in agreement that having minors in low gravity was an experiment best put off at this time.
Meena was slowing down, probably to see if I wanted to jog beside her for a while. 
I didn’t. I kept right on plowing ahead, ignoring how the sweat streamed down the back of my neck and the muscles of my quads and calves burned. An alarm went off in my suit, informing me that I was consuming far more oxygen than it thought was proper. I didn’t care. There was enough oxygen in this suit for me to run to Olympus Mons and back, and now that I thought about it, maybe it was worth a try.
My muscles betrayed me, though. A stitch formed in my side and the burn in my calves warned me to cool it before I suffered a cramp. I might have enough oxygen to run to Olympus Mons, but not enough to crawl on my hands and knees back to the base, and my pride wouldn’t let me call for help if I went down.
I slowed my steps and dragged great lungfuls of air past my raw throat while my vision began to gray out. I wondered if I’d faint. That’d be real dignified.
“Jess?” Meena pulled up beside me and then dropped to a walk when I did. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said in a sharp tone that said otherwise.
She was smart enough not to question my words, though. “Me too,” she said in a tone that conveyed she was anything but.
So, she wanted to talk. I wasn’t sure I was up for that, but my steps bent towards the little cave that we’d staked out and declared our “hideout.” Yes, it was juvenile, but there was no one in the base under the age of fourteen. Someone had to play the role of the cute little kids.
Meena kept pace with me, and she kept silent as we walked around the large hollow and down the path into the cave.
I always had the impulse to take my helmet off once inside, as if my brain couldn’t tell the difference between the inside of a manmade base and a cave with no airlock, just a wide-open mouth. 
Two more suited figures turned towards us as we stepped into the darkness, my helmet visor auto adjusting to let in more light. I tried not to show my disappointment that the hideout was already occupied. I was trying to get away from people, breaking as many rules as possible to achieve that, and yet people were everywhere. On a planet with a population of two thousand, was a little solitude too much to ask?
“Jess,” said one of the seated figures over my comm.
I realized then that these two had been talking on a restricted channel. They wanted their privacy, too, but there was no reproach in Pramila’s voice. That was who’d spoken, Pramila Singh, video blogger extraordinaire.
That made the other person Lena Urieva; those two were the odd couple. Gregarious Pramila was a nonstop talker and I hadn’t been sure Lena really knew English until she had to give a report in class. If she could avoid talking, she did.
“Guys? Are you in the hideout?” That was Esi Lebna, which meant that Nausheen Tengku and Lupita Cortez were also on their way. 
Because why stay in the base when we could find a place more crowded with less privacy? A place where we had to wear bulky spacesuits and not see each other’s faces and probably end up in a fight because someone used the wrong inflection over the radio?
By now I was seething, and I was really glad there were no rocks nearby. Normally running flat out burned the anger out of my system, but today it was as if it had merely burned the anger in deeper.
By now I was seething, and I was really glad there were no rocks nearby. Normally running flat out burned the anger out of my system, but today it was as if it had merely burned the anger in deeper.
Pramila’s helmet angled towards me as I stomped in and threw myself against the wall, then slid down to sit on the floor, the sound of suit fabric against stone roaring loud in my helmet.
Meena sat down more primly, folding her legs under herself like she was a perfectly balanced robot executing a command.
Three more figures appeared in the entry and all strode in and flopped down like they owned the place. 
I suppose they did as much as any of us, but the thought only stoked my anger more.
“Jess?” said Pramila. “You’re trending.”
“I don’t care.”
“Your coach is saying he’s going to let you try out for a spot on Team USA even though it’s past the deadline. Or… it will be, once we get back to Earth. He says that if you pass the physical—”
“I don’t care,” I repeated. “And I probably won’t pass.”
“What kind of team?” Esi asked.
I resisted the urge to fling a handful of dust at her visor. “Blinkball,” I said, knowing this would open a can of worms I did not want to deal with.
“What’s that?”
Exactly. I didn’t want to have to explain my life before Mars to her. When I was in a good mood, I liked Esi just fine. She was eternally curious and constantly asking questions. When I was in a bad mood, I did not have the patience to handle that. 
“A game,” I snapped.
“Ooooh,” she said, as if this were some deep revelation. “A game with teams?”
Now I did move to throw dust at her but was blocked by Lupita, who threw her arm across my chest, pinning my arm against my side. 
“Stop,” she ordered me. “She didn’t do anything.”
Everyone else in the cave shifted with discomfort, no doubt bracing for a fight.
But I didn’t want to fight. I flopped back against the wall. “Yeah, it’s a game with teams. You could just search the term, you know?”
“I did,” said Esi. “You, like, play on a court with light up squares? That change colors and… wow, it’s kinda cool.”
I was so gratified that she found my former life “kinda cool,” but with Lupita still pinning me, I couldn’t express said gratitude.
“Guys look at this,” said Esi. She activated her projector and some footage of me at the California state finals winked on.
I averted my gaze, but everyone else watched me dodge around two opposing players, toss the ball into the air, and spike it hard enough to sail to the other end of the court, where it landed on a green square that went yellow to show we’d scored a point. The winning point. That was the year we’d won our division. That was the little league, though, that I’d played in until I was twelve.
Everyone else in the hideout cheered.
I folded my arms across my chest. Why were we talking about me? Meena was a sprinter. Lena was a dancer. Esi was a gymnast. Lupita was a soccer player. All of us were athletes of some kind or other; we wouldn’t have passed the physicals to come to Mars if we were anything less. Why did they have to be paying attention to me?
“I’m not going to make the team,” I repeated. “Not with the amount of bone and muscle loss I’ve already got.”
And that was why nobody wanted to talk about themselves. We’d all worked our butts off to stay in shape. High impact exercise, low impact, high intensity intermittent, with weights, and with heavier weights. None of us had managed to meet the targets that the medical community wanted us to maintain if our time on Mars was considered “sustainable.”
I wished I could get up and walk back to the base, but odds were they’d follow me. They were “supportive” like that.
“I’ve never seen that game before,” said Lupita. “So that’s how you avoided murdering your classmates back at home?”
Despite knowing it was stupid, I whacked her on the side of the helmet, hard enough to make it ring.
“Jessie!” snapped Pramila. “Seriously. It’s not like you’re the only one getting sent home.”
“Sent away from home,” I snapped.
“Yeah,” agreed Lena. “That’s a better way of putting it. This is home. This is where our families are.” She’d used up a month’s supply of words in less than twenty seconds.
“At least you can go live with your dad,” said Pramila. “And I can live with my mom. Esi, who are you going to live with? Meena? Nausheen? Jess?”
That was everyone who had both parents stationed in the Mars base.
“Grandparents,” said Esi. “With my cousins. I mean, it’s good in a way, right?”
“My uncle,” said Nausheen. “He’s not much older than me, though. It’ll be kinda weird.”
“Grandparents here, too,” said Meena. “Until I can go to university.”
Everyone looked at me.
“Um… grandparents will be my guardians,” I said, “but they agreed to that because they think I’ll be off playing blinkball.” I was pretty sure they didn’t want to raise a teenager.
“Well, I’m looking forward to seeing my best friend again,” said Meena.
Great, now the conversation was turning to the pluses of getting sent to Earth. I couldn’t take it. I pushed up onto my feet and walked out.
There was a reason I knew that there were no rocks anywhere on this plain or in the hideout, I’d collected all of them with my parents to set up a little cairn in memory of my brother. 
There was a reason I knew that there were no rocks anywhere on this plain or in the hideout, I’d collected all of them with my parents to set up a little cairn in memory of my brother. It had taken months of paperwork and then two weeks of driving a little rover all over the place grabbing every rock we could find.
That little cairn was back near the base, on the far side of the airlock. Here I could get some measure of privacy. At the base of the cairn was a plaque that read “In loving memory of Stephen James Li” with the dates that delineated his disturbingly short lifespan. I’d been twelve when he died, and back then he’d been five years older. Now he was only one year older than me, and in two years, he’d be younger.
“Jessica,” came my mother’s voice over the comm.
“What?” I said, fully aware that I was inviting a rebuke.
“I see where you are so I’m going to waive your requirement to be with someone.”
Shame welled up inside me. “Thanks.”
“And I know you need time to think and process, but please don’t go yelling at your friends.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. Apologize to them. This is hard on everybody.”
Including her. Especially her. You need to stop making this all about yourself, I added mentally. “I know. I’ll apologize.”
“All right. Twenty minutes, and then I’m sending Dad up to check on you.”
“Got it.”
It had been Stephen’s dream to come to Mars, and for me to stay home in California and play blinkball. “To become the famous Jessie Li!” he’d declare, opening his mouth and making the breathy sound that was supposed to be a crowd roaring. He’d inherited Mom’s rounder eyes in Dad’s shade of brown and liked to wear his hair so short that it stood up on end. Stephen was the child my parents had always dreamed of, while I was the misfit jock who could do the same higher math and science but couldn’t manage to care about it.
When Stephen had died after being hit by a car, my parents had gotten so deep in their depression that it was scary. They’d nearly lost their spot in the Mars program and did so little housework that our house started to look like an abandoned squat.
Until I figured out that I could take Stephen’s place. When I declared I wanted to go to Mars, my parents started to turn things around. By the time I’d passed all the physicals, we were a family like we’d never been before. I tapered off playing blinkball and instead had dinner with them every night. We talked about school and my grades and what I’d experience on the Martian frontier.
I wasn’t bitter about living Stephen’s life. Not at all. The problem was that I wasn’t ready to stop, because stopping would mean letting him go, letting him be dead and my parents be up here alone. His existence would fade to memory and eventually that would disappear too.
I didn’t want to be Jessie Li. I wanted to be Stephen’s sister for the rest of my life, but going back to Earth, even if I pursued the subjects he’d loved and made my mark in those fields, that wasn’t really doing him justice. I supposed that if I did well enough to come back to Mars as an adult, maybe that would allow me to pick up the thread of his life again, but that was a longshot. Beyond a longshot.
“Fight the good fight,” I heard him say in my mind. He was the one who always thought my sport was a battle, a deathmatch between sworn rivals. The way he talked about it, I was a gladiator, not an athlete.
I had fought the good fight, though, writing letters to NASA and my senators and representatives. I’d blogged with Pramilla and allowed every minute aspect of my life on Mars to be made open to the public in our desperate bid to prevent the inter-agency resolution that would call us all back to Earth. Our parents had written and sent messages and conducted studies that showed we’d still be able to live normal adult lives. We’d all fought the good fight and lost.
A suited figure stepped around the corner, taking it wide so that I would see him coming. Dad. I knew it hadn’t been twenty minutes and that this wasn’t his break time. I was disrupting everyone’s life today.
“Jessie,” he said. “Can we talk?” His voice was husky with emotion.
It wasn’t like I could say no to him. I’d already thrown dust at people and run off. What options did I have left? Leaping off the cliff to my right and plummeting to the bottom of the Valles Marineris? Even when angry, I wasn’t that nuts.
“I know you’re not happy about having to go back, but I think this is the most fair to you.”
Was I ready to hear his twisted logic on this? I wasn’t calm enough to admit it wasn’t twisted, so the answer to that question was probably no.
“It wasn’t right for you to give up your dreams for ours. I’m sorry we let you do it.”
“Dad—”
“Just listen. Our job was and is to support you and help you achieve the things you want in life. Your mom and I have already achieved what we wanted. I know we never learned much about your sport or went to your games, and I’m sorry. I can promise you we’ll watch them all from now on.”
“They’re not going to let me play anymore.”
I couldn’t see his face, but I could tell from his posture that I’d just twisted the knife. Here he’d explained to me how he was going to be okay with all this, and I’d just taken his main justification away. If I really had sacrificed the life I’d planned out before, then they’d literally taken everything from me.
I let that thought bore through my chest and my shoulders sagged. “Sorry. I’m not sure I want to play, is what I mean.”
“Jessica, you’ve been doing all of the exercises your coach laid out for you every day. You still doodle play strategies on your tablet. That sport is a big part of who you are.”
Stephen wouldn’t want me picking a fight with Dad, so I just shrugged, exaggerating the movement so that he could see even while I wore a spacesuit.
“Your coach has left three messages. He’s excited to get you back.”
“Yeah…” Maybe the coach would want me on Team USA because a Martian would be good publicity? That made me feel even worse.
“But you do what you need to do. You live your life.”
He was doing his best to help me through this, and deal with it himself. He had no way of knowing that was the worst thing he could possibly say. I blinked back tears and hoped he didn’t look at my biofeed and see how upset I was.
Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. I couldn’t tell from what he said next, which was, “Well, you know where to find me. I’m here if you need me.” Then he left, trudging back around to the airlock.
The other six were returning from the hideout and though none of them glanced my way, they did talk over an open channel that I picked up through my proximity.
“I’m doing a farewell blog tonight. I think we should all talk about what’s next for us and say thank you to our space agencies and seem all mature about this.”
“Maybe Jess could demonstrate some blinkball moves?”
I did not want to talk to them, but my anger had cooled enough that I could say, “Sure.” The word sounded flat and dead enough, though, that they didn’t pursue any further conversation, just got into the airlock and went back down to the base.
I imagined Stephen standing next to me, something I rarely had the courage to do, but I needed him right now.
“You didn’t kill anyone did you?” He’d always asked me stuff like that and teased me about having an aggressive temper. “Is Earth going to be safe when you go back?”
If I really believed it was him, I would have laughed. As it was, I merely clung to the thin thread of imagination that conjured him up.
“You know I lived my whole life on Earth, right? I kinda have a connection to the place. And it’s a great planet. Class M, practically made for humans. Or humans were made for it; I don’t want to start any major ideological debates, here.”
He always chattered when he could see I was upset, and back when he was alive I’d found it annoying. Now I missed it more than anything.
“Hey, you’re gonna be all right, sis. You know I’ll be around whenever you need.”
He wouldn’t though. My memories of him were already fading, and whenever I watched old videos, I risked having the memories of making them overwritten by the pixels on the screen. Time was a yawning chasm between us that grew wider with every passing year. Someday, when I wanted to tell my own kids about their uncle, I wouldn’t even have all the memories I had right now.
“Jess!” That memory came so loud that I practically heard it through my comms. I could almost see Stephen standing in front of me, the edge of the Martian canyon stretching off into the distance behind them. “Don’t wallow.”
He was not a fan of “wallowing,” a word that was so old fashioned that I’d had to look it up the first time I heard him use it.
“You’re terrible at wallowing, you know that? Go take out your aggression on a punching bag or something. You’re coloring all the memories of me with this sad stuff. Don’t make me into a sad figure. It goes against my very nature.”
I chuckled a little at that, then considered the possibility I was slipping into some form of psychosis. Dr. Faroush would not be happy to see me giggling at snarky comments from my long dead brother.
When the announcement had been made this morning that we were going to Earth, that the last round of deliberations was over and we were all slated to be on the next ship, disbelief had passed in a flash. I’d definitely moved on to anger right away. Maybe now it was time to move on to acceptance.
I didn’t feel ready, but I also knew that I was reaching my limit of time spent on the surface and Dr. Maki would have my hide if I went over. The space program might not be able to punish me worse than they already had by sending me away, but Dr. Maki’s wrath was a level of punishment beyond even that.
“I’ll see you later,” I whispered to Stephen’s memorial.
I wanted to be alone, as did everyone else, I was sure. That was hard to manage in a base as small as ours. So, when Meena came to sit near me in the mess, I didn’t glare at her or try to make her uncomfortable. I wasn’t over anger yet, but I was managing my rage. 
Sort of.
“You all right, Jess?” she asked.
Yeah, that ignited my temper, but there wasn’t any dust to throw in here and there were two dozen adult witnesses at the other tables. All of them gave us a wide berth, which might have been because of the news this morning, but wasn’t necessarily. Being a kid in what was effectively a research outpost meant being a freak. The other adults didn’t dislike us so much as not understand how to talk to us, and whenever two or more of us were together, it made people nervous.
Meena hadn’t done anything wrong so my anger was out of place. I needed to be grown up enough to understand that much, at least. 
Since I couldn’t punish her with underserved spite, I gave her honesty instead, fully aware that was almost as bad. “No,” I said. “I’m not all right.”
“What are you watching on your tablet there?”
“Games,” I said. “Matches played by Team USA this last season.”
“Oh…”
“You looking up race statistics and stuff?”
“Hmm? Why? Oh, because you think I could be a sprinter?”
“Yeah.”
She shook her head. “No, not after my last bone scan. Nobody’s going to let me run for their track team. Esi’s not going back to gymnastics or Lena to dance. We gave it all up for Mars, you know?”
Which meant that if I could get my blinkball career back, I was luckier than they were. That, finally, broke through my wall of rage and let the grief come pouring through. “Sorry,” I whispered.
“What? It’s not your fault. I mean, it’s not like we go back to nothing. Just not the same life that we left, and we always knew that would be the case eventually.”
Meena was seventeen, edging ever closer to the legal age of majority and the gray area that politicians had warred over back on Earth. When was childhood over and when were adult children supposed to fly the very expensive, taxpayer supported nest? She’d been staring down the possibility of being shipped back for longer than I had. She’d known this next ship to Earth would almost definitely have her on it regardless of what the space agencies decided about the rest of us.
“That game does look fun,” she said, nodding to my tablet.
“Yeah, maybe. I’m just kind of annoyed watching this.”
“Oh yeah?” She peeled open her carton of yogurt and granola and dipped her spoon in. 
“The captain, Lori Kagan, she was, like, my biggest rival in her dreams. She was always trying to outdo me and it was pathetic. Sorry, that sounds arrogant, huh?”
“It was like you trying to beat me in a footrace?” She lifted one perfectly sculpted eyebrow.
I deserved that. “Yeah, basically.”
“Truly pathetic then.” She winked at me.
“I could beat her, but now that she’s had years to basically dominate the team, there’s no way I can break back in.”
“I’m sure you’ll find a way. You don’t exactly take no for an answer.”
“Sure, so I can crack my head open by beating it against that wall. I’m really good at that.”
“You’re so hard on yourself, seriously. You’re the most competitive person I know, and may I remind you we live in a Martian base that only a tiny percentage of the population will every qualify to live in? Even by those standards, you seriously don’t give up, no matter what the challenge is. If you want to become captain of the team and take them to international glory, I’m sure you’ll manage, or at least make the rest of the team regret turning you down.”
I didn’t know if she meant this as a compliment or was slapping me upside the head with honesty. She daintily crunched away at her granola, looking kind and sweet as always.
Nausheen came over, still tugging at her headscarf to make sure it was straight. Esi came around the corner and joined us. I knew Lupita and Lena would be along eventually. They were clearly over me losing my temper, but this was still a good time to apologize.
Jared slipped into a seat at the end of the table and quashed that impulse for me. We did have boys in the base, too, but they tended to give us a wide berth. Jared was one of the only ones to brave coming to our table, and the least we could do was reward the effort.
“You guys all packed to leave?” he asked.
I clenched my jaw and looked away.
Meena, much to my shock, said, “No. Got anything nice to say?”
“All I’ve got is honesty.”
I so wanted to kick him under the table.
“Ten days from now, we’ll be on a ship back to Earth. Six months from now we’ll be re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, six months and four hours—”
“I know how the spacecraft work!” I snapped. “I qualified to be here too, and unlike you, I actually tried to stay.” I expected he’d bristle at that last swipe.
Instead he rolled his eyes. “You really think they would’ve let us stay even if you guys had met their benchmarks? Earth has enough problems of its own without having to pay for dumb luxuries—”
“Like us being with our families,” said Meena. “Yeah, real indulgence.”
“Out here it is, yeah. Look, you guys can get all mad if you want, but there is nothing we can do about being sent home.” He was at least smart enough to start gathering his things as he said this. 
Meena held her chin at an angle that indicated she might lose her temper, and as amazing as it would be to see, I sensed it would be horrific too. Someone needed to slap Jared, though.
This conversation, at least, was better than watching more game footage and getting progressively more annoyed by it. Dr. Faroush was going to think I had a rage disorder. That was the problem with being a fighter who’d lost the fight for good. I had no other outlet. Acceptance was claiming me like a hard slap in the face.
I collected the remains of the meal I’d eaten without tasting and got up to recycle them, only to have my gaze fall on Commander Ichi. He was seated by himself in the corner; being the base commander was a lonely position, but I knew there was more than him being everyone’s boss that set him apart today.
Usually he noticed when someone stared at him and would look up and return the look with a smile and a nod. Today he only stared off into space, spooning soup into his mouth and swallowing it automatically.
He was a very private person, but there were few secrets in a base this small. I might not have known all the details, but I did know that his son had died recently, and his daughter-in-law had died a few years ago. That left a toddler son without any family on Earth, and today’s decision by the international coalition of space agencies ensured that Earth was where that baby would stay.
I knew how hard Japan had fought for a manned spaceflight program, and how much honor Commander Ichi’s rise to base commander conferred on his home country. The man I watched now was having his heart slowly ripped in two, loyalty to country pitted against loyalty to his own flesh and blood.
Past disbelief, anger, and acceptance I was finding a new frontier: despair. Perhaps this was part of growing up, learning that the world was so much bigger than me that there was little I could do to affect the forces in play, even when those forces shattered the lives of people all around me.
Commander Ichi finally noticed my stare and looked up at me, bobbing his head and flashing a friendly smile. I bobbed my head in return and fled the mess hall.
Mom got all of us sleeping pills from Dr. Maki, but they didn’t do anything other than make me really, really wish I could fall asleep. Drug haze dragged at my consciousness, but my consciousness was having none of it.
I lay with my eyes closed, not moving, on my super cushy bed. Of all the things I’d miss about Mars, this bed would rank right below feeling like I’d failed to realize my brother’s greatest dream. These beds were top of the line, state of the art. I wasn’t sure quite how they worked, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if little nanotech machines swarmed the interior, making sure it stayed the perfect ratio of squishiness and firm support.
Not even this bed mixed with drugs could help me sleep, though. I had an obligatory appointment in the morning with Dr. Faroush, and I had a guess about what he would say. He’d leaned on me hard about living Stephen’s life. “That will only work as a coping mechanism for so long,” he’d said. “Your brother was only seventeen, and you can but guess what his dream would have been at twenty-five or thirty. Sometimes the best ways to honor the dead are to get on with our own lives.”
I’d always nodded like that was sage advice and then ignored it the moment I walked out the door. 
Now it occurred to me that one of Stephen’s top priorities, if he were still alive, would be to watch me live my life, like he had when he was alive. Mom and Dad told me that when I was born, he’d screamed with joy and spent the first week that I was home sleeping on the floor of my room. Our parents had explained to him over and over that I wasn’t a doll or a toy, and he seemed to understand that and yet he still watched me with fascination.
Stephen was who had coached me on how to walk. He’d started his coaching when I was a month old, so it was a long course of study before I could toddle ten months later. He’d played dolls tea party with me and watched silly kids movies that he was too old for because I asked him to.
And he loved to see me fight. When I was mad, he was energized. When I took out my aggressions on the blinkball court, he’d cheer and shout, probably at about the same volume as he’d screamed when he learned I’d been born.
The problem was, the more I watched Team USA play, the more annoyed I got. I didn’t want to join up with them, and I did not want to have to play second fiddle to Lori.
When it became clear that lying still wasn’t achieving anything, I got up and paced my room. It was only three steps in any direction; the place was the size of a closet.
“Find a healthy outlet,” was what Mom always said to me when I was angry.
With a sigh of resignation, I sat down at my desk, got out my tablet, and started sketching out blinkball plays. I began by thinking of counters to Lori’s plays, and then I branched out, getting creative with all the other ways I could lead a team on the offensive.
Bit by bit, my anger began to ratchet down. It wasn’t cooling and it wasn’t leaving me, but it was congealing from rage into quiet resolve. 
As I sketched out a play that would require someone to run the length of the court in record time, my hands slowed.
“Find a healthy outlet,” Mom would say.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” was how Stephen put it.
I sat back, then opened a channel to all my friends. “Hey… so I’m sorry about how I was today. Thanks for being cool about it. Um… soooo… I have a favor to ask.”
At 0600 hours, I was in the gym with the holographic projectors set up to cast a blinkball court on the floor. It wasn’t ideal because the gym didn’t have the padded walls, but it would suffice for now.
Esi was the first person to show up and her face lit up at the sight of the court. “Are you going to teach us some plays?” she wanted to know.
“Yeah, that’s the idea.”
“Oh, this is so cool.” She hopped on the balls of her feet and clapped.
Nausheen staggered in, still not fully awake, but she had her sport hijab on, the one with elastic to keep it in place. Meena was right on her heels, looking serene as always. Lupita came in rubbing her eyes and Lena was her usual, quiet, ghostly self.
“We playing blinkball?” she asked.
“Yes… well… okay.” I braced myself for their laughter. “This isn’t a sport for me. It’s battle. I know we all feel like we lost big time yesterday, but I have an idea to keep waging war on the system once we get home.”
I had all of their attention now. Bleary eyes blinked at me with interest.
“Okay, so here’s how the court works.” I sketched it out to them, pointing to how the squares changed color, shaping where we were allowed to run, where we had to keep clear, and which ones we had to hit to score. “There’s a really common pattern that shows up at least once a match, and I think I have a strong way to play it. Meena, I need you to start there—” I pointed “—and get there—” I pointed to the other end of the court “—in the time it takes for me to bounce the ball off that square to score and to Esi.” I sketched out everyone’s positions and they all stepped out onto the court.
I bounced the ball that I’d had printed up. One of Stephen’s last gifts to me had been the calculated density and material of a blinkball that would work on Mars, where gravity is only 38% that of Earth. That gravitational variance itself was the single most critical reality that had brought us to this point.
I’d kept not just the scan of the piece of paper on which Stephen had made his calculations but the paper itself. Perhaps I was looking to this day all along.
“Ready?” I asked.
Everyone nodded. I threw the ball and everyone began to move.
The first time wasn’t too disastrous.
The second try was definitely better.
The third made me rethink the strategy and switch people around.
The fourth try was when the magic happened. Esi caught the ball and bounced it back to score again. Lena leapt over a field of red squares and passed the ball to Meena. Everyone moved as if we’d been practicing for months.
In a way we had. We knew each other better than most teams did, because we didn’t just exercise together. We ate together, went to school together, hiked out to the hideout together, piled into each other’s tiny rooms to watch cheesy movies together.
“All right,” said Meena, bouncing the ball onto another square to score another point. “Am I overconfident, or was that amazing?”
“You’re probably overconfident,” I said, pausing to catch my breath and let my vision clear. “But we can do this. Here’s the plan. The report that got us all scheduled to go back to Earth said that we may not have the muscle or bone density to—”
“—engage in strenuous activities in full gravity,” said Lena. Her eyes were narrowed and she watched me. 
“We’re not going to win that argument by gathering more data. We’ve already tried that,” I said. “But if we form a blinkball team and enter the international championships and beat a few national teams, that might change things. We reach Earth six months from now, and we can practice on the journey, and then we’ll have about three months on Earth before the first rounds of the international tournament start. Maybe it’s crazy, but… who’s with me?”
Pramila nodded to herself. “We create a spectacle. We do everything we’ve been told not to do while we’re here. We draw attention to ourselves. We turn the international championships into the first ever interplanetary championships.”
“But these are other national teams,” said Esi. “Will they even let us make our own team? And if they do, how do we stand a chance?”
“Oh, they’ll let us make a team,” I said. “You know how none of you had ever heard of blinkball before?”
People looked away, biting lips and scuffing shoes. Shaming them hadn’t been my goal, though.
“The World Blinkball Federation wants the sport to be known,” I said. “Well known. They’ve been working for ages to get this first international tournament put together.”
“So,” said Pramila, “when we can get people from around the world to watch our matches... The first ever Team Mars? We can find a sponsor or two.”
“I mean, this may be a disaster,” I said. “But I’m not in the mood to just go back to Earth and never see you guys again.”
“And we need to show the world that life is about more than bone density scans,” said Lupita.
Everyone was nodding now. 
“Right,” I said. “We do battle. We take the fight to Earth and see how many countries we can conquer. Sorry, maybe that’s too aggressive...”
Before I could think of better words, though, my friends all broke into applause.