by Sugoi Maji
The thing about Mars is that it stops surprising you. After the first year, you learn its moods, its dust, its silence. You make peace with it. Logan Wells made peace with it. He was there because a law said he had to be. The 2039 Interplanetary Heritage Protection Act, a government checkbox that the suits at Tree of Life Corporation resented every time they cut his paycheck. His job was simple: show up, look around, sign off. Nothing of historical value here. Rubber stamp the destruction and go home. Home. Hannah. Nine years old, filling up sketchbooks with whatever her imagination conjured while her dad was 140 million miles away. The salary made the distance easier to justify. At least, that's what he told himself. Then Logan found the ruins. Something built. Something deliberate. Ancient hieroglyphs and geometry pressed into the Martian crust like a signature. A merkaba, symbols he couldn't read yet somehow recognized, and beneath it all, the quiet, deep feeling that he was the first human to see this. He wasn't. And back on Earth, Hannah was drawing things she had no way of knowing. Things that matched, almost perfectly, what her father was staring at through a visor on the surface of Mars. Someone at Tree of Life knows what's down here. They always have. Logan just became a problem they need to erase.
