Marguerite wasn’t being held against her will. She wasn’t trapped at this hotel. She was happy. She wasthriving.
And as we stared at each other, her question hanging in the air between us, it clicked into place. The realization felt like cold water washing over me in a crashing wave – like I couldn’t see or hear properly.
I had been so,sostupid.
I’d thought we were competing for Mom’s attention as a team. But at some point during the months of back-and-forth between Mom and Dad, Marguerite had decided we were up against each other. And worst of all, she’d been right.
She’d planned this, right down to letting me take the hit for her on the hacking job. After that, Mom had let my twin step up to take her place as the Graves heir, always at her side. Marguerite had written her own ticket out, and left me behind.
We’d been playing two different games, my sister and I.
Her lips parted on the vid screen, as though she was about to say something, but I cut the call before she got the chance to lie to my face.
After that, I let my own ambition take over, which is what I should have been doing from the start. I left the boarding school Dad had stashed me at and came home. I hired my own tutors, bringing in staff who could focus on teaching me everything I needed to become a shark like my mother. Like my sister.
I forced my way into meetings, and took over the sections of GravesUP my father had taken in the divorce but effectivelyabandoned. I used my muscle as a Graves to run them in reality, even if his board members and execs still seemed to be steering the ship on paper.
I made enemies, but I didn’t care, though I should have.
I’ve been in control of those businesses and their billions for four years now, since I was fourteen, which probably sounds wild – but this is what it means to be a Graves. This is the legacy my grandfather left, with his great deeds. To be a Graves, you have to find a way to leave your mark.
I thought I was getting one over on Mom and Marguerite. That one day I’d be able to show my mother what I’d done, howmuchI’d done all on my own. I might have been invisible in the media – they only ever report on the parties I attend, girls I’m seeing – but I was going to be very real in all the ways my mother cares about.
I was waiting for the day I could walk her through the years I’d spent running whole arms of the family empire. I was ready for the moment she’d bring me back in, and let me take on even more parts of this company that changes the world every day.
Marguerite had been learning by her side? Whatever. I’d done it all on my own.
I was ready to bump my sister aside as her heir. But there was one contingency I didn’t plan for.
Dad’s death.
Now, as I contemplate the low odds of a touching family reunion in the near future, I’m carefully submerging myselfin the Pax system, creeping through each section of it like some soldier in one of those movies where they cruise along underwater with only their eyes showing, then jump out and pull off some badass attack. Only I guess my helmet would be covered in daisies.
The invaders’ ops team, which seems to consist of at least two of the four people we saw on the bridge, are methodically working their way through all the registers Pax has in its systems. But why? What kind of information could they be after?
The UN Central Registers keep track of who’s who and who’s where on Mars. Some sections of the planet are still unclaimed, and if you want to get your hands on one of those, the deal is that you have to (a) find a way to get yourself here from Earth, and then (b) physically occupy the land you want to grab, and (c) register your claim with the UN.
You have to tell the UN everything, from who’s in your group to what kind of business you’re planning to carry on to your survey results, what kind of natural resources you find, the works.
It’s expensive – even for us – to get here, so the registers also reveal the various alliances, nations and corporations that are pooling their cash to make the trip. And fewer of them are doing it these days, since the only unclaimed land is the stuff that doesn’t hold much of value.
Every claim out there involves some kind of alliance, except for the GravesUP territory.
We were first, after all.
My grandfather Michael Graves was a visionary who built a pile of businesses, and changed just about every part of daily life on Earth. He was in housing, medicine, transport, tech – most people’s toothpaste probably has a GravesUP logo on it. And then he was the guy who tore up the United Nations Outer Space Treaty (yes, they actually called it that, ten points for originality) and got things on Mars jump-started thirty-one years ago.Nobodythought he could do it – that he could launch a rocket, that he and his team could make it to Mars.
And then one day he’d done it, and everyone else was caught with their pants down.
The Graves family have always been rule-breakers. And honestly, there’s every chance that humanity would still be stranded on Earth without someone having made a big move. Say what you will about us – and plenty of people do – but the reality is that humanity needed a lifeboat.Weactually built one, while everybody else debated what color the paint should be. We didn’t just dream about it – we did it.
The heavy hitters – the USA, China, Russia, India and some Euro alliances – were all up within five years of my grandfather’s team’s first landing, because it turns out that panic-buying a space program is actually more effective than you’d think, provided you have the budget. Then came more corporations, more countries, and finally the UN itself, about a decade after the party began. It took them a while to convince their members to cough up the cash.
The early claimants were called the Red Star Rebels, because they all became rule-breakers, once we were. It was kind of likethe old gold rushes, everybody grabbing land for themselves, except for one important difference, which was that in the case of Mars, nobody was already living here.
There are protesters who … let’s say they don’t see my grandfather the way I do. Who think everybody deserves a ride.
To them I say: if the Mars For All crew wants a future on the red planet for all of humanity, they need to let the best of humanity do the building first. Then we’ll talk about whether their kind can contribute.
