“Fine. You tell me when and where, and I’ll be there. If you need me for anything else, send me a text.” She didn’t know when her voice had become hard, so much like her mother’s. Better this than weak and wobbly. Either way, she hated it.
He opened his mouth to say something before seeming to change his mind. Instead, he retrieved the keycard he had dropped on the table. “Okay, if that’s what you want,” he replied in a quiet, dejected tone.
Trey left, the door shutting behind him with a resounding click, the sound so final it vibrated in her heart. This was it. They were on their way toward a different path, one that had a definite fork and no U-turns allowed.
Abandoned in this musty room with a rattling air conditioner, the steel in Catalina’s spine dissipated. Trey was wrong. This wasn’t what she wanted. She desired nothing more than to love and be loved, to not feel alone. She couldn’t stop the pain from spiraling inside her gut, nor stop the tears that threatened to spill all the time—even at work, which was one part leading to her breakdown and her boss demanding she take a few days off.
Unfortunately, the only way she knew how to deal with the situation was to either strike out at Trey for being the catalyst for why they were unhappy and… Well, this wasn’t entirely true. He may have brought the situation to a head, but there was unhappiness before their major blowout. So, she could either strike out at her husband or stuff everything down deep inside. It was debatable which one was worse.
But she was convinced this would be the last vacation they’d ever take together.
Chapter 3
Sasha
Goddamnit.
Someone had left the door to the testing room unlocked again. Sasha used the key provided by the front desk to lock it, testing the knob to make sure the room was secured. Yes, they were in Paradisio del Mar in beautiful Cancun, but it was as if half the team took this as permission to forget about standard protocols, putting their whole brain in vacation mode when this remained a work site.
Not Sasha, though. She never felt more of a reason to be at the top of her game. Ever since her friend and coworker, Reese, departed from Mankind2Mars with the words,I didn’t sign up for this,many things had fallen on her shoulders. Sasha never had so much pressure in her life, making her too busy to ponder anything for very long.
At least Dr. Cutchin remained. When she mentioned Reese’s departure and parting words, wondering if perhaps her friend was seeing things in a different light than her, Dr. Cutchin had half-heartedly lifted a hand before dropping it.We’re scientists. This iswhat we do, had been his response. He’d never steered her wrong before, and Sasha felt ninety percent confident that what they were doing was for the good of science and, therefore, the world. The end justified the means.
It was only during those quiet moments, usually while lying in bed at night, that the other ten percent of worry impeded her brain. If everything Zack Massey said was true, that all the i’s had been dotted and t’s had been crossed, especially when it came to collaboration with the Mexican government, then why all the secrecy? Why even create a front like Vacations4Fun if everything was on the up-and-up? And if this truly was science, and she was acting in the capacity of a scientist, then why was she making silly phone calls to let people know they had won a vacation? As Reese pointed out, Sasha hadn’t signed up for this either. It all sort of happened. She was too busy cashing her paychecks to pay for her father’s increasing medical bills.
When the email arrived informing them that the Zip-M operation was temporarily moving to Mexico for the next stage, she at first thought it was a joke. Why the hell would it be necessary to move to the other side of the border? And why, instead of getting straight answers to basic questions, did they always generate layers and layers of explanations that didn’t answer anything at all? The higher-ups’ reasoning that getting potential test subjects to agree to the next step was easier if done in the relaxing environment of Cancun rather than their official headquartersin Southern California didn’t make sense. Unless, of course, one suspected that all the oversight put on a company doing experimental studies would be less piercing in a place like a Mexican resort than in a lab in California. It made everything sound shady.
It wasn’t that Sasha didn’t trust her employer.
Well, maybe she didn’t trust them completely. It was hard to know what to believe when they couldn’t even be honest with Mankind2Mars employees. If no one knew anything, it was easier to just go along. Plus, Zack Massey seemed to thrive on doing things in a big, secret way. He was always making promises and predictions that only worked out a fraction of the time. When something was told with enough charisma, one couldn’t help but be eager to be a part of the experience rather than miss out on something big.
What they were doing went against the company’s original plan. Sasha still wasn’t sure why it was dropped. Originally, Zack wanted to set up a website and let people fill out pre-applications for being part of the first Martian colony, bragging he would receive hundreds of thousands at the drop of an announcement. Sasha didn’t doubt this was true. She’d witnessed what his weird online fanbase was willing to do for him. Even outside of this group of people, there would be adventure seekers or social media influencers who couldn’t see past their own perceived online image and analytics at being the first at something.
For whatever reason, mostly having to do with the legality of the situation, this original scenario never got off the ground. The only thing she heardwas, “Why would we risk our base of actual paying customers?”
Ah, okay. Test subjects and customers were not the same thing, and paying customers were clearly more valuable than the former. Instead, the team would be given access to those so desperate and excited for a vacation they didn’t care it was a few days long and didn’t bother to read any of the fine print—the same fine print that gave obvious clues that a person may be exposed to more than just a sales pitch. Instead, they could be part of once-in-a-lifetime technological and scientific history with Mankind2Mars.
After two years of exciting promises about a whole new society set up on the neighboring red planet, there was a lot of pressure on all of them. People were already rolling their eyes and creating sarcastic memes on social media regarding empty promises and cheering for its failure. Maybe Zack Massey also felt the pressure, which might explain why everything moved up in the timeline.
But Sasha didn’t have time to think about all of this. It wasn’t her job to worry about the larger picture. She’d stay in her little bubble and let the higher-ups worry about the ethics.
The company’s biggest concern was blending in. She wasn’t sure if this was for the local population, or because maybe they didn’t actually have the Mexican government’s permission as she suspected. Or maybe it was to not alarm their guests, who came for the free vacation. Either way, she was a little sad about not being able to wear her standard white labcoat. Luckily, she hired a seamstress to create a similar style coat, even adding extra pockets, in a tropical print her mom had purchased from a fabric store. The new lab coat turned out better than expected and she wondered whether Mankind2Mars would continue to let her wear the garment back in LA.
Until then, she looked forward to what the team would uncover about the subjects from the inquiries put to them during the presentation pitch. There was always a chance that nothing would come of it, but there was also a flutter of excitement due to having the opportunity to test everything she’d been working toward. She couldn’t help but experience a tiny thrill in her chest at the potential of it all. It almost made her forget about the weird, sinking uneasiness in her gut…
But she couldn’t entertain gut feelings. Instead, she’d blend in, make sure the small conference room door was locked and all important equipment, like the MASS (molecular atom scale and shrinkage) laser, was secured, and to keep her mind focused on the task at hand.
Chapter 4
Trey
Why was green the color most associated with jealousy? For Trey, the only color he saw was white—the exact shade of Catalina’s bikini. He was never more jealous of a garment in his life as it clung tightly to her curves.
When he first spotted her on the beach, the lower half of his jaw almost unhinged from the rest of his skull. It only proved he could be intimately familiar with his wife’s body and yet still find himself so wrecked at the sight of it he could chew his own arm off from frustration. As it was, he tripped over a kid playing in the sand nearby and almost stabbed the roof of his mouth with the wooden skewer of a fruit kebab he had picked up from the resort’s afternoon snack buffet. Being impaled while gawking at his wife wasn’t the way he wanted to go, especially when it wasn’t certain if Catalina would mourn his death or simply kick mounds of sand over his corpse as she strolled by.
This might be a deserving consequence for spying on his own wife—not that he was purposelywatching her. It was merely a case of the resort’s private beach area only being so big. Also, his eyes were always drawn to her, even during those occasions when she wasn’t wearing a bikini.
Trying to appear casual, Trey leaned against a beach cabana bar top. He waved away the bartender, choosing to finish the fruit kebab and moodily stew at the whole situation. From this safe distance, he allowed himself to take out his phone and snap a picture of Cat strolling along the shoreline. She was picture perfect as the wind gently teased her hair. A beach ball bumped into one of her shapely calves, and she bent to take it, returning it to a small child nearby. As she handed the ball back, she smiled at the kid and laughed at something said to her, looking like the woman he’d been missing in recent months—the one who was quick to smile and warm to everyone, including strangers.
