The alarm doesn’t sound like a drill. It sounds like sand in a tin, three dry rattles, then a pause, then three more.

You kick out of your bunk in Hearth, the hab of Hestia Base, and your socks find the floor the ordinary way. Gravity here is a lighter handshake than Earth’s, but it is still a handshake. You are not falling. You are not on a ship. You are on Mars, on the Tharsis rise, and the sky in the little port is the color of weak tea going brown.

GROVE, the station computer, speaks from the ceiling in a calm voice that does not care about your heartbeat.

“Regional dust storm. Direct-beam sunlight at Leaf Hall down twelve percent and falling. Estimated thick weather in four hours. Dr. Cole to the greenhouse. Junior grower, you are up.”

You are the junior grower. This is your first storm season that isn’t a classroom with a proud sticker at the end. Last month you packed seeds and pretended not to be nervous. This month the sun has a timer.

Your badge is still stiff at the corners. It says JUNIOR GROWER and a number you have memorized like a secret. Down the corridor, one way is Leaf Hall—wet air, green smell, Dr. Imani Cole already talking to tomatoes as if they keep receipts. The other way is the EVA porch, where Lina Cho keeps the dust on the correct side of the door.

A second voice, human, cuts over GROVE: Dr. Cole, already moving. “This is not a movie. Plants eat light. If you guess, guess after you look.” You swallow. Guessing is exactly what they warned you about in the classroom with the sticky chairs.

Outside, the first fine dust is already writing on the glass.

Hestia Base is a cluster of cans and one long bright hall, all of it hugged by berms of rusty dirt. You can feel the fans in the floor if you stand still. You can also feel the way everyone walks a little lighter here, as if the planet is trying to make you bounce into a mistake. Last night you dreamed of bees. There are no bees. There is GROVE, and a storm clock, and a badge that pokes.