She mulled over that offer for a few days. Her parents didn’t talk much about their A.I. work much, and when they did bring up the topic, it was always pretty vague. They’d both signed a NDA with UTOPICorp for the work that kept taking them up to an ice mine far to the north on the Utopia Planitia. She’d actually have to spy on them, get into their system accounts maybe. It seemed like a big risk with potentially zero reward, considering what Valentine had pulled on her before. Was she going to do it so an old man could get another smirk out of her getting humiliated, confined, threatened?

Before she could come to a decision, though, another unexpected encounter took place. The next weekend she was shopping in the Level 19 Bazaar, a big area laid out for imports from Earth that a schoolmate had told were really cheap, at least for Mars, even if it wasn’t a mall Earthers generally frequented, as it was more for the thousands of bornehere’s that had been housed in Cerberus Underground’s lower levels and mostly goods that got damaged in transit from home to here. While asking a woman vendor about some things she hoped to find, like snacks and such that were too unhealthy for selling in the upper levels, she spotted a familiar face, couldn’t believe who it was.

Ekaterina from The Hole was sifting through a box of water packs. She thanked the candy vendor and felt herself practically skip over to the girl. She found herself actually really glad to see the slight Martian. The girls hair still looked amazing. Tory hadn’t dared tried what she’d suggested, but had finally found a shampoo that didn’t leave her own hair in ugly clumps.

“Ekaterina, what are you doing here?” she asked.

The girl turned around and smiled, hugged her! Tory tensed for a moment, surprised at the girl’s reaction to her, but relaxed. The sudden hug she received wasn’t uncomfortable, just unexpected one. They’d hardly spent more than a few minutes together back in The Hole.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” Ekaterina breathed into her ear.

“What are you doing here?” Tory asked.

“The Hole is no more. Marsec destroyed it. They are hunting. Hunting for us, hunting for the bomb and the people who stole it,” the girl said in a low voice.

What? No. Oh, crap. It was all real.

Tory pulled out of the hug, stared at her now relatively well dressed friend. Ekaterina did clean up well.

“There’s been no news, anywhere,” she replied. “What happened!”

“Don’t you know?” Ekaterina said. “It never made it back. Leader Mina was so angry. We heard you and Gurminder got it, but he never returned to The Hole. Nobody knows where it is. I was sent with some of my people to find you and ended up here. It’s hard for our kind to ask anything, you know.”

 “Do they think I took it?” Tory asked suddenly glancing around, kidnapping suddenly on the front of her mind. No, she was not going to let anyone take her back there. She would be in so much trouble if it got out that she took part in the heist of a nuclear bomb. “How did they find out I was with him?”

“I don’t know,” Ekaterina told her. “But no, they don’t think you took it, but they are sure he took it. And they think since you helped him steal it he might have told you what he was going to do with it. Tell me, Tory. We need to know!”