As y’all have heard me say, part three is a bit harder for me. That being so, I’m planning on every-other-day updates rather than daily. I’m having to pay a lot of attention to details I’d otherwise gloss over, and it takes time.

What a lovely family. I’m trying my best to not ruin it.

Enjoy my content? Buy me a beer!

By the blue-tiled walls at the market stalls, there was a hidden door they both knew but only she could open.  More of a gray than black market, it was for those foodstuffs which were so hard to import, especially meat.  That was out of their budget right now, but they walked quietly to the Japanese woman who looked over one hundred but Saras suspected was really just fifty.

“Fish?” she asked with a polite bow.

“Yes,” the demi-human replied in Japanese.  She had taught herself the language after finding out where they were moving.  It was an order magnitude more different than learning Spanish overnight.

Saras described what she wanted and that she would be by to pick it up later tomorrow.  The older woman jotted some notes on a pad of paper and turned it around.  Four thousand yen.  Not wanting to make a scene by haggling, Saras nodded and led her son for a look around at some of the other stalls.

In such a small sub-community, they were well known.  Besides their small – but growing – family, no one on Mars spoke Spanish, so they smiled and returned greetings in a complex mix of Russian and Japanese.  One fruit vendor gave Anton an apple, telling the boy he was growing up so fast.

Having already eaten the peaches, he thanked the man and promised to have it for dessert, later, as he stashed it into the pouch on the waist of his skinsuit.  They left by a different door they had come in, into a quiet side street; almost an alley.

“Picking it up tomorrow, Mom?” he asked.  “Why not today?”

“Because fish, and guests, stink after three days,” she laughed at him.  “I want this dinner for your father to be special.”

“You’re the best, Mom.”

She knew her eyes flashed at the compliment.

“Can we go outside, down to the docks are being built?” he asked.

She considered the time.  More than enough.

“Of course!”

Moving north through the lanes and walkways over the little canals which laced the new colony, they came to one of the small airlocks to outside.  For once, Anton didn’t make a fuss about his helmet while Saras just seated her noseline.  While only the Empress and her sister-in-law were modified enough to walk around without even a skinsuit, other demi-humans could monitor themselves for pressure sickness or frostbite. 

Outside, it was not as cool as it had been the last few days, as Mars was entering its summer season.  Like the local year, the seasons were twice as long as on Earth.  When a climatologist once commented what a coincidence it was that Mars and Earth shared nearly the same axial tilt, he was laughed off the planet and his career destroyed.

Just north of the equator, Neo-Yokahama would likely have a pleasant, Mediterranean climate year-round.  Happy to outside, even in the thin air, Saras stretched her hands over her head and arched her back.

“Okay, Mom?” Anton asked through the tiny speaker on the front of his helmet.

“I spend too much time at a desk and not enough time with you, out and about,” she replied, never one to lie to her family.  “And, your baby sister was getting restless at my lapse.”

“How is Alicia?” he asked, pointing a request that they move down hill toward the Isidis Cove.  That his mother could talk to the child in her, but could not with him, was, to him, perfectly natural.

“She’s fine and feels very fondly toward you,” she replied, taking his hand as they walked to the waterfront.  “I was initially concerned about carrying her in this lower gravity, but there do not seem to be any issues so far.”

“Huh?” he asked, looking up at her.  She had forgotten for a moment he was a human five-year-old.

“Nothing.  Look ahead!  The harbor is almost complete.  I guess that’s pretty good confirmation that Aqua does not plan a third inundation.”

They paused to look at the steel and ferroconcrete structure, its two arced sides reaching out like the colonnades of St. Peter’s Square.

“You’ve met him, right?”

“Aqua?  In his construct?  Just once.  Given my work, I routinely get messages from him.  It’s Kira who spends the most time of any of us mortals with him.”

“Are they married?” He was honestly curious.

“No,” she said with a small shake of her head.  “I think, I do not know, First Son, that they are fond of one another.  But that’s none of my business.  Or yours.”

“Yes, Mom,” he agreed.  “Can we go down to the small beach, just there?”

“Sandcastles again, Anton?”

“Hee hee!”