The Invisible City of Mars
The orbiter can see it. The astronauts can't find it.
Nineteen months into humanity's first settlement on Mars, cartographer Mara Quill spots something impossible in a routine satellite image. In a small crater sixty kilometers from Arcadia Base, there is a city: walls, terraces and a spiral road winding toward a dark center. The day before, the crater floor was empty sand.
The crew drives out to look, and the crater is empty. They walk the floor and scan the ground beneath it, and they find nothing at all.
Then Mara finds the rover. In the orbiter's next image, taken while the team was on site, their rover is already parked at the city's edge, seven minutes and forty seconds before it arrived.
The city is real. It simply exists a few minutes ahead of the present, and the gap is growing.
As a dust storm sweeps across the northern plains, a crew member steps onto the hidden road and vanishes. Her voice comes back over the radio carrying news from minutes that haven't happened yet. Earth is twenty light-minutes away, and its orders arrive too late to matter. Only one person can map the road into the future and bring her friend back: a careful, quiet woman who has spent her whole life feeling five minutes behind.
The Invisible City of Mars is a story of wonder, loss and courage, about an ancient people who outran the death of their world and the mapmaker who must decide how far ahead she is willing to go.
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