I zoomed in and so did everyone else. It was a small drawing of a man with a long nose peering over a wall. The words “Kilroy was here,” were written below the drawing.

Marcus said, “There’s one of those in the hangar at home.”

Cassie nodded, “Dad left them when he had the time.”

With an eye roll, Jaclyn said, “And even when he didn’t, Grandpa told me about once when they were sneaking out of a supervillain’s base and he had to return for Cap. They nearly got caught because of it.”

Marcus turned to Jaclyn, “I missed out on that story.”

“Ask him when we get home. I’m sure he’ll tell it. He liked that one,” Jaclyn shook her head.

Marcus raised an eyebrow, “Is it better than the one about Evil Beatnik and the Hare Krishnas? Or the time they defeated some supervillain using Twinkies?”

“Different,” she said. “Still funny.”

Cassie caught my eye, “It’s not the first one on this trip. I saw one in the lab in the Abominator moon base too.”

“Really?” I asked, “You didn’t mention it then.”

“You and Accelerando had been teleported out. Victor had Shift. Ghost and I were fighting slime monkeys. That’s when I saw it,” she shrugged, “and by the time you were all back I’d forgotten.”

“Huh,” I nodded, “I can see how you might get distracted… You know what’s interesting, though? Nothing I saw in the records of helping Lee with the device ever mentioned going to Mars. I suppose they might have been here for some other reason.”

Cassie glanced toward me, “Or Dad could have been here without the team. He worked for the government and on his own for years after everyone else retired.”

“Also possible,” I said.

“Maybe I’m crazy,” Marcus said, “but could it have been someone else?”

I thought about it, “It was a World War 2 GI thing and it’s a weird world, so if some other GI got transported to Mars, maybe.”

Jaclyn pursed her lips, “If we were being crazy paranoid, it could be a supervillain who knew Cap did it, but no one thinks far enough ahead to plant it for us.”

We all nodded and no one said anything until Rachel said, “Lee might.”

Jaclyn shook her head, “We all remember picking him up after Hideaway.”

Marcus let out a breath, “Bits of my genetic material are now in the right place to throw the Human Ascendancy into slow but inevitable chaos.”

“Plus,” I said, “that whole mess on Hideaway put the Xiniti, the Alliance, and the internal Ascendancy resistance into much closer communication. I gave them my updated monomolecular blade design and they’re going to do something big shortly. There’s no knowing how that ends, but he was involved in sending us to Hideaway somehow.”

We all looked at each other. Rachel waved us all forward, “Even if Cap left it on his own, Lee probably got him here indirectly.”

“So…” I said, “we should assume that the graffiti is a message from Lee?”

Rachel eyed me, “I think we should.”

“Huh,” I zoomed in on Cap’s vandalism, “I guess we should go see if there’s a door there.”

The trip down that short length of hall felt longer than it should have. I expected the floor to drop out, someone or some thing to attack, the Artificers or Abominators to appear out of nowhere.

None of that happened.

We walked across the floor, leaving footprints in the red dust that had accumulated throughout unknown eons. When we reached the drawing, I crouched to get a closer look. I couldn’t be sure what Cap had written it with. Pen, maybe? It seemed the most likely possibility. I could see Grandpa designing special pens, if necessary, but not solely to vandalize alien ruins.

I noticed another thing though—a door. Much like the last one, it wasn’t a door so much as a door-shaped indentation in the wall. Along with it came the feeling that Rachel had told me was an Artificer control system, one I still didn’t know how to use.

I turned to her, “Are you going to get this one too?”

She shook her head, “This one’s yours.”

Even if I could feel the controls’ presence, I couldn’t see them, “Are you going to tell me how?”

Through her facemask, I could see that Rachel smiled, “I don’t know if you can do it the way I do. I go out of phase and manipulate the controls that way. What you’ve told me about using Artificer abilities is that you could touch something even though it was out of phase. There was a guy in powered armor with an Abominator thing, right?”

“Right,” I said, “when we were fighting outside Higher Ground. Plus, there’s Jody. I grabbed him during the fight before you got here. I’m pretty sure his speed is being out of phase like you but with a different effect.”

Saying it at that moment gave me a different perspective on that event and what it could mean.

Rachel caught it too and said, “Oh. We’re going to have to talk about that later, but for now, I’d bet that all you have to do is reach out and touch it.”

I let energy flow through me the way Kee taught me, reaching out toward the presence with my mind. I felt the resistance, the sort I might have felt on a physical button, but with no effort, it gave and the door slid into the wall.

It had been so easy, but still, all that time I’d spent practicing exercises had been useful. I wondered what Kee would say if I told her, whether she’d see it as progress or scared that I was messing with Artificer ruins.

“There you go,” Rachel said.

“Yeah,” Cassie added, smirking, “Congratulations Rocket. You opened a door all by yourself!”