Beth Johanssen knew that there was something significant happening — something that somehow involved her — long before the meeting request arrived in her inbox. The first inkling she'd had was when she'd arrived early for work.

As had become her habit since the launch of the Ares IV mission, she'd wandered past Mission Control as soon as she'd arrived. Though she wasn't directly involved in the mission, checking in every day — just to see that the crew was still okay — eased something inside her that had been broken since Mark's death.

It didn't make all the pain go away.

Nothing did.

Not the extensive grief therapy she and the rest of the crew had undergone, not the time off she'd taken to go home and be with her family, not the joy of a new role at NASA, not even the brief (but ultimately ill-advised) relationship she'd had with Chris.

Thank God it hadn't ruined her close friendship with him and the rest of the crew.

They were the only thing, sometimes, that kept her together after the nights spent dreaming of Mark being blown away from her in an endless loop, his scream following her into her waking hours.

The nightmares had come more frequently since Ares IV launched and now that they were actually on Mars…

It helped, to check.

Normally she could pop her head into Mission Control and get a thumbs up or a brief update from one of the on-duty personnel — usually one of her fellow sysops — and get on with her day.

But today when she opened the door, the room was conspicuously silent.

Not the silence of busy people working, but the awkward silence of a conversation abruptly cut off when the subject of the conversation walked into the room.

Both would have written it off, except...

There were only half-a-dozen people in the room — much less than there should be for this time of day, Beth realized suddenly — but they were all not-so-subtly watching her or conspicuously not looking at her. She shifted on her feet and tried to catch the eye of Evan Larson, the sysop regularly assigned to the overnight shift and who usually gave Beth her morning update, but the man was staring intently at his blank screen, shoulders hunched as if aware of Beth's gaze.

That nebulous feeling of wrongness was settling into actual worry.

Her mind began to churn, listing everything that could have possibly gone wrong. A sick crewmember. An equipment breakdown. A problem with the satellites. A communication loss.

A storm.

Please no, she thought. Not again.

"Beth?"

The soft question jerked her from her thoughts and looked up into the face of Brendan Hutch.

"What happened?" she asked.

"Nothing," Brendan said. "Everything's—"

"Don't." Beth said. "Don't lie to me. I can tell that something's wrong."

Brendan sighed.

"Nothing's wrong," he said, then put a hand up when Beth opened her mouth to protest. "Nothing's wrong. You're right, something did happen and we did have an unexpected message from the Ares IV crew early this morning. But nothing is wrong."

She studied his face, searching for truth in his eyes. Finally, she nodded and felt something in her stomach loosen.

"Then… what?" She gestured to the tense room behind him, unable to articulate her question.

Brendan shook his head. "I'm sorry," he said, "but I can't tell you. It's privileged information until Sanders clears it for public release."

Beth swallowed and bit her lip. She knew that the last time NASA had implemented this kind of information black-out had been right before announcing Mark's death, even though she hadn't been on the planet at the time. Beth's tense expression must have been obvious to Brendan, because he took pity on her.

"I imagine the information will be released internally in a while," he said. "It really isn't anything bad."

Beth nodded slowly, trying to wrestle the fear in her gut.

She let Brendan guide her quietly out of Mission Control and walked off to her small office in a daze. She slumped behind her desk and stared blankly at the framed photo of the Ares III crew sitting next to her monitor. The photo, a candid shot of the six of them at a barbecue at the Martinez's house, had been taken just days before their departure. Near the middle of the photo, Mark grinned at her from his place sandwiched between Chris and Rick.

Beth wanted to smile, cheered by the memory of Mark's irrepressible humor. But the tense faces in Mission, the sideways looks in the halls, and the broken-off conversations gnawed at her mind.

No matter what Brendan had said, Beth knew that there was something wrong and that somehow that something involved her and Ares IV crew.

When her computer chimed briefly to notify her of a new meeting request — a request for an after-hours meeting that included her, the remaining Ares III crew, Mitch Henderson, and Annie Montrose — she knew her feeling was right.

She accepted the meeting request with shaking hands, then dug through the top drawer of her desk for her therapist's phone number.

She had a feeling she might need someone impartial to talk to very soon.