Trevor surveyed himself inside a large mirror bolted to the wall. He straightened his navy sports coat. Tonight was their graduation ceremony, and as much as he'd made fun of the idea of graduating from space camp before arriving, now it felt well deserved. The past seven days had been challenging and very different from what he imagined. Mia had made things better simply by being there.

  His parents hadn't bothered to call or text once. They knew how to access the portal, so they might have been following his posts and trying not to hover. But it was also probable to assume they didn't care. Trevor wondered how they might feel knowing he'd almost drowned this week.

  Mia kept saying no one would have let him drown, but that's not how he'd felt those last few seconds before blacking out. The incident happened during their third round of pool training, which was unexpected. By this point, he'd been comfortable with both the wetsuit and the breathing apparatus. They'd been using a waterproof instruction manual to reassemble a crate lying in pieces on the bottom of the pool. The tools had been scattered, varying distances from the crate. It was an exercise in both team building and mental stamina.

  The first 15 minutes were hard. Mia had panicked. But Trevor had helped her focus and settle into a productive rhythm. He'd enjoyed watching her hair flow as she walked back and forth collecting tools. Trevor thought of the crate like a gigantic puzzle, comparing their underwater manual to the glossy guide he'd used to build a Lego Death Star with his brothers. Mia had been off searching for a tool when the accordion-style delivery hose detached from his oxygen tank.

  He'd felt it within seconds, tiny bubbles appearing all around him. Trevor tried to unstrap the tank and reconnect the hose, but the tank wouldn't budge. His fingers wrestled with the bottom of the tank and then moved upwards, feeling their way through the problem. They'd practiced this scenario outside the pool many times, but nothing he'd learned was helping. Mia was on her way back. Once she visualized the problem, it would be easy to fix. He'd begun walking toward her.

  But as Trevor moved forward, pushing against the water, he started to feel weird. He couldn't tell how far he was from Mia or how long he'd been without air. Maybe it had been too long, he thought, and kicked upward, but the surface never came. The last thing he remembered was hearing Mia talk to him, but then everything stopped.

  Trevor woke in a pile of soft, orange towels, Red Rock's medical team buzzing around him. Mia was still talking, but her words were muffled. Later, he found out he'd been unconscious for over two minutes. He hadn't seen Mia holding on to his helmet, bobbing in the pool, terrified.

  "Thanks for not dying and making me do this alone," she said once he could finally hear her.

  Mia's words made him smile even now, but her face had been swollen. The emotion had surprised him, and still did.

  "Well, you know, what happens at space camp stays at space camp," Trevor had managed.

  Six hours later, they were eating pizza by the pool back at the hotel with Samantha.

  "Trevor, I heard we almost lost you earlier," Samantha had said jokingly. "Don't make me have to notify kids from the seventh high school."

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  "What seventh high school?" Mia had asked.

  Samantha had paused but recovered quickly. "Well, there are contingency plans if something happens and you can't go. The M6 mission is launching no matter what."

  "No matter what?" Trevor asked, lifting an eyebrow.

  "No matter what," Samantha said. "Anybody want the last piece of pizza?"

  "So if one of us dies in a car accident, you just replace us?"

  "Mia, no one died today. Trevor barely had a mishap. But yes, the honest answer is, you're replaceable."

  Trevor knew the near-drowning mishap could have been worse. The incident in the lab was way more embarrassing. Space Camp included one day of learning about basic laboratory equipment. But there was nothing basic about the stuff Dr. Leeson expected them to know and do. And even after the lecture about knowing their limits in the pool, there had been a second mishap.

  It happened after they'd given up trying to identify unknown substances under a microscope.

  "Nothing in this book matches what's on slide twenty-three," Mia had whispered.

  "There has to be. Look again. Hand me the other journal. I'll look through it."

  "What kind of slides are we going to be looking at on Mars?" Mia asked.

  "I dunno," Trevor said. "Maybe we'll discover the cure for cancer up there."

  In the end, between the two of them, they'd only correctly identified twenty of the fifty slides they'd been assigned. It had been a total fail.

  "Don't worry- you'll have six months to practice," Dr Leeson reported enthusiastically. "What else will you do with all your time on the way to Mars? Let's visit the microbiology lab. You'll need to become proficient in sterile technique.

  Trevor should have known his being unnerved by the snotty yellow liquid Dr. Leeson pulled from an incubator inside the micro lab was the beginning of the end.

  "Can that make me sick?" Mia had asked, her face pinched.

  "This is way too concentrated. Mia, place this in the centrifuge, please."

  "So, it CAN make us sick?" Mia asked again. "What's a centrifuge?"

  Dr. Leeson had ignored both questions.

  "Oh, heavens, do you NOT know how to operate a centrifuge?"

  Mia's silence had prompted Dr. Leeson to turn to a small device housed on a lab counter, the disgusting solution safely in his hand. The glass test tube was stoppered shut, but he wrapped an extra layer of wax paper around the cork, handing it to Mia, who'd been wise enough to glove up before accepting it.

  "A centrifuge is a machine that uses centrifugal force to push solids to the bottom of a test tube, leaving a less concentrated sample on top, but you have to balance the samples inside for it to work properly."

  Mia placed the sample into the centrifuge, added a second tube to balance it, locked the lid, and pressed start.

  "While that's spinning, let's head down to the supply closet. We need several different agar plates, including blood agar."

  Mia mouthed the word "blood" in Trevor's direction, making a face. But they never made it to the supply closet because a deafening crash required their attention.

  "What was that?" Trevor remembered asking.

  "I'm almost positive it was the centrifuge," Dr Leeson replied. "Mia, did you balance the tubes?"

  Mia hadn't responded.

  "Did you place a test tube of the exact volume directly across from the sample?"

  Mia's face told Dr. Leeson she had not.

  "Well, let's go see what we're dealing with," Dr. Leeson had said, walking calmly back to where they'd started.

  Trevor had been shocked by the level of destruction.

  The centrifuge had literally jumped off the counter like an off-balance washing machine. What remained of it lay in ugly pieces on the lab floor, bits of glass and yellow goop painting the walls and floor a textured yellow.

  Dr. Leeson had sighed and turned to a dome-shaped speaker mounted on the wall. "Smart Lab, text Samantha. The kids are coming back early. We've had a bit of an accident."

  Space Camp had been quite an eventful week. I look damn good in this suit, Trevor thought, fuck a 7th high school.