Mars, the Second Time Around

Kyra Maren Solace had known, from her earliest years, that she did not quite fit on Earth.

Her earliest memory was not of her mother's voice or the warmth of a family embrace, but of an endless ochre desert, wind like static in her ears and a sky so thin it left colors raw and unfiltered. She would blink awake in her crib, a city toddler, and for a moment expect the ceiling to be painted in pale orange light, only to find herself surrounded by the hum and thrum of Earthly life. Her parents, both practical engineers, dismissed her insistence that she belonged somewhere else as a phase. "You can have an imagination, honey," her mother would say, "but you can't have another planet."

Later, when she became an astronaut, she would find out what it all meant.