Alone in the room with the empty cryochamber, Lisbet was free to right herself without anyone knowing how she had disgraced herself by falling face-first onto the black carpet. She stood up tall and took in the room around her. There were no windows. She had not been expecting any. On Mars, almost everything was built underground and she had not had time to research the home of Vantz Bloomburg before she was put into cryostasis. 

The room was bare, except for the cryochamber in the middle. It was marked with Sleeping Beauty Inc.’s brand, but Lisbet noticed a stamp on it that indicated that not only she but also the cryochamber had been sold to Vantz. The walls and ceiling of the room were a deep red with black wainscotting and molding. The light came from pots above her. With the lush black carpet under her feet, she felt like she had arrived on Mars, even though she had yet to see the surface.

Outside the room, Lisbet met two people in servant uniforms. One was a young man with black tousled hair and deep brown eyes. The woman next to him seemed more ageless as her hair and eyes were both gray. They were both smooth and beautiful in their white pointed collars and black ties.

“Welcome to Castle Ares,” the young man said with a smile. 

“Is that what Vantz calls his mansion?” Lisbet asked, her voice a little shaky as she shook off the cryosleep.

“Not at all,” the young man continued brightly. “It is what we call it in honor of him. This is Charcoal. She will see to all your personal needs. I am Beckett, Beck for short, and I will see to all your professional needs.”

Lisbet didn’t know what that meant exactly. What did she need personally and what did she need professionally? However, she was feeling woozy. Apparently, it was the space travel that did that to models, not the cryostasis. 

Beck noticed Lisbet was unsteady on her feet and led the way to a seating area where she was placed in an armchair and given tea and sandwiches. 

Beck and Charcoal both took seats in chairs next to her, which immediately meant that neither of them were low-level servants. A servant like a waiter or a valet would never take a seat next to their patron. However, a servant who was more like a business partner could do so at any time.

The first bite into a cucumber sandwich did not taste good, but Lisbet recognized immediately that that was not the fault of the sandwich. Her mouth felt strange, like she’d been sleeping with her mouth open… for a year, which was probably the truth. She swallowed a sip of tea and realized it wouldn’t take another year for the feeling to pass. She just needed to keep eating and drinking.

“How are you feeling now? Are you feeling any better?” Charcoal asked her in a considerate tone. 

“Well enough,” Lisbet replied, knowing that these people had a job to do. Today, it was guiding her orientation to Castle Ares. She had to let them get on with it. 

Beck began. “Obviously, Castle Ares is not a building like you’d expect it to be back on Earth. It is a skyscraper that was built inside a crater.”

“Does that mean that it was built downwards like the buildings on Europa?” Lisbet asked.

“No,” he said kindly. “There are two levels of basement, but the rest was built above ground. It was built at the bottom of a crater that comes up around it. There are seventy-seven floors, excluding the below-ground levels I mentioned. The top four floors are above the top of the crater. Those are the floors that are used as the Bloomburg residence. Beneath, the space is rented out as homes for those working on the Mars terraforming project. They are inaccessible to us and managed by the castle’s head butler.”

“When will I get to meet Vantz?” Lisbet asked at the pause.

“Terribly sorry,” Charcoal apologized. “He was just on his way out when you arrived. He stopped and said hello to you when your cryochamber was deactivated. I suppose it wasn’t much of an introduction when you were still so groggy, but it was all the time he could spare before he began his tour of the magnetic towers.”

“When will he be back?” Lisbet pressed, touching the exposed skin over her heart that her black dress did not cover.

Beck saw the motion and his eyes lingered on her hand for the length of a heartbeat before he hefted a throw blanket from behind his chair to cover her shoulders.

Lisbet accepted it gratefully.

“I’m sorry to say that he will need to spend at least one week at each tower and there are fourteen towers,” Beck explained from his height before returning to his chair.

“He won’t be back for fourteen weeks?” Lisbet asked weakly. Hearing that Vantz wouldn’t be there for over three months was a blow. 

“At the soonest,” Beck emphasized. “That’s if everything goes as smoothly as possible, which is unlikely, but Lisbet,” he continued, scooching forward on his seat and getting closer to her to further emphasize what he was about to say. “You mustn’t tell anyone that he is touring the towers. You must know some of the history of Mars terraforming.”

Lisbet looked at him. She knew what everyone knew, but she had been out of the news loop for the last year. All she knew was that there had been numerous attempts to terraform Mars and all of them had failed. People lived underground on Mars or they lived in domed cities. Life on Mars was hard and most people who were looking to colonize a new world quickly moved on to Ganymede or Callisto, moons orbiting Jupiter that already had atmospheres. Both moons had enjoyed success with terraforming and efforts to turn the red planet into a livable world had been one debacle after another. 

The towers Beck was referring to were intended to generate an artificial magnetic field around Mars. The magnetic field was an invisible bubble that kept life-dependent gasses close to the surface. The idea of fourteen towers to generate the magnetic field had been tried several times before Vantz came along. He was using unfinished infrastructure. The logic was simple. If, for a moment, you forgot that Mars was a sphere and transformed it into a cube, there were eight corners on a cube and six faces. If you put a tower at each of the eight corners and in the center of all six faces, you had fourteen. That was why there were fourteen towers. 

“Are you saying if certain people knew that he was close to finishing the towers, Vantz would have more to worry about from saboteurs?” Lisbet asked.

“Exactly,” he said, wanting to sound positive. “But it’s always a good idea to keep his exact location a secret. A lot of people want to kill him. You arrived at a perfect time to give him an alibi and this castle is well protected. It’s helpful if everyone thinks he’s here with you. He left you a marriage certificate and we’ll take your wedding pictures to include in a press release.”

“Won’t people think it’s strange that he’s not with me in the pictures?” she asked, still in a bit of a fog.

“Not at all,” Beck said with that same smile soaking in positivity. 

Was it the only smile he knew how to make?

Charcoal took over. “Vantz has always been very private about his appearance. There are no photographs of him. No one is expecting him to be seen with you, in the pictures or in person. However, there is a lovely selection of wedding dresses for you to choose from waiting for you in your dressing room. Also, Vantz has prepared a wonderful surprise for you. After you sign the wedding agreement, you will be welcomed into his private suite.”

Lisbet nodded. “I’ll sign it. Where is it?”

Beck and Charcoal looked at her with approving smiles that lasted all the way to the moment after she had signed the document.