## Chapter 416 — Two Tickets

On Sunday morning, Kanno brought Mercury to flat 202 in the front pocket of her camera bag.

Thomas and Isha already had Mars on the dining table.

The two tickets looked disappointingly mundane beside breakfast. Ian had supplied them weeks earlier, before the reunion had consumed everyone's attention: a round trip to Mars for Thomas and Isha, and a separate Mercury ticket for Kanno. The objects had survived being stored, discussed and postponed without developing an expiry date or demanding to become somebody's weekend.

Kanno removed hers from its sleeve and placed it beside the Mars ticket.

"Still ridiculous."

Thomas looked at the two destinations.

"More ridiculous together."

Isha finished her tea.

"Do you still want Mercury?"

Kanno looked at the camera bag beside her chair.

"Yes."

There had never been much uncertainty about that part.

The private note that had accompanied the ticket was something else. *I don't think I used the phrase date as purely a joke.* Kanno had kept the card. Using Mercury did not need to answer it.

She had already photographed Venus with Ian standing beside her and had come back with twenty-seven frames she still had not decided what to do with. Mercury offered a different problem. No lander she had chosen, no Ian to talk to, no photographic subject prepared by human history.

Just a planet.

That appealed.

Thomas turned the Mars ticket once on the table.

"We should decide what we think we're agreeing to before we use them."

Kanno nodded.

Nobody made the discussion elaborate. They already had enough precedent to know what mattered.

Actual Mars and Mercury, not reconstructions. Their bodies safe from pressure, temperature, radiation and anything else that would make the visit immediately lethal. Carried belongings protected but otherwise unchanged. No improvement to the landscape for aesthetics. No permanent trace left by their presence. Return to flat 202 when they deliberately chose to use the return part of the trip.

Isha added one more condition.

"Mars is not Olympus Mons."

Thomas looked at her.

She was smiling.

"I still want to climb it. This is not that trip."

The earlier proposal had remained exactly where she had left it: an interesting future idea whose actual conditions had never been agreed. Today they had a ticket saying **Mars**, not an expedition plan saying **Olympus Mons**.

"Agreed," Thomas said.

Kanno looked between them. "Try not to accidentally climb anything twenty kilometres high."

"I have excellent restraint."

Thomas made a thoughtful noise.

Isha turned towards him.

He looked down at the ticket.

"No comment."

Kanno took her camera from its bag.

She had chosen one body and two lenses rather than packing as though Mercury had commissioned her professionally. Two batteries sat in an inner pocket. No tripod. No additional light. Nothing whose purpose was making the planet easier to photograph than the planet itself allowed.

Thomas had his phone. Isha had hers.

Kanno noticed.

"No camera?"

Thomas lifted the phone.

"This is a camera."

Kanno's expression conveyed professional disappointment without requiring speech.

"We are tourists," Isha said.

"Yes."

That apparently made the offence worse.

They moved into the flexible room shortly before eleven.

Sunday light reached across the clear floor. The correspondence storage remained closed along one wall. Camping equipment, drying rack and guest bedding occupied their normal places. Nothing about the room suggested that it had previously opened onto other worlds.

Thomas and Isha stood together with the Mars ticket between their hands.

Kanno held Mercury in one hand and her camera in the other.

"Simultaneous?" Thomas asked.

Kanno thought about it.

If she returned first, she could wait. If Thomas and Isha returned first, they could wait. None of them needed another person standing in 202 as a safety officer for an external mechanism whose hazards ordinary first aid could not meaningfully address.

"Yes."

Isha looked at Kanno. "If your ticket does anything you don't want, come back."

"Same."

That was enough.

Kanno looked at the word **MERCURY**.

Thomas and Isha looked at **MARS**.

All three chose to go.

---

Mercury arrived as light.

Kanno's first instinct was that somebody had overexposed the world.

She stood on grey-brown ground beneath a black sky. The Sun hung low enough to throw shadows across the surface that seemed almost structurally separate from the objects casting them: black, hard-edged shapes beside rock lit with an intensity no atmosphere softened.

The Sun itself was enormous.

Not absurdly so. Still recognisably the Sun.

But wrong by every Earth instinct.

Closer.

Kanno did not raise the camera immediately.

She looked down.

Her boots rested on fine regolith broken by small stones. A low crater rim crossed the middle distance. Beyond it, the horizon curved almost imperceptibly beneath a sky with no blue in it at all.

She inhaled.

Breath came normally.

That was one of the impossible parts.

The planet supplied none of the air entering her lungs. She could feel the protection only through all the things that failed to happen. No pressure injury. No lethal heat. No radiation she could perceive. Her clothes remained ordinary and her camera sat against her chest exactly as it had in Sendai.

The light was real.

So was the reduced weight.

Kanno discovered that on her third step.

She pushed from the ground with the amount of force walking required on Earth and rose farther than expected, not enough to become a jump but enough to make her next footfall arrive late.

She stopped.

Looked at her feet.

Tried again more carefully.

Mercury required a different walking rhythm.

Kanno smiled.

Then she lifted the camera.

Her first photograph was bad.

The surface was too bright, the shadows too empty, and her automatic assumptions about exposure had been trained under skies that scattered light.

Good.

She changed the settings.

The second frame was less bad.

Kanno walked towards the low crater.

The ticket had not supplied a famous landmark. At least, none she could identify. She did not know the coordinates and found that she preferred not knowing them yet. There would be time on Earth to compare photographs against maps if she wanted. Here, the problem was simpler.

Grey ground.

Black sky.

A star close enough to dominate every surface.

She photographed the line where sunlight struck one side of a small boulder and abandoned the other almost completely. She photographed a shallow depression whose floor remained dark while the rim looked bleached. She changed lenses once and discovered that the broader view made Mercury feel smaller rather than larger.

That interested her.

Kanno returned to the longer lens.

The camera remained hers here in all the useful ways. She still chose badly. She still moved half a metre and found the composition worse. She still had to decide whether an empty foreground was empty or necessary.

Nothing in the mechanism helped.

She spent several minutes photographing a rock no larger than her hand.

That made her happiest.

Eventually she lowered the camera.

The silence had become noticeable.

Not ordinary quiet. Earth never quite produced this category outdoors. No air moved around her ears. No distant traffic, bird, insect, leaf, wire or ventilation unit supplied a background she normally ignored.

Her own protected breathing reached her somehow.

The camera shutter reached her too, though she suspected the mechanism was carrying those sounds locally because there was no atmosphere to do it.

Everything beyond that small allowance was silent.

Kanno stood beside the crater and looked towards the Sun.

She did not photograph it.

Not yet.

---

Mars arrived as colour.

Thomas saw the sky first.

It was pale, dusty and unmistakably a sky rather than the perfect black he had expected from space photographs absorbed over a lifetime. The horizon carried muted orange-brown light, and the ground beneath them was rust-red broken by darker rock.

Isha's hand tightened around his.

They were standing on a broad rise.

The land fell away ahead.

Then continued falling.

Thomas took several seconds to understand that what looked at first like a mountain valley was the upper edge of something vastly larger. Walls cut across the distance in layered red and brown, dropping into a canyon whose far side was so far away that ordinary landscape instincts failed.

Isha breathed out.

"This is better than the photographs."

Thomas looked at her.

Wind moved lightly through her pale hair.

Not much wind. Mars barely had enough atmosphere to deserve the word by Earth standards, yet the external protection allowed them to feel some version of it: faint pressure, dust lifting in occasional thin movements across the ground, cold suggested at the edges rather than allowed to become dangerous.

Thomas looked down at himself.

He felt lighter.

Substantially.

He bent his knees once.

Isha saw.

"Do not."

"I was only testing."

"You were preparing to jump."

"That can be a test."

Isha's eyes narrowed.

Thomas jumped.

Only a little.

The little became considerably more than expected.

He rose high enough for the joke to leave him before his feet returned to the ground. The landing was soft under reduced gravity, helped by whatever margin the ticket's safety carried, but his balance still required a quick correcting step.

Isha stared at him.

Thomas straightened.

"Useful finding."

"You are twenty-five."

"Currently."

That almost made her laugh.

Then Isha tried.

Thomas had enough warning to move back.

She used far less effort than he expected.

It was still too much.

Her body rose with startling ease, pale hair lifting around her as she hung for a moment in the weak Martian pull before coming down several metres from where she started.

She landed cleanly.

For a second her face held the concentrated surprise of someone whose body had just been given a familiar instruction under unfamiliar rules.

Then she laughed.

Thomas had heard that laugh rarely enough to stop making fun of her.

Isha turned towards him.

"The ground gives too much."

"Gravity gives too little."

"Yes."

She tried another smaller hop, this time with deliberate restraint.

Better.

Thomas held out his hand when she returned.

Isha took it.

They began walking towards the canyon rim.

Neither tried to find the maximum distance they could jump.

Mars had more interesting things to do.

The ground crunched differently beneath their shoes. Dust gathered in shallow hollows but did not cling permanently to their clothing; when Thomas deliberately brushed one boot against a red patch, the powder behaved normally until the external protection quietly prevented it from becoming contamination they would carry back to Sendai.

He noticed.

"Trace rule."

Isha looked down.

Their footprints remained behind them for the moment.

"If it works like Venus, they will be gone when we leave."

Thomas nodded.

They kept walking.

The canyon took scale away from them.

On Earth, Thomas could usually judge distance badly but usefully. A building, tree, road or person supplied some known measure. Here there was almost nothing. A dark formation that looked like a short walk away resolved through the phone camera into a ridge that might be kilometres distant.

Isha stopped before the ground became steep.

She did not need a warning line or railing. The drop itself was enough.

Thomas stood beside her.

Valles Marineris—if that was where the ticket had brought them—spread below in immense terraced walls, shadowed cuts and distant plateaus. They did not know enough geology to read what they were seeing properly.

For once Thomas did not reach for an explanation.

Isha looked along the canyon.

"Olympus Mons is somewhere else."

"Yes."

"Good."

Thomas smiled.

She nudged him lightly with one shoulder.

"Not because this is insufficient."

"I understood."

"I want the mountain to remain its own trip."

"I understood that too."

Isha looked suspiciously at him.

Thomas enjoyed the rare experience of not needing to clarify.

They walked parallel to the rim.

Mars became smaller through detail in the same way the Great Peak had for Lethira, though neither of them knew that comparison. One patch of ground contained a line of dark stones partly buried in dust. Another held a shallow channel whose origin they could not identify. The horizon changed whenever the land rose by a few metres.

Isha crouched beside a rock.

She did not touch it immediately.

Then she looked at Thomas.

"Can I?"

"The ticket conditions said no lasting trace. Touching a rock doesn't seem like moving it."

"That was not what I asked."

Thomas understood.

"Yes."

Isha rested two fingertips against the surface.

Mars.

Actual rock beneath her hand.

Her expression became quiet.

She had once lived in another world and later woken on Earth in a human body with no agreed cosmology capable of explaining either event. She had seen her first world from orbit because Ian took Lethira there, though that fact remained outside her knowledge; she herself had only seen reconstructed planetary imagery and the miniature world pendant she sometimes wore.

Now she knelt on another planet in her current Solar System.

Thomas crouched beside her.

"How is it?"

"Rock."

He laughed.

"Useful."

"It is."

She left it exactly where it was.

---

Kanno eventually photographed the Sun.

Not directly.

She found a piece of broken terrain where a low ridge cut the disk partly away, leaving a fierce white arc beyond the black silhouette. The resulting frame was technically difficult and visually simple.

She made three versions.

Then stopped.

Mercury's gravity had become familiar enough that walking no longer required conscious correction. Kanno disliked that slightly. The first awkward steps had been part of the place; adaptation began erasing the difference.

She checked the time on her camera.

Forty-seven minutes had passed since the first frame.

Or forty-seven camera minutes had passed. Given Ian's other impossible chronologies, Kanno refused to make more philosophical use of the number.

The Mercury ticket remained in her pocket.

She had not looked at it since arrival.

Now she took it out.

The destination still read **MERCURY**.

Nothing else had appeared.

Kanno held it between gloved-by-nothing fingers and thought about returning to flat 202.

The planet remained.

She did not disappear immediately.

Apparently intent needed to be more definite than curiosity.

Good.

Kanno put the ticket away.

One more photograph.

She chose a shallow crater whose illuminated edge curved through the frame while most of its interior vanished into shadow. No Sun. No horizon. No obvious planetary scale.

Someone could mistake it for the Moon.

Someone could mistake it for an abstract study of light.

Kanno took the photograph.

That was the last one.

She lowered the camera.

Looked around Mercury once with nothing held between herself and it.

Then she chose home.

---

Thomas and Isha's photograph required a rock, a timer and three failed attempts.

The first framed mostly sky.

The second caught Thomas halfway into position.

The third worked.

The phone sat against a stable stone several metres back from the canyon rim. Thomas stood beside Isha, his arm around her waist. Isha had one hand on his shoulder. Behind them Mars expanded in red-brown layers beneath its dusty sky.

Neither was centred perfectly.

Thomas liked it.

Isha looked at the screen.

"We look like tourists."

"We are tourists."

"Good."

She handed the phone back.

They did not take another.

Their ticket had stayed in Thomas's pocket for the whole walk. When he eventually removed it, the paper looked absurd against the Martian landscape.

Isha took his free hand.

"Ready?"

Thomas looked towards the canyon.

He had expected another world to feel more dramatic.

It did not.

That was perhaps the most dramatic part.

Mars did not know they had survived another universe. It did not know about Green Road, the Demon Lord, university paperwork, climbing qualifications or a gold specimen formed in geology no Earth specialist could locate.

It was simply Mars.

"Yes."

Thomas looked at Isha.

"Home."

They chose it together.

---

Kanno returned first.

Flat 202 appeared around her so abruptly that she stopped with one foot half a step ahead.

The flexible room smelled faintly of laundry detergent.

Earth gravity arrived at full authority.

Kanno's knee bent more than intended.

"Oh."

She corrected before falling.

That annoyed her more than the transition itself.

The camera remained in her hand.

She checked it first.

Forty-one new frames.

The ticket remained in her pocket.

No dust covered her boots or clothes. When she looked behind herself, there was no Mercury, no doorway and no visible mechanism. Only the flexible-room wall.

Thomas and Isha were still absent.

Kanno went into the LDK.

She set the camera on the dining table, filled a glass of water and drank half of it while standing.

Earth's weight felt excessive.

She flexed one hand.

"Ridiculous."

Nobody answered.

Kanno sat and began reviewing photographs.

She rejected six before Thomas and Isha returned.

Their arrival came with a soft movement from the hall rather than any flash.

Thomas said, "Oh," from the flexible room.

Then something bumped gently against the door frame.

Kanno waited.

Isha appeared first, holding Thomas's forearm while he reacquainted himself with Earth gravity.

Kanno looked at them.

"Elegant."

Thomas straightened.

"Gravity changed unexpectedly."

"You returned to your own planet."

"The timing remained inconsiderate."

Isha was smiling.

She had adapted faster. Of course she had.

Kanno looked at her. "Did you jump?"

Isha paused.

Thomas answered for her.

"Yes."

Kanno nodded.

"Obviously."

They came to the table.

For several minutes, the three of them talked over one another more than usual.

Mercury's black sky.

Mars's dusty one.

The size of the Sun.

The canyon.

The silence.

Low gravity.

Kanno's first exposure failure.

Thomas's first jump.

Isha's much better second attempt after her first one had carried her farther than expected.

Eventually Kanno held up a hand.

"Photographs."

That restored order.

Thomas showed the tourist photograph first.

Kanno stared at it.

Thomas waited defensively.

"It's good."

He looked suspicious.

"You expected criticism."

"Historically justified."

"The slight bad framing helps."

"There it is."

Isha took the phone back before the discussion became technical.

Kanno showed them Mercury.

The images were less immediately colourful than Mars. Grey-brown regolith, hard black sky, long shadows. One frame reduced a boulder to an almost white geometric surface beside total darkness. Another showed the low crater rim under the enormous Sun.

Isha leaned closer.

"This one."

She pointed to the partially obscured Sun.

Kanno nodded.

"I think so too."

Thomas looked through the next few.

"Mercury looks more like the Moon than I expected."

Kanno glanced at him.

"You have not been to the Moon."

"I have seen photographs."

"Isha said the same thing."

Thomas looked at his wife.

Isha looked innocent.

They continued.

Kanno did not show every frame. Thomas and Isha did not show every phone photograph. The best parts of each trip survived without becoming a compulsory presentation.

Eventually Thomas placed both strange tickets on the dining table.

Mars.

Mercury.

Neither looked visibly consumed.

He touched the edge of the Mars ticket.

"Do we test whether they work twice?"

"No," Kanno said immediately.

Isha agreed.

One journey had been offered.

They had taken it.

If the objects later proved to contain some other property, that could remain a later question. Repeatedly attempting to trigger them merely because the paper still existed would turn a good afternoon into mechanism testing.

Thomas collected two clear sleeves.

Mercury went back to Kanno.

Mars returned to the household archive.

Kanno looked at her ticket before slipping it into her bag.

The private card was still at home.

Mercury had answered none of the questions written on that other piece of paper.

That was fine.

Some things were allowed to remain separate.

She zipped the pocket closed.

Thomas started tea.

Isha opened the balcony door for a few minutes because the April air outside felt suddenly valuable. Cherry petals had begun collecting along one edge of the balcony, driven there by ordinary wind under an ordinary blue atmosphere.

Kanno stood beside her.

After Mercury, the sky looked crowded with colour.

Isha glanced sideways.

"Worth using?"

Kanno knew which ticket she meant.

"Yes."

No qualification followed.

Across the room, Thomas held up the tea tin.

"Normal or expensive?"

Kanno looked at him.

"We stood on two other planets today."

"That is not an answer."

"Normal."

Thomas nodded and made normal tea.

By late afternoon, Mars and Mercury had become photographs on three devices, two impossible tickets in storage and an argument about whether low gravity made Thomas's jump more or less dignified.

Outside, petals continued gathering against the balcony rail.