But her mom had loved those lilacs, and wouldn't be seeing them again. Nita sighed. "Yeah, I'm tired, too," Kit said, glancing up and down the driveway as Ponch wandered off down it. "You wouldn't think a vacation would leave you so wiped out." "And there won't be much time to get rested up now," Nita said. She looked down their street, where the branches of the maples beside the sidewalk, bare for so long, were now well clothed in that particular new spring yellow-green. The leaves that had been small when they first went off on their spring break were now almost full-sized. "At least there's stuff to do…" "And five whole days left before we have to go back to school." Kit looked at her meaningfully. Nita rolled her eyes. "Yeah, I know, the Mars thing. I've been meaning to talk to you about that. When did you get the idea it would be cute to carve my dad's cell-phone number on a rock in the middle of Syrtis Major? He hates it when people call me on his phone." Kit gave Nita a resigned look. "Sorry," he said, "I couldn't resist." "Well, resist next time!" Nita said. "Anyway, we can't just run off and start digging up half of Syrtis on our own. We have to talk to the rest of the intervention team and see if they've got any kind of idea where to start." "Yeah, but they said individual research was still okay," Kit said as they walked up the driveway toward the gate leading to the backyard. "You don't fool me," Nita said. "You just want to run all over Mars like some kind of areo-geek, and you want me to split the labor on the transport spell with you!" "Oh, wait a minute now, it's not that simple!" Nita grinned, for he hadn't denied it outright. Kit had developed a serious case of Mars fever-serious enough that he'd added a map of the planet's two hemispheres to his bedroom wall and started sticking pins in it, the way he'd been doing with his map of the Moon for some months. "It is cool, isn't it," Nita said, "standing there at sunset and seeing Earth? Just hanging there in the sky like a little blue star." "Yeah," Kit said.