She got up and got Spencer some tea, avoiding looking at the photo or the pale image of her face in the dark kitchen window, the pinched bleak vulture eye that she could never meet. You can never look back.

For the moment there was nothing to do but sit there, and get through the night. Try to absorb the news, to withstand it. So they sat, they talked, they listened to Marina tell her story in greater and greater detail. They made calls out on the Praxis lines, trying to find out more. They sat, slumped and silent, caged in their own reflections, their solitary universes. The minutes passed like hours, the hours like years: it was the hellish twisted spacetime of the all-night vigil, that most ancient of human rituals, where people fought without success to wrench meaning into each random catastrophe.

Dawn when it finally came was overcast, the tent spattered with raindrops. A few painfully slow hours later, Spencer began the process of contacting all the groups in Odessa. Over the course of that day and the next they spread the news, which had been suppressed on Mangalavid and the other infonets. But it was clear to all that something had happened, because of the sudden absence of Sabishii from the ordinary discourse, even in matters of common business. Rumors flew everywhere, gaining momentum in the absence of hard news, rumors of everything from Sabishii’s independence to its razing. But in the tense meetings of the following week Maya and Spencer told everyone what Marina had said, and then they spent the subsequent hours discussing what should be done. Maya did her best to convince people that they should not be pushed into acting before they were ready, but it was hard going; they were furious, and frightened, and there were a lot of incidents in town and around Hellas that week, all over Mars in fact — demonstrations, minor sabotage, assaults on security positions and personnel, AI breakdowns, work slowdowns. “We’ve got to show them they can’t get away with this!” Jackie said over the net, seeming everywhere at once. Even Art agreed with her: “I think’civil protests by as much of the general population as we can muster might slow them down. Make those bastards think twice about doing anything like this again.”

Nevertheless, the situation stabilized after a while. Sabishii returned to the net and to train schedules, and life there resumed, although it was not the same as before, as a big police force stayed in occupation, monitoring the gates and the station, and trying to discover all the cavities of the mound maze. During this time Maya had a number of long talks with Nadia, who was working in South Fossa, and with Nirgal and Art, and even with Ann, who called in from one of her refuges in. the Aureum Chaos. They all agreed that no matter what had happened in Sabishii, they needed to hold back for the moment from any attempt at a general insurrection. Sax even called in to Spencer, to say he “needed time.” Which Maya found comforting, as it supported her gut feeling that the time was not right. That they were being provoked in the hopes they would try a revolt prematurely. Ann and Kasei and Jackie and the other radicals — Dao, Antar, even Zeyk — were unhappy at the wait, and pessimistic about what it meant. “You don’t understand,” Maya told them. “There’s a whole new world growing out there, and the longer we wait, the stronger it gets. Just hold on.”

Then about a month after the closing of Sabishii, they got a brief message on their wrists from Coyote — a short clip of his lopsided face, looking unusually serious, telling them that he had gotten away through the maze of secret tunnels in the mohole mound, and was now back in the south, in one of his own hideouts. “What about Hiroko?” Michel said instantly. “What about Hiroko and the rest of them?”

But Coyote was already gone.

“I don’t think they got Hiroko either,” Michel said instantly, walking around the room without noticing he was moving. “Not Hiroko or any of them! If they had been captured, I’m sure the Transitional Authority would have announced it. I’ll bet Hiroko has taken the group underground again. They haven’t been pleased with things since Dorsa Brevia, they’re just not good at compromise, that’s why they took off in the first place. Everything that has happened since has only confirmed their opinion that they can’t trust us to build the kind of world they want. So they’ve used this chance and disappeared again. Maybe the crackdown on Sabishii forced them to do it without warning us.”

“Maybe so,” Maya said, careful to sound like she believed it. It sounded like denial on Michel’s part, but if it helped him, who cared? And Hiroko was capable of anything. But Maya had to make her response plausibly Mayalike, or he would see she was only reassuring him: “But where would they go?”

“Back into the chaos, I would guess. A lot of the old shelters are still there.”

“But what about you?”

“They’ll let me know.”

He thought it over, looked at her. “Or maybe they figure that you’re my family now.”

So he had felt her hand, in that first horrible hour. But he gave her such a sad crooked smile that she winced, and caught him up and tried to crush him with a hug, really crack a rib, to show him how much she loved him and how little she liked such a wan look. “They’re right about that,” she said harshly. “But they ought to contact you anyway.”

“They will. I’m sure they will.”

Maya had no idea what to think of this theory of Michel’s. Coyote had in fact escaped through the mound maze, and he was likely to have helped as many of his friends as he could. And Hiroko would probably be first on that list. She would certainly grill Coyote about it next time she saw him; but then he had never told her anything before. In any case, Hiroko and her inner circle were gone. Dead, captured, or in hiding, no matter which it was a cruel blow to the cause, Hiroko being the moral center for so much of the resistance.

But she had been so strange. A part of Maya, mostly subconscious and unacknowledged, was not entirely unhappy to have Hiroko off the scene, however it had happened. Maya had never been able to communicate with Hiroko, to understand her, and though she had loved her, it had made her nervous to have such a great random force wandering about, complicating things. And it had been irritating also to have another great power among the women, a power that she had had absolutely no influence over. Of course it was horrible if the whole of her group had been captured, or worse, killed. But if they had decided to disappear again, that would not be a bad thing at all. It would simplify things at a time when they desperately needed simplification, giving Maya more potential control over the events to come.

So she hoped with all her heart that Michel’s theory was true, and nodded at him, and pretended to agree in a reserved realistic way with his analysis. And then went off to the next meeting, to calm down yet another commune of angry natives. Weeks passed, then months; it seemed they had survived the crisis. But things were still degenerating on Earth, and Sabishii, their university town, the jewel of the demimonde, was functioning under a kind of martial law; and Hiroko was gone, Hiroko who was their heart. Even Maya, initially pleased in some sense to be rid of her, felt more and more oppressed by her absence. The concept of Free Mars had been part of the areophany, after all — and to be reduced to mere politics, to the survival of the fittest…

The spirit seemed gone from things. And as the winter passed, and the news from Earth told of escalating conflicts, Maya noticed ‘that people seemed more and more desperate for distraction. The partying got louder and wilder; the corniche was a nightly celebration, and on special nights, like Fassnacht or New Year’s, it was jammed with everyone in town, all dancing and drinking and singing with a kind of ferocious gaiety, under the little red mottoes painted on every other wall. YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK. FREE MARS. But how? How?