Coyote stepped to her side and went on his toes to peck her on the cheek with a kiss, meeting her glare foursquare. “You did good,” he said, putting a hand to her arm. “You saved Sax.”

Maya shrugged him off and said, “We blew up the machine they had Sax hooked into. I don’t know if we managed to wreck any records. Probably not. And they know they had him, and that someone took him back. So there’s no reason to celebrate. They’ll come after us now with everything they’ve got.”

“I don’t think they’re that well organized,” Art offered.

“You shut up,” Maya told him.

“Well, okay, but look, now that they know about you, you won’t have to hide so much, right?”

“Back in business,” Coyote muttered.

They drove south together through that day, as the dust torn up by the katabatic storm was enough to hide them from satellite cameras. Tension remained high; Maya was in a black fury, and could not be spoken to. Michel handled her like an unexploded bomb, trying always to get her focused on the practical matters of the moment, so that she might forget their terrible night out. But with Sax lying on a couch in the living compartment of their car, unconscious and looking like a racoon with all his bruises, this was no easy thing to forget. Nirgal sat beside Sax for hours on end, a hand placed flat on his ribs, or the top of his head. Other than that there was nothing to be done. Even without the black eyes he wouldn’t have looked much like the Sax Russell whom Nirgal had known as a child. It was a visceral shock to see the signs of physical abuse on him, proof positive that they had deadly enemies in the world. This was something Nirgal had been wondering about in recent years, so that the sight of Sax was an ugly, sickening thing — not just that they had enemies, but that there were people who would do this kind of thing, had always been doing it all through history, just as the unbelievable accounts had it. They were real after all. And Sax only one of millions of victims.

As Sax slept, his head rolled from side to side. “I’m going to give him a shot of pandorph,” Michel said. “Him and then me.”

“There’s something wrong with his lungs,” Nirgal said.

“Is there?” Michel put his ear to Sax’s chest, listened for a time, hissed. “Some fluid in there, you’re right.”

“What were they doing to him?” Nirgal asked Spencer.

“They were talking to him while they had him under. You know, they have located several memory centers in the hippocampus very precisely, and with drugs and a very minute ultrasound stimulation, and fast MRI to track what they’re doing … well, people just answer whatever questions they are asked, often at great length. They were doing that to Sax when the wind hit and they lost power. The emergency generator kicked in right away, but—” He gestured at Sax. “Then, or when we took him out of the apparatus …”

This was why Maya had killed Phyllis Boyle, then. The end of the collaborator. Murder among the First Hundred…

Well, Kasei muttered under his breath in the other car, it wouldn’t be the first time. There were people who suspected Maya of arranging the assassination of John Boone, and Nirgal had heard of people who suspected that Frank Chalmers’s disappearance might also have been her doing. The Black Widow, they called her. Nirgal had discounted these stories as malicious gossip, spread by people who obviously hated Maya, like Jackie. But certainly Maya now looked poisonously dangerous, sitting in her car glaring at the radio, as if considering breaking their silence to send word to the south: white-haired, hawk-nosed, mouth like a wound … it made Nirgal nervous just to get in the same car with her, though he fought against the sensation. She was one of his most important teachers after all, he had spent hours and hours absorbing her impatient instruction in math and history and Russian, learning her more than any of the subject material; and he knew very well that she did not want to be a murderer, that under her moods both bold and bleak (both manic and depressive) there writhed a lonely soul, proud and hungry. So that in yet another way this affair had become a disaster, despite their ostensible success.

Maya was adamant that they should all get down immediately into the southern polar region, to tell the underground what had happened.

“It is not so easy,” Coyote said. “They know we were in Kasei Vallis, and since they had time to get Sax to talk, they probably know we’ll be trying to get back south. They can look at a map as well as we can, and see that the equator is basically blocked, from west Tharsis all the way to the east of the chaoses.”

“There’s the gap between Pavonis and Noctis,” Maya said.

“Yes, but there’s several pistes and pipelines crossing that, and two wraps of the elevator. I’ve got tunnels built under all those, but if they’re looking they might find some of them, or see our cars.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I think we have to go around, north of Tharsis and Olympus Mons, and then down Amazonis, and cross the equator there.”

Maya shook her head. “We need to get south fast, to let them know they’ve been found out.”

Coyote thought about it. “We can split up,” he said. “I’ve got a little ultralight plane stashed in a hideout near the foot of Echus Overlook. Kasei can lead you and Michel to it, and fly you back south. We’ll follow by way of Amazonis.”

“What about Sax?”

“We’ll take him straight to Tharsis Tholus, there’s a Bogdanovist med clinic there. That’s only two nights away.”

Maya talked it over with Michel and Kasei, never even glancing at Spencer. Michel and Kasei were agreeable, and finally she nodded. “All right. We’re off south. Come down as quickly as you

They drove by night and slept by day, in their old pattern, and in two nights made their way across Echus Chasma to Tharsis Tholus, a volcanic cone on the northern edge of the Tharsis bulge.

There a Nicosia-class tent town called Tharsis Tholus was located on the black flank of its namesake. The town was part of the demimonde: most of its citizens were living ordinary lives in the surface net, but many of them were Bogdanovists, who helped support Bogdanovist refuges in the area, as well as Red sanctuaries in Mareotis and on the Great Escarpment; and they helped other people in the town who had left the net, or been off it since birth. The biggest med clinic in town was Bogdanovist, and served many of the underground.

So they drove right up to the tent, and plugged into its garage, and got out. And soon a little ambulance car came and rushed Sax to the clinic, near the center of town. The rest of them walked down the grassy main street after him, feeling the roominess after all those days in the cars. Art goggled at their open behavior, and Nirgal briefly explained the demimonde to him as they walked to a cafe with some safe rooms upstairs, across from the clinic.

At the clinic itself they were already at work on Sax. A few hours after their arrival, Nirgal was allowed to clean up and change into sterile clothes, and then to go in to sit with him.

They had him on a ventilator, which was circulating a liquid through his lungs. One could see it in the clear tubes and the mask covering his face, looking like clouded water. It was an awful thing to see, as if they were drowning him. But the liquid was a perfluo-rocarbon-based mixture, and it transferred to Sax three times as much oxygen as air would have, and flushed out the gunk that had been accumulating in his lungs, and reinflated collapsed airways, and was spiked with a variety of drugs and medicines. The med tech working on Sax explained all this to Nirgal as she worked. “He had a bit of edema, so it’s kind of a paradoxical treatment, but it works.”

And so Nirgal sat, his hand on Sax’s arm, watching the fluid inside the mask that was taped to Sax’s lower face, swirling in and out of him. “It’s like he’s back in an ectogene tank,” Nirgal said.