The train is definitely slowing. I can feel it in my feet. Out of the corner of an eye I see shadows gliding past the window. The wheels below us squeal and clatter across points, and there’s a lurch as we crab sideways toward a platform. Jade glares at me, unblinking, until I begin to wonder if he’s forgotten. Then he speaks. “I go.”

He turns and scuttles through the door into the carriage, and I stare after him, locked on and terrified that it’s a hallucination, that he’s still there, finger moving toward the button—

The air-lock door behind me buzzes loudly. I nearly break a fingernail hitting the OPEN button. I spill onto the hard cement platform, taking a tumble in my haste, then scramble to my feet and run for my life. It’s full dark, both moons below the horizon or hidden by Mars’s penumbral shadow, and the chill has a knife-edge to it as I seek the exit. I don’t want to stay on that platform a second longer than I can—

Then my shadow is lengthening in front of me, straight as a sword and stark as a death sentence. A blast-furnace heat raises welts of protective pigment on the back of my neck as I dive forward, flattening myself against the sand-strewn concrete of the platform with tightly shut eyes. The glare from the burning train is so bright that I can almost read the copyright notices on the inside of my eyelids.

The next minute or so is confusing. I crawl away from the glowing white silhouette of the sleeper carriage and tumble over the far side of the platform without damaging myself further. My clothes feel like they’ve melted onto my back, but the cold sweat of arousal lubricates them so I can move. Which I do, with reckless haste. I’m going to need deepsleep soon — I’m going to have to slough the top millimeter of skin off my buttocks and shoulders, not to mention growing new hair again — but the main thing is to put distance between myself and the station as fast as I can.

Somebody evidently didn’t trust Jade and his brother to do the job properly. Either that, or he changed his mind at the last moment. Which is interesting, and not in a good way. I limp into the darkness, crossing tracks into the freight-marshaling yard, where strings of peroxide-reddened freight cars slumber between tumbledown brick warehouses. New Chicago isn’t my idea of a rest stop, and I certainly don’t want to stay here, but the molten wreckage of a sleeper carriage is unlikely to convey me to my destination, and besides, the railway bulls will be here soon enough.

I’m heading toward a distant wall beyond which I can see buildings, beyond a row of container cars, when I hear low voices electrospeak each other. “Stranger come from multiple! Am thinking is bitchin’?”

“Hide then, fool. Ahoy, you! Tall one from spressline. What you do here?”

I stop dead. It’s time for a snap decision. “I’m hiding,” I say quietly. I tighten my grip on my pistol, inside my shoulder bag. “Who are you?”

A quiet chuckle. I hear something moving away from me. The distant rumble of wheels on steel comes through the soles of my feet. “Rail riders three are we.” Or did he say “free”? “Be you welcome and you never the poorer for what you share.” He backs away beneath the nearest container car. I catch a faint glimpse of a small body, many-limbed. “Be free and not afeared.”

I follow him. Ice crystals crunch beneath my hands and knees. “Who are you?” I repeat.

“Eee! Cunningly curious now! Be not unduly forward, guest. Who are you?”

I straighten up. There’s another row of container wagons just meters away, and between them an odd gathering. Someone’s tapped into one of the trains’ backup batteries and strung radiant heaters overhead between them. The ruby glow stains the trackside ground black but sheds just enough light to see, and just enough warmth to hold the frigid night at bay. Half a dozen strange folk sit between the heaters. Here’s a heavy lifter, his short, stubby body sprouting from a tracked plinth, with arms as thick as my torso and multijointed elbows. A pair of munchkins who have clearly seen better times warm themselves beneath the glimmer of an axle heater. They’re hobos or runaways, independents in a world-mill that grinds the spaces of freedom into increasingly fine fragments. I’ll bet there isn’t a limited company among them. “I’m Freya,” I introduce myself. “I’m just passing through.”

“So’s all of us.” It’s the one who met me. He’s got about sixteen legs and a multisegmented body, from which rises a neck with a sensor platform atop it. Something about him reminds me of Daks. An asteroid tunnel-runner, perhaps? Or a mining supervisor? “Be you welcome an’ you welcome us. Come, warm your joints by the fire.”

“I’m just passing through,” I repeat slowly. I shiver, but not from cold; my cryogenic mods are working fine. I feel… not exactly numb, but not good. A crashing sense of desolation settles around me, an occlusive blanket cutting me off from the universe. Petruchio doesn’t love me. Stone, Jade, and their brethren are trying to kill me, taking increasingly dangerous measures — it’s slowly sinking in that I’m lucky to be alive right now. If I hadn’t woken up and suspected something, smelled the air — They could have left their incendiary device in place and departed the train at this very station, leaving me to sleep until the timer counted down and the entire carriage torched off in a flashbulb second. I’d be dead for good, in body and soul chip. Your sister sends her regards. Juliette? Was Jade simply playing with my head, or telling the truth? If the latter, then why doesn’t Petruchio know about her? Indeed, why was Petruchio sent to meet me in the first place? I shake my head. “I need to get to Marsport,” I say sluggishly.

“Sit down with you here!” The many-legged greeter fusses around me and drags a foil insulating blanket across the concrete sleepers. “Be you tired?” I nod unintentionally, and the next thing I know, there’s a voluminous roll of not-very-clean pneumatic sponge behind me. “Bilbo knows how it works! Sit you now and tomorrow will ride you up the side of Olympus.”

This unasked-for kindness is baffling and touching, but I’m too exhausted to argue, so I go along with it. For some reason the hobos want to make a fuss over me; they move me closer to their precious heaters and offer me their furtive, stolen power cable. The fire on the far side of the station has all the bulls’ attention. Nobody has time to roust out the homeless vagrants tonight. They chat and joke about their last night’s station call and where they plan to go on the morrow, but it’s so ingenuous that after a while I begin to relax to their presence. They really are no more than they seem — and I have spent so long among liars that I am deathly tired. After an hour, I drift into a healing sleep, and for once I do not dream.

I WAKE UP with the morning light, and a strange conviction that the world is moving around me.

For a few seconds I can’t remember who I am. So strange — I seem to have multiple overlapping memories of the night before! In one of them, I was walking naked across the Martian desert, to a deserted railway platform where Daks was waiting for me with a crawler. In the other, I was walking half-naked across a railroad marshaling yard, toward a row of container cars where—

There’s a bump from somewhere deep beneath me, and the world lurches left to right, then right to left. I open my eyes and see a deep blue sky above me. Rolling my head to my left, I see I’m lying on a spongy foam mattress with my shoulder bag for a pillow, and there, looking almost close enough to touch, is a typical Martian landscape: red desert, lots of randomly distributed rocks, the distant low hills of a crater’s rim wall. It is moving. I try to sit up. My makeshift bed has somehow been transported to the top of a cargo container. A few meters away, the far end of the container draws a ruler-straight horizon. Beyond it starts another rusty metal box, and beyond that one, more… I try counting, but run out of fingers and toes before I’m anywhere near the end of the column. (Actually, I don’t. I know how to count in binary on my digits. But you get the idea.) The train stretches to the horizon, bumping and grating and squealing as the wagons clatter across the points we’ve just passed.