“A wedding,” he said. “My sister’s.”

Suspicion colored her expression and he felt one foot sink into the grave. “Seems a little late to be planning an international trip, especially given the terrain you’ll be traveling through.”

“I heard the Tatien border isn’t such a fuss,” he said. “Just a quick checkpoint.”

She raised her eyebrows eloquently at that.

“My friends came down all right for the wedding,” he said, settling deeper into his character’s tale. “They told me I wouldn’t have any trouble getting through.”

“If you’re lucky,” she said, glancing down at his illegible passport.

He could feel the few people in the waiting room beginning to stir, to stare and make whispered commentary. He had hoped to do this without causing a scene.

“Ma’am,” he said, injecting it with an icy courtesy that would have made his sister proud. “I hardly think it’s your concern.”

The words didn’t even shake on their way out. He was beyond that, floating just over his own right shoulder watching a stranger’s drama play out.

Inside the ticket booth, suspicion became anger on the woman’s face. And then, finally, it sank into irritated resignation. She stamped something illegible across his ticket and shoved it through the window with his passport. “As long as you’re not my problem anymore.”

He barely made it to a seat—his knees had turned to gelatin and his bowels to water. Cold sweat soaked his shirt beneath his sweater. In warmer weather he would have been scratched.

After a bare few minutes of reprieve, the bell above the station door rang. Cyril looked up and saw Aristide approaching the ticket counter, rucksack over one shoulder. He had to look down again before his face gave them both away.

The train ground to a stop in the midst of razor wire, sandbags, and corrugated metal. Palpable tension crept through the cars. Aristide looked up from his battered paperback—Return to Wolf’s Neck, which someone had left lying in the waiting room at Tarbycliff—and caught Cyril glancing in his direction.

He returned to his book without acknowledging the eye contact. Julian and Maurice had just met for the first time since university. He was trying to remember who they were, and why he should care, when the door at one end of the car slid open to reveal a pair of Tatien border guards, the collars of their sheepskin coats turned up against the cold. One held a submachine gun low across her stomach. The other led her down the row, confronting each passenger with an ominous, “Papers, please.”

Aristide produced his passport and ticket when asked, setting his book over one knee. The guard who’d asked for his papers scanned the photograph and information in his passport, considered Aristide’s face, and then handed the passport to his colleague. She squinted at it and then nodded.