He weighed about what he would on Mars, seventy kilos with the suit, she guessed, more a matter of balance than anything else, so while he babbled on hysterically, “Let me go, Zo, truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all you know and all you need to know,” she leaned over and put her arms under his back and knees, which caused him to shriek. “Shut up!” she cried. “Right now this is the truth, and therefore beautiful.” And she laughed as she started to run with him in her arms.

He blocked her view of the ground directly before them, so she had to look forward in the blaze-and-black, with sweat in her eyes. It was hard going, and twice more she fell; but while running she thumped along at a good speed back toward the city.

Then she felt sunlight on her back. It was like the pricking of needles, even through her insulated suit. Massive surge of adrenaline; blinded by the light; some kind of valley aligned to the dawn; then back into the patchy zone of light-shot shadows, a crazy chiaroscuro; then, slowly, back into the terminator proper, everything shadowed and dim except for the fiery city wall, blazing far above. She was gasping hard for air, sweating heavily, hot from exertion now rather than sunlight. And yet still the sight of the incandescent arc at the top of the city was enough to make one into a Mithraist.

Of course even when the city was directly over them, there was no immediate way of getting back up into it. She had to run past it, on to the next underground station. Complete focus on running, for minute after minute. Lactic-acid pain. And there it was, up ahead on the horizon, a door in a hill beside the tracks; pound and pound over the smoothed regolith. Violent hammering on the door got the two of them let into the lock and inside, where they were arrested; but Zo just laughed at the spasspolizei, and got her helmet off, and Miguel’s, and kissed the sobbing Miguel repeatedly for his clumsiness. In his pain he didn’t notice, he was latched onto her as a drowning man to a lifesaver. She only succeeded in disengaging herself from his grasp by banging him gently on his hurt knee. She laughed out loud at his howl, feeling a rush pour through her; such adrenaline, so beautiful, rarer by far than any sexual orgasm, thus more precious. So she kissed Miguel again and again, kisses that he did not notice, and then she barged through the spasspolizei, claiming diplomatic status and a need for haste. “Get him some drugs, you fools,” she said. “A shuttle for Mars is leaving tonight, I have to go.”

“Thank you, Zo!” Miguel cried. “Thank you! You saved my life!”