A faint, whistling, bottle-rocket sound begins to rise in the night, the next cannon-train coming toward them.

“You remind me of him, you know,” Iris says.

“Your father?”

“Yes. He’s as devoted to me as you are. In some ways you were filling in for him tonight. I was supposed to have the stars with him. I had them with you instead.”

“Iris, the train is almost here. You should give me the aquaball.”

She turns the glass globe over and over in her hands, does not offer it to him.

“You know how else you’re like my father?” she says.

“How?”

“He used to die, every day, so I could have the things I wanted,” she says. “And now it’s your turn.” And she puts her hand on Chip’s back and shoves.

He drops.

The cannon-train punches through the darkness with a concussive boom.

By the time she carries the aquaball down the embankment, the train is long gone, rattling off into the south, leaving behind a smell like hot pennies.

Chip has been all but obliterated. She finds one of his ceramic hands on the blackened pebbles, a few feet from the rails, discovers shreds of his wool coat, still smoldering, among some slick, damp weeds. She spies a black diamond of battered plasteel—Chip’s heart—and is able to pry the battery out of it. It is, miraculously, intact and should slot right into her Monowheel.

Tokens gleam between the rails, across the rocks. It almost seems there are as many silver coins on the ground as there were stars above the Spoke. She collects them until her fingers are so cold she can’t feel them anymore.

On the walk back to the embankment, she kicks something that looks like a cracked serving plate. She picks it up and finds herself staring into Chip’s blank smiling face and empty eye sockets. After a rare moment of indecision, she sticks it chin down in the soft gravel, planting it like a shovel. She leaves the aquaball next to it. She has no use for the kind of ugly, helpless thing born to live its life trapped in a bottle or a ball for the amusement of others. She has no use for victims. She intends never to be one herself.

She scrambles up the slope, grabbing brush to pull herself along, thinking that if she hurries, she can get to a RebootYu and buy some used Hideware before she has to meet her friends in the Carnival District. She collected seven hundred tokens in all, which might even be enough for a used Ophelia. And if that jealous bitch Joyce Brilliant thinks Iris is going to let her borrow it, she’s got another think coming.

In another minute the mermaid is alone. It swims disconsolately out of the murk to gaze through the side of the aquaball at Chip’s easy smile and empty eyes.