Everyone in the crowd raised their hand, and all of her crew had stun guns or nail guns or soldering-beam guns in hand.

“We don’t want bloodshed,” Nadia said to the ever-tighter knot of bodyguards before her. “We don’t even want to take you prisoner. There’s our train right there; you can take it, and go to Sheffield and join the rest of your team. There you’ll find out the new status of things. It’s that or else we’ll all leave the station here, and blow it up. We’re taking over one way or another, and it would be stupid for anyone to get killed when this revolt is already a done deal. So take the train. I’d advise going to Sheffield, where you can get a ride out on the elevator if you want. Or if you want to work for a free Mars, you can join us right now.”

She stared calmly at the man, feeling more relaxed than she had all day. Action was such a relief. The man ducked his head to confer with his team, and they talked in whispers for most of five minutes.

The man looked at her again. “We’ll take your train.”

And so Underhill was the first town freed.

• • •

That night Nadia went out to the trailer park, which was near the new tent coping wall. The two habitats that had not been turned into labs were still outfitted with the original living quarters equipment, and after inspecting them, and then going back out and walking around the barrel vaults, and the Alchemists’ Quarter, she finally returned to the one she had lived in at the very start, and lay down on one of the floor mattresses, feeling exhausted.

It was strange indeed to lie by herself among all the ghosts, trying to feel again the presence of that distant time in her. Too strange; despite her exhaustion she could not sleep, and near dawn she had a hazy vision, of worrying about uncrating goods from freight rockets, and programming robot bricklayers, and taking a call from Arkady on Phobos. She even slept a while in this state, dozing uneasily, until a tingling in her ghost finger woke her up.

And then, rising with a groan, it was just as hard to imagine that she was waking up to a world in turmoil, with millions of people waiting to see what the day would bring. Looking around at the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving— beating very lightly— a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticon, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light.

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