So they waited their turn. In the dawn light they could see that everyone’s eyes were extremely bloodshot, which, along with the dust-caked masks still over their mouths, gave people a wild and bloody look. Clearly goggles were in order for walks out.

Finally Zeyk and Marina escorted the last group into the station. At this point quite a few of the First Hundred had found each other and clustered against one wall, drawn by the magnetism that always pulled them together in a crisis. Now, with the final group in, there were several of them: Maya and Michel, Nadia and Sax and Ann, Vlad, Ursula, Marina, Spencer, Ivana, the Coyote. . . .

Over by the pistes Jackie and Nirgal were directing people into trains, waving their arms like symphony conductors, and steadying those whose legs were giving out at the last minute. The First Hundred walked out to the platform together. Maya ignored Jackie as she walked past her onto a train. Nadia followed Maya on board, and then came the rest of them. They walked down the central aisle, past all the happy two-toned faces, brown with dust above, clean around the mouth. There were some dirty facemasks on the floor, but most people were holding theirs clutched in their hands.

Screens at the front of each car relayed film that a dirigible was showing of Burroughs, which this morning was a sea of ice-coated water, the ice predominant, although black polynyas were everywhere. Above this new sea stood the nine mesas of the city, now nine cliff-walled islands, not very tall, their top gardens and remaining rows of windows truly strange-looking above the dirty brash ice.

Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred followed Maya through the cars to the last one. Maya turned around and saw them all, filling the final little compartment of the train, and said, “What, is this one going to Underhill?”

“Odessa,” Sax told her.

She smiled.

People were getting up and moving forward, so that the old ones could sit together in the final compartment, and they did not decline the courtesy. They thanked them and sat. Soon after that, the compartments ahead of them were full. The aisles began to fill. Vlad said something about the captain being the last to leave a sinking ship.

Nadia found the remark depressing. She was truly weary now, she couldn’t remember when she had last slept. She had liked Burroughs, and a huge number of construction hours had been poured into it. . . . She remembered what Nanao had said about Sabishii. Burroughs too was in their minds. Perhaps when the shoreline of the new ocean stabilized, they could build another one, somewhere else.