“I got into the UNTA records of that first takeover of Sabishii,” Coyote said after a while, “and there was no mention at all of Hiroko, or any of her group. I don’t think they got them.”

Maya said darkly, “What’s written down has nothing to do with what happened.”

“In Sanskrit,” Marina said, “Hiranyagarbha means ‘The Golden Embryo.’ ”

Nadia’s heart squeezed. Come out, Hiroko, she thought. Come out, damn you, please, please, damn you, come out. The look on Michel’s face was painful to see. His whole family, disappeared. . . .

“We can’t be sure we’ve got Mars together yet,” Nadia said, to distract him. She caught his eye. “We couldn’t agree in Dorsa Brevia— why should we now?”

“Because we are free,” Michel replied, rallying. “It’s real now. We are free to try. And you only put your full effort into a thing when there is no going back.”

The train slowed to cross the equatorial piste, and they rocked back and forth with it.

“There are Reds blowing up all the pumping stations on Vastitas,” Coyote said. “I don’t think you’re going to get any easy consensus on the terraforming.”

“That’s for sure,” Ann said hoarsely. She cleared her throat. “We want the soletta gone too.”

She glared at Sax, but he only shrugged.

“Ecopoesis,” he said. “We already have a biosphere. It’s all we need. A beautiful world.”

Outside the broken landscape flashed by in the cool morning light. The slopes of Tyrrhena were tinted khaki by the presence of millions of small patches of grass and moss and lichen, tucked between the rocks. They looked out at it silently. Nadia felt stunned, trying to think about all of it, trying to keep it from all mixing together, blurring like the rust-and-khaki flow outside. . . .

She looked at the people around her, and some key inside her turned. Her eyes were still dry and raw, but she was no longer sleepy. The tautness in her stomach eased, for the first time since the revolt had begun. She breathed freely. She looked at the faces of her friends— Ann still angry at her, Maya still angry at Coyote, all of them beat, dirty, as red-eyed as the little red people, their irises like round chips of semi-precious stone, vivid in their bloodshot settings. She heard herself say, “Arkady would be pleased.”

The others looked surprised. She never talked about him, she realized.

“Simon too,” Ann said.

“And Alex.” “And Sasha.” “And Tatiana—”

“And all our lost ones,” Michel said quickly, before the length of the list grew too great.

“But not Frank,” Maya said. “Frank would be thoroughly pissed off at something.”

They laughed, and Coyote said, “And we have you to carry on the tradition, eh?” And they laughed some more as she shook an angry finger at him.

“And John?” Michel asked, pulling Maya’s arm down, directing the question at her.