It was raining in the hub. The thawing frost on the inside of the dome was falling like gray tears, lit by the shining coral of the tower.
Zen had not expected to be back so soon, and all alone. As he came through the K-gate he was half afraid that he would find the place crawling with Kraitt, or his way into it blocked where the Railbomb had exploded. But there were no Kraitt, and when the Damask Rose sent up a drone, it showed him the Sunbird sitting peacefully on a track at the far side of the dome.
“Nova?” he asked his headset. “Are you there?”
There was a moment of waiting and then her voice in his head. “I am.”
“You’re all right! What happened? Why didn’t you come back to Khoorsandi? It’s been hours and hours. I was afraid the bomb…”
“Everything’s all right,” she said, but he thought she sounded sad. “Come and talk to me, Zen. Talk to me with your mouth, not like this.”
*
She sat in the middle of the tracks, watching the old red train come closer. Sometimes she used her mind to move a set of points so that it could take a shortcut through the maze of rails. Sometimes she kindled Station Angels to dance along beside it and scramble playfully over its hull and over the roof of the one carriage it pulled, which was Raven’s old state car. Behind her the Sunbird waited quietly, still ashamed at its failure to explode, but starting to think about the new ambitions she had given it.
The Damask Rose came close, and stopped. Nova stood up. She had already made her decision, but she almost changed her mind again when Zen stepped out of the state car and walked toward her, turning up the collar of his coat against the rain.
He hugged her. “I was so worried about you,” he said. “I wanted to come through after you right away, but there was so much to do. Chandni was hurt and we had to get her to a hospital — she came through for us in the end, saved Threnody and me from Shiv Mako. Khoorsandi is still in chaos while the data raft reboots, but Threnody and her uncle are busy talking to lawyers and people, trying to establish our claim to the K-gate before any more Prells arrive. The Prells who are there seem okay though — that Laria, she’s all right. And all I could think about was you, but Station Angels kept drifting into the station, and the Rose said that was a sign you were okay…”
“It was!” said Nova. “They were my messages to you, and they brought back news. Otherwise I would have been worrying about you too. But the Angels watched the newsfeeds for me. I know all about the new company that’s been set up, Noon-Starling Lines, and how you’re going to be sending a trade expedition to the Greater Web. I’ve seen the gossip sites too. They’re saying that new business alliances are usually sealed by a marriage.”
Zen looked confused, then doubtful, then actually a little afraid. “Me and Threnody? That’s never going to happen! I’m just going to stay on Khoorsandi while the contracts are all signed, and see the expedition off. Then I thought we could go to Summer’s Lease, find Myka and my mom…”
Nova laughed, sort of. He was so young and beautiful, and she felt so lucky that he loved her. She hated the thought of what she had to do. But her mind had become so strange, and so full of things that she knew he could never understand. She said, “This stupid rain. I spent so long figuring out how to cry actual tears like a real girl, and now you can’t see them because of the rain.”
“Why are you crying?” Zen asked.
“Because I can’t come back to Khoorsandi with you,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Something happened to me, Zen. I’ve changed.”
“We’ve both changed,” said Zen. “We’ve been through a lot. But we’re safe now. We’ve won! We’re all right! Aren’t we?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t sure how to explain. “I’m becoming something…” she said. “My mind opens up like wings…” She shook her head again. It was useless trying to explain. “When I was on Khoorsandi, all I could think of was getting back here. And now that I’m here, I have to go on,” she said.
“Then you can. We’ll be sending lots of trains through. We’ll go on together, explore the whole Web of Worlds — it will be just like before…”
“No, it won’t,” she said. “When human trains start traveling onto the Web, the Guardians will come with them. They’ll want to make sure there’s no trace left of what they did. Wherever they find one of the Railmaker’s machines still working, they’ll shut it down and replace it with something of their own. And I need to talk to those machines before that happens, Zen Starling. There’s so much more that I need to learn from them. I have to go to the center of things. Look…”
She turned and pointed past the silver bulk of the Sunbird. The track it stood on stretched toward the dome wall, but sank into the ground before it reached it, vanishing into the mouth of a tunnel festooned with glowing coral.
“This is the oldest line in the whole hub,” she said. “The first line. I think it leads all the way back to where it all began. If I can get there, I might find the Railmaker itself. I think it might still be alive, some part of it, at least. But I have no idea what things are like, that deep in the Black Light Zone. I don’t know if humans can even survive there. So I have to go alone. The Sunbird is going to take me. It doesn’t want to be a bomb anymore. It’s developed this sudden urge to travel.”
The former Railbomb turned its engines on. The pulse of them made its battered cowling tremble. Beyond it, deep in the tunnel, the light of the waiting K-gate flickered like static.
“And when I’ve gone through,” said Nova, “I’m going to take the warhead out of the Sunbird and detonate it. I have to block that gate so that the Guardians can’t come through after me.”
“But that means you won’t ever be able to come back.”
“No,” she said. “I won’t. And I’m going to miss you so much, Zen Starling.”
Zen felt suddenly very small and lost, the way he had when he was little, watching the home he’d known dwindle behind him when his mother took him off down the K-bahn to a new one. “But I need you,” he said.
“I need you too.” She touched his face and smiled. “This is what it feels like, being human. Needing someone, and loving them so much that you want it to last forever. But it can’t, and it goes past you, and falls away into time, and you can’t hold on to it. Except for memories. I’ll hold onto those always. Do you remember that first night, at Yaarm in the Jeweled Garden, when the wind blew the curtain?”
He put his arms around her then and she kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him. She could taste rain on his mouth and the salt of his tears. She saved the taste and the warmth of him to her deepest memory. “Please stay,” he said. And she wanted to. But she knew that, if she did, there would never be a moment sweeter than this one. So she stood for a long time with her face close to his, looking into his eyes, breathing in the musk of him. And then, before her mind could change, she turned and walked quickly away through the rain.
The Sunbird started to move, opening a hatch in its side as it went. She wanted to look back, but she didn’t, because she wanted her last memory of Zen to be his kiss. So she walked quickly with her head down, keeping pace with the train, feeling like the heroine of an old movie. And she wondered if this was why she had always wanted to fall in love in the first place — not for the love itself, but for the sweet aching sadness of its ending.
Music swelled around her like a soundtrack. It was the voice of the Sunbird, singing a new song, a song full of wonder at the size of the universe and the mysteries that lay ahead of it in the light of the black suns. She jumped nimbly up into the doorway it opened for her and went inside, and the door closed, and the Sunbird gained speed and shot underground toward the light of the gate. And suddenly, where there had been a train, there was nothing.
Zen stood and watched the gate for a long time. He wiped his eyes and waited for Nova to change her mind and for the Sunbird to bring her back, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. The Damask Rose asked him if he wanted to go after her, but he shook his head because he knew there was no point. She was on her way to places where he could not follow.
The Damask Rose did not ask him again. After a while she gently opened her doors. Zen stepped into the state car, and sat down, and the old red train carried him back to the Network Empire, where the rest of his life was waiting to begin.