Big surprise, that pep talk didn’t make me feel better, but the train lurched unexpectedly and threw me against the far wall, which worked well enough as a distraction.
Screeching and clacking filled the bathroom as the train put on the brakes.
“Last stop,” came the conductor’s voice over the speaker system. “Bogland.”
I glanced at the mirror one more time to make sure I looked normal, then headed back to our car.
Rali had climbed into the window seat I’d been in, and he was staring out with a huge grin on his face. The lace in his eyes was so thick that they were almost black.
“Hake, it’s raining!” he yelled when he saw me.
Sure enough, big dark clouds had blocked out the day suns, and now that we were stopped, you could hear the downpour on the roof.
Kest jumped up and grabbed my hand.
“Come on, let’s go!” she said, pulling me down the aisle to the opening doors.
As soon as we stepped onto the platform, the icy cold cloudburst drenched us. Kest giggled like a little kid and spun me around.
“It’s the rainy season!” she yelled over the pounding of the rain on the station’s tin roof. “I can’t believe we got here during the rainy season! Isn’t this great?”
I laughed. “Yeah. Great and wet.”
Rali hopped out onto the platform behind us. He stuck his arms out wide and tipped his head back, trying to catch some of the droplets in his mouth.
“Oh man,” he said, swiping wet hair out of his face. “You just can’t beat rain straight out of the sky.”
Growing up in the Rust Flats around Ghost Town, they’d only seen a couple rains a year, so it was no wonder they were excited about it. I’d come from Missouri, where it rained pretty regularly, but after a month out in the desert with them, it was kind of nice to be standing out in the rain again.
Warcry was the only one who looked like he wasn’t enjoying himself. He sheeted rainwater off his buzzed head.
“Sure, it’s fun now,” he muttered, limping on his locked-up prosthetic to a bench under the station’s overhang. “Won’t be when we’re two days down the road and wishing our clothes would dry out already, will it?”
“Can’t you just flame on and dry your clothes out?” I asked him.
He stared at me for a second, mouth open. Then he snapped, “It don’t work like that.”
Kest’s HUD buzzed, and she spent a second juggling it one-handed while she opened her message.
“Naph can’t meet us out here. He’s not allowed in shared Eight-Legged Dragon-slash-Heavenly Contrail territory.” She lowered her HUD and turned to Warcry. “So that’s a no to an off-planet prosthetic. Let me overhaul your knee real quick—see if I can rig up something so the joint will move again—then we’ll get going.”
With minimal grumbling, Warcry let her take his knee apart and put it back together.
While they were doing that, Rali and I looked around Bogland Station. The bullet train’s tracks had been built up on a high trestle to keep it out of the water that stretched out in every direction, and the station was up on stilts at the edge of a cluster of raised shacks. Elevated boardwalks stretched between the houses so you could make your way around the little settlement without getting your feet wet.
“Can you imagine,” Rali asked, looking out at the wetland settlement, “if you lived in a place where you had to build your house up off the ground because half the year it would flood?”
“If you wanted to go for a swim, you could just hop off your front porch,” I said.
Blue-white Metal Spirit strobed and crackled as Kest welded something. Rali and I both put a hand up in that direction to shield our eyes.
“That’s how it’s supposed to be on Selk,” he said. “From the pictures you see, the planet’s mostly water.”
Which explained why Selkens like him and Kest were amphibious.
“How weird was it growing up on Van Diemann?” I asked him. “I mean, this place doesn’t exactly match your biology.”
Rali shrugged. “If you’ve never had it, you can’t miss it.”
“Think you guys’ll ever visit Selk?” I asked.
“That’s a worry for someone who knows the future. If I end up there, whatever. If I don’t, also whatever.” He stuck a hand in the runoff from the roof, letting it splatter on his palm. “Kest won’t go to Selk, though. Not if she can help it.”
I glanced back at the benches. “Why not?”
“Too much chance of running into our dad,” he said.
My eyebrows jumped up. “He’s there? From what you guys said, I figured he was still on Van Diemann somewhere.”
Rali shook his head. “He went back when we were really young, took some kind of fealty oath or something that granted him a pardon. He said he’d send for me and Kest when he got there, but I guess that never panned out. Anyway, Kest took Mom’s side on the whole thing and got kind of hung up thinking of him as a traitor to the family. She says she wouldn’t have gone if Dad did send for her.”
That I could understand, but it didn’t sound like Rali did.
So I asked him, “What about you?”
The big guy leaned on his walking stick. “I bear him no ill will. Some people think they have to play by certain sets of rules to get ahead in this universe. Kest thinks money and connections can save her. Dad thought an oath and a return to Selk could. They don’t see that it’s all ridiculous.”
“Done,” Kest called from the benches, pushing up her welding goggles.
Warcry strapped his metal leg back on and took a couple testing steps on it. The limp was still
