While Kest messaged back and forth with her smuggling contact, Rali meditated, and Warcry watched fights on his HUD. I gave sleep another shot. Eventually, the rocking of the train and droning of the tracks knocked me out.

I dreamed about Gramps sitting on the rusty trailer house steps, shivering. There was a blanket hanging off his shoulders, but you could see the dark red smears all over his shirt and pajama pants. Cops milled around, asking him questions, while a paramedic took his blood pressure. Gramps stared past them, answering absently. At the end of our carport, another paramedic was loading a body bag on a gurney into the ambulance. The lights on top flashed purple instead of blue and red.

I lurched awake, my breath hung up in my chest. Rali and Kest were too focused on what they were doing to notice, but Warcry looked my way. Before he could say anything, I got up and headed toward the exit at the rear of the car. My throat hurt like I might start crying or screaming, and the bathroom seemed like a good place to hide until I got myself under control.

In the dirty little cubicle, I braced my arms on the walls so the swaying of the bullet train wouldn’t knock me over. I glared into the green eyes in the tarnished square of mirror over the sink.

“Get over it,” I told mysef. “It was just a stupid dream.”

Usually when I didn’t have a choice in something, I tried to shove it out of my brain and not think about it anymore. Crying over what you lost doesn’t bring it back. Even my dad had understood that, and he wasn’t some genius philosopher, just a loser drug dealer with a dead wife. I was stuck in this universe, so I shouldn’t be crying over losing Gramps. This wasn’t any different than when Mom OD’d or Dad got sent down for dealing. I had to keep moving forward and focusing on what was in front of me instead of thinking about stuff I could never get back. This was my life now. End of story.

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, outside 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 pretty bad, but his knee could bend a little bit now.

“Let’s get a move on, yeah?” he said.

After a quick check of the Heartchamber location marker on our HUDs, we left the station and headed northeast out of town, taking the boardwalk until it ran out. The water there came up to our waists. In spite of the icy rain, that open water was fairly warm.

Outside the little settlement, mats of tall, tufted grass floated on top of the water. The stalks stretched up over our heads high enough that we couldn’t see any landmarks, and rain clouds blocked out the day suns, so there was no way to tell from the landscape which direction we were going. We had to keep checking the arrow in the corner of our HUD maps to make sure we weren’t getting off track.

The lack of visibility above and below the water was kind of creepy. The grass mats seemed to be muffling all sound, and I swore I felt stuff bumping against my legs from underneath.

I looked over at Kest. “Are there any, like, alligators or creek carp or things that like to eat people here?”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got my Fish Finder on. That should give us some warning if anything the size of a carp or larger gets close.” She put the storage ring to her forehead and said, “Machete.”

A long-bladed homemade machete appeared in her hand, and she started hacking away at the mat of grass in front of her. The roots tore free of each other with a sound like a zipper unzipping.

“We need to go this way, but the grass mats grow in that direction,” she said, swiping some rain out of her eyes with her wrist. “I’ll cut, you guys shove.”

“Got it.”

“What about poisonous reptiles?” Warcry asked, shoving aside an unzipped grass mat. “Van Diemann got any of them?”

Kest shook her head. “There aren’t any native poisonous reptiles on Van Diemann that I know of.”

Warcry relaxed and nodded. I hadn’t been thinking about snakes and stuff before he’d brought them up, but hearing that they weren’t something to worry about made me feel better, too.

“Only venomous,” Kest said, and this time she wasn’t trying to hide her grin.

Rali chuckled and shoved some grass aside with his walking stick. “Classic.”

“You dorks,” I muttered, smiling.

Warcry scowled. “Long as they ain’t bigger than a creek carp, they shouldn’t be a problem.”

The twins looked at each other, then looked away like they didn’t want to answer him.

The redhead stopped slogging through the grass. “That ain’t funny! There better not be any bleedin’ giant snakes out here!”

“To tell the truth, I don’t know how big they get out here in Bogland,” Kest said. “Most of the snake and lizard population in the Rust Flats was wiped out by overconsumption, and what little survived doesn’t usually make it to adulthood before somebody kills and eats it. But nobody settles this far out, so in theory, whatever sort of reptiles live out here could grow as big as their body’s regulation system would allow.”

Warcry started scanning every clump of grass before he shoved it aside. I did the same, because jeans and a t-shirt didn’t seem like they would do much to protect me from snake fangs, whether they were giant or normal-sized.