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why.
    It was a K-bahn station.
    He turned around, trying to work out which part of Cleave Station this was, and why it was so quiet. And slowly he real-ized that it was not part of Cleave Station at all. The high vaulted roof where shadows nested, the broken clock and shuttered shopfronts, the wide concourse, deep in dust and droppings, where rows of empty chairs faced a departure board decked with cobwebs… It was unmistakably a station, but it was not Cleave Station. It was another, hidden deep in the canyon’s cliffs. Its name was stenciled in huge letters on the walls: CLEAVE-B.
    “That’s impossible.” His voice echoed around the subterranean hall and sent small, unseen creatures scurrying for cover among the drifts of litter in the corners. “Cleave is on a one-gate world. There’s only one line in.”
    “There is nowadays,” agreed the strange Motorik. “There used to be two.”
    “I’ve never heard of a Cleave-B. It’s not on the Network map…”
    “Not anymore. The line from here runs to a K-gate under the Sawtooth Mountains. But that K-gate just links to Tusk, and you can get to Tusk much quicker from the main Cleave station. This place was shut down fifty years ago.”
    That felt right. Fifty years of dust and debris under Zen’s boot soles. Fifty years of seeping water staining the tiles, drizzling scabs and stalactites down the frontages of cafés and waiting rooms. The fading ads on the walls for drinks and threedies that he’d never heard of. Everything stamped with a corporate logo he didn’t recognize: Sirius Trans-Galactic . Old stuff. Antique. Valuable. Collectors paid good money for railway memorabilia.
    But Zen knew that was too small a way to think about this place. A whole lost station! Surely he could find better ways to profit from it than just stripping out the fixtures to sell at Ambersai Bazar…
    He followed Nova through an archway, onto a platform. There were other platforms beyond it, rails shining in the shadows between them. This place had been busy once. Zen wondered how he’d never heard of it, but memories were short in Cleave; people blew through on short-term contracts, earning what they could and moving on. They didn’t hang about to discuss local history. Flex had said something about an abandoned line, he remembered. Maybe she had been down here. But Flex didn’t talk much to anyone.
    Across a footbridge, past screens that would once have told the times and destinations of the trains. Dry leaves crunching underfoot. Lights turning on, weedy and power-starved but doing their best as they sensed Zen and Nova’s movements. Below the bridge, Zen saw trains. An old Foss loco, and a couple of others that he couldn’t make out. Dead trains in a dead station…
    No, not all dead. Light came from one, spilling through the gaps in the blinds on the carriage windows, and through shark-gill vents along the loco’s side. Zen heard the faint waiting purr of it as Nova led him down the stairs to the platform. The loco was a streamlined slice of darkness, splashed with mysterious numerals and letters, stitched with rivets, exhaust ports, the housings of powerful drive-wheels. A huge engine idled like a heartbeat deep inside it.
    Behind it were three carriages: double-deckers, massive and elaborate, but old; the type of rolling stock that Zen had only seen in historical threedies.
    “
Fox
?” said Nova. Her voice echoed up and down the platform. “We have an extra passenger.”
    The train just sat there, but a maintenance spider scrambled out of a hatch on its hull and trained its cameras on Zen. One of the carriage doors slid open, and the wind it made sent more of those small dry leaves whispering and scratching along the platform. Zen was too lost in railhead awe at the strange train to wonder where leaves had come from, down there.
    “This is the
Thought Fox
,” said Nova. She patted the big loco’s hull with one hand, steering Zen toward the first carriage with the