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other. He touched the loco too. His fingertips ran lightly over old ceramic, ridged and plated like a tortoise shell.
    “It’s a beauty!”
    The loco made a noise. Just coolant shifting, deep in its engine compartment, but it sounded like a warning growl. Zen took his hand away, and peeked inside the first carriage. He saw luxury and lamplight, like something in an ad. No rows of seats, no luggage racks. This was—what was the word?—a
state car
. The sort high-ranking members of the corporate families rode around in: a sumptuous interstellar living room on wheels. It looked old: dusty mirrors, tarnished gilt, the leather of the deep seats cracked and faded. Shabby, but shabby in an expensive way; antique shop shabby, not the everyday worthless shabbiness that Zen was used to.
    And sitting in the middle of it, smiling at him, was the man from Malik’s photos. Same hollow face, same old black suit, same long hands and level gaze. The lights of the carriage shining on his pale hair. He was so white and motionless that he still looked like a photo, like someone frozen in the glare of a camera flash.
    “Welcome, Zen,” he said. “I’d hoped to gather you in at Ambersai. I didn’t want Yanvar Malik to find his way to your mother and sister. But don’t worry, he won’t trouble them. Railforce won’t let him pursue his obsession any further now that he has cost them a train.”
    “What’s his obsession?” asked Zen.
    “I am.” Raven steepled his fingers under his chin and smiled. Nova stepped into the carriage and looked back, smiling too, holding out her hand to welcome Zen aboard.
    Some street-bred instinct told Zen to turn and run. He ignored it carefully. Instincts weren’t always right. Raven had defeated Malik. He had taken out that wartrain. He was powerful. Whatever he had going on down here, with this hidden station and this secret train, Zen wanted a piece of it.
    He did not take Nova’s hand—he didn’t like the touch of her, that synthetic flesh that felt so nearly like the real thing. But he stepped aboard, and the
Thought Fox
closed its doors behind him.
    The carriage had been grown from livewood, with silvery bioluminescent lamps set into knots in the curved roof. It was like being inside an enormous hollow nut. Music came from hidden speakers. Waves of harmony, low voices singing words Zen didn’t know. Old music on an old train. Nova went away, into another carriage or another compartment. She gave Zen the creeps, but he felt sorry she’d gone; Raven was creepier.
    Now Raven rose from his chair. He was long and thin, and he looked wrong somehow, like something carved in cold white stone by a sculptor who didn’t quite understand human bodies. He snapped his fingers and a holographic map appeared in the air in front of him.
    “You know what this is, Zen?”
    “Of course I do,” said Zen. It was the same rail map that you saw in every K-bahn station, lines intersecting and branching to form a 3-D mass like glowing coral. “It’s the Network.”
    Raven smiled. “When I was a boy, we called it ‘Kilopylae.’ That means ‘the thousand gates’ in one of the languages of Old Earth. That was the ancient name for it, the Guardians’ name. It seems to have fallen out of fashion now.”
    “Because it’s not true,” said Zen. “There aren’t a thousand K-gates. There are nine hundred and sixty-four.” Everyone knew that. Maybe the Guardians had planned to open a thousand gates, but it had turned out that there were only so many holes they could tear in the fabric of space-time before it came apart like an old dishcloth. They had stopped after nine hundred and sixty-four gates, saying that to make another would upset some symmetry and destabilize the whole Network.
    “Yes,” said Raven. “Nine hundred and sixty-four gates. And thirty of those are out of use, because the corporate families decided it isn’t economical to keep those stations open anymore…”
    He enlarged part of the