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Two boots appeared behind it, and it looked up. So did Toby.

It was a girl, roughly his own age, dressed in long open-hooded coat and black leggings. A cap of dark hair framed even blacker eyes. A larger version of the creature that crouched in front of Toby was sitting on her shoulder.

“Quick! They’re coming.” She reached down and the cat-otter swarmed up her arm, clambered around the one there, and disappeared into a half-visible backpack over her shoulder.

She looked Toby in the eye and shook her head. “You never saw me,” she said. “I’m not here.”

Then she ran to another entrance that led into the main building, but not, apparently, into the same corridors as he’d just come out of. Before he could shout after her, she was gone.

Toby was so busy staring after her that he didn’t hear footsteps approaching behind him. Suddenly a large hand landed on his shoulder, clapped it gently.

“Aw, McGonigal,” rumbled a voice of subterranean depth. “There was never gonna be an easy way to tell you.”

Toby stood up shakily, waving away help from the man who had followed him out of the building. He was middle-aged, with crow’s-feet at the corners of his striking gray eyes, a long face, and a bent nose that looked like somebody might have broken it a long time ago.

His hand rose from Toby’s shoulder, was held out now to shake. “I’m Ammond Gon Alon,” he said.

“Welcome to your future, son.”

IT WAS ALL TOO much, and Toby found himself being led back to his bed, where he proceeded to sleep for nearly a day. He finally dragged himself to the marble-tiled bathroom and allowed a couple of bots to cycle him through a shower and provide new clothes. Then he staggered downstairs to find a vast meal waiting in a tall room with arched stained-glass windows along one wall. The man who’d introduced himself as Ammond was waiting there, as was the woman.

She held out her hand for him to shake. “Persea Eden,” she said. “We never finished our introductions yesterday.”

She had the cosmetic perfection you expected from rich Earthlings, but she was more likely Martian because she was very tall and slender.

Toby could ask about that, but he had other questions first. He also had questions he didn’t want to ask; just thinking about them made him feel sick.

“Did you rescue me?” he asked Ammond.

The older man nodded. “Well, strictly speaking, one of our orbital bots did. Your ship was spotted as we were coming out of dormancy; the telescopes do a census of orbiting and landed ships while the cities are waking up. The bots assumed you were just a visitor from some backwater planet, but Persea’s systems are always on the lookout for … unusual patterns.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Would that be a good way to put it?” She nodded. “Your ship looked different. There was a red light on our board when we woke up, so I sent a salvage tug to investigate. The rest you know.”

Toby had sat down in front at the long table, which was piled with food he hadn’t seen since he’d left Earth. You couldn’t get blueberries on Sedna, or mangoes. There were flapjacks, bacon, croissants, and was that maple syrup? His mouth watered just looking at it all.

He began voraciously piling a plate with stuff. After a couple of minutes he noticed the silence and looked up. Ammond and Persea were watching him, identical expressions of bemusement on their faces.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just I haven’t eaten in fourteen thousand years.”

Just saying this made his stomach knot with grief, but they laughed, which was what he wanted. After stuffing a whole pancake into his mouth (and yes, it really was maple syrup in that little white pitcher) he remembered them again and said, “So you own tugs? What do you do, traffic control?”

This was meant as another joke—in the two years they’d been at Sedna, no one and nothing had come into orbit around the little world. The very idea that you’d need traffic control around an orphan world in between the stars was absurd. But Ammond nodded.

“It’s one of my businesses. Lowdown is booming, there’s a ridiculous amount of immigration these days. You probably noticed how new this city is.”

“Were there other ships in orbit?” He remembered the emptiness, the stars, and a vast circular cutout that was the planet. Nothing had ever seemed so empty, except maybe Sedna in their first days there.

“Uh, over two thousand, I think.” Ammond grinned. “Pretty crowded for a little world like ours.”

“But … there was no radio chatter. And all your cities were…”

“Wintering over. So were the ships. You had the bad luck to arrive while everybody was dormant.”

“But why were you all hibernating? That’s just … weird.”

Ammond exchanged a glance with Persea. “It’s true, then. You’ve never heard of the locksteps.”

He said the word as though it meant something important. Toby shook his head.

Ammond blew out a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t even know where to start,” he said.

Persea frowned in thought. “Let’s start with this city,” she said.

TOBY ATE A HUGE amount of everything, then promptly fell asleep on a couch under a stained-glass window. When he awoke the light was just the same, but he sensed some hours had passed. A bot had noticed he was stirring and went to fetch his rescuers.

“Want to go for a ride?” asked Ammond.

The house was at least four floors tall and wrapped around a big central courtyard. It came as no surprise that it had an inside garage with five vehicles in it. Ammond and Persea picked a big lozenge-shaped ground-effect car, and Ammond sat in the front with a bot driver while Toby and Persea took up the back. In moments they slid out into an orange-lit street full of other cars and bots and bicycles and dashing pedestrians.

The city went on for kilometers. There might be a million people here, most living in glass-walled condominium towers. Presiding over it all was that bizarre orange sky—a giant neon lamp, Persea had claimed.

“It all looks ordinary enough, right?” Ammond said as he let the bot steer them through the dense traffic. “I mean, you might think the whole planet was like this. But it isn’t.”

Toby remembered what he’d seen from orbit. “There’re only a few cities, and there’re these big splash marks around them…”

“Yes! You saw that, good. It’ll make it all easier.” They’d come to a roadway and were zipping along at a hundred or more kilometers per hour. In a couple of minutes the towers were behind them, and ahead was an empty snowscape where vast dunes of white marched away into deepening darkness. Some of the dunes were carved by deep runnels and canyons of trickling water, and tortured spires and pillars of ice jutted up here and there like sentinel towers. Blustery gray clouds scudded low over the scene.

Toby looked back, and now he could see how the orange banners of light that lit the city curved up and over its buildings to make a flickering dome. Their light reflected off the clouds that tumbled around the horizon, but past that everything was dark. Midnight dark.

“We can’t heat the whole planet,” Ammond explained. “First of all, that would take a ridiculous amount of power. We’re nowhere near the Laser Wastes here. Second, if we heated the whole place above freezing, the mountains would melt. The continents would dissolve … They’re all made out of ice, aren’t they? So we light up our cities when we’re done wintering over, and heat up the air, but even that makes these giant storms—”

There were no roads out here. The car was skating over wind-whipped snowbanks, its fans sending up billows of white. Overhead the clouds were even lower, some twirling in tornadolike gyres. Driving snow was quickly reducing visibility to a few meters.