The hulking steel machine arrived with the squeal of metal under friction and a great puff of smoke. After a moment, side doors opened on several of the brightly-painted railcars, allowing throngs of people to hurriedly disembark with the train. The vibrant color scheme of the steam locomotive held a strange juxtaposition to the uniform gray and olive drab architecture surrounding the central station. Martin and Namo marveled at the massive machine, the likes of which neither of them had ever before seen. Al-Kutami must have noticed their slack-jawed expressions, for he chuckled knowingly. “First time, I presume? Happens to everyone. Behold, the magnificence of the steam-powered engine: the future built by, and for, the people of Penelopeia.”

Namo recovered from her stupor quicker than Martin could. “The future is kinda loud.”

“Ah, my dear, that is but the clamor of innovation, the ringing of the church bell for the sermon of the betterment of civilization! Come, let us be on our way.” He led the travelers to one of the cars near the rear of the train, which Al-Kutami informed the Sinoean travelers had been reserved for him and his entourage. The three men who had bailed Martin and Namo from jail—Frank, Gus, and Micah—also accompanied the tycoon “for the purpose of personal protection and handling of sensitive business matters; you may even pretend they are not here,” as the magnate had put it, and joined the trio in a luxury dining car. The group of retainers sat at a gold-trimmed ebony table with plush booths the color and texture of red velvet cake on the opposite side of the aisle before Gus produced a deck of cards from his jacket and began dealing a hand to the three of them.

As Martin, Namo, and Al-Kutami took their seats, a svelte young man with a dimpled smile dutifully appeared in time to store their coats and hats. Al-Kutami pulled a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his blazer before they sat down. Martin marveled at the efficiency with which they were provided service. As soon as the first valet left, as if rigged to a mechanical device, a young, waifish, red-haired human woman approached the group, pen and pad of paper in hand. “Would you care for something to drink, Mister Al-Kutami? Perhaps your usual mint tea?” Both the cloakroom attendant and the waitress currently assisting them wore matching burgundy dress attire—identical in hue to that which Al-Kutami and his retainers currently wore.

The man smiled up at her. “Of course, Miss Purcell. And please, whatever these two like, as well. On me, of course.”

“Yes sir,” the woman nodded, turning to the pair. “And what can I get for you, miss?”

“Oh. Fer. Cute. Your dress is so pretty! It really compliments your hair!” Namo twirled her braid in excitement. “It reminds me of this tree back home—we call it noko’onto. This time of year it looks bright orange, and its red bark is beautiful! It’s also great for healing split hooves when ground up and mixed with something oily.”

The demure young woman maintained a strong effort not to demonstrate an outward effect of the compliment, but her pale complexion failed to conceal the slight crimson blush caused by the faun’s odd compliment had. “Um, thank you miss. I’d offer to relay your feedback to our customer care staff, but, well, since Mister Al-Kutami is here, I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

“Message received, both of you,” Al-Kutami said, turning his head to regard each of the women with a polite laugh.

Martin looked past Namo’s shoulders and out the window as the coastline sped past at speeds the man hadn’t thought possible for a vehicle so large. He swirled his wine, the Empress vintage 284 Cabernet Sauvignon dry, smooth, and heavenly rich on his alcohol-parched tongue. Namo enjoyed a cup of coffee, lukewarm as was her custom, similarly gazing out the window, scratching the top of her head every few minutes.

The vagabond took another sip of his wine. “So, Mr. Al-Kutami. It sounds like you’re pretty well respected here. Are you the head of customer service with the rail company?”

Al-Kutami laughed. “I suppose you could say that, in a manner of speaking! But more accurately, I lead this rail company, my friend. The Trans-Penelopeian Rail Corporation, president and CEO Ibrahim Ibn Rashid Al-Kutami.”

“I suppose that explains a lot,” Martin replied flatly, in an attempt to ignore the magnate’s flair for the dramatic. “Judging based on the number of customers on board, I take it the company has expanded while you’ve been in charge, then?”

“Pah!” The tycoon exclaimed, with a puff of his chest. “That’s putting it mildly. I turned this company’s dreams into a reality! When I started in the company, fresh-faced and head full of lofty ambitions, there were no train lines on the Peninsula, merely a tiny streetcar network in Stonefield City.” He jabbed a finger onto the table of the dining car. “This very line only exists thanks to my leadership! And more rail lines are being built and serviced across the continent. Just last week I received some fantastic news.” The man leaned closer, as if he were divulging company secrets. “Groundbreaking has just begun on a tunnel beneath the Josuunajee Glacier. Do you know what that means?”

Martin could only shake his head dumbly.

“Soon, the Stonefield network will be connected to Perras. Transportation across the continent will never be easier for the common man—for goods as well as people. It is the very definition of progress, my friends.”

Namo leaned off or her balled fist and took a sip of her coffee. “I wonder what it would be like to just use a machine like this one to travel north when it gets cold durin’ the winter, and south when it gets hot durin’ the summer. It would make life so much easier!”

“Indeed it does, and indeed it will, Ms. Namo. So long as the Trans-Penelopeian Rail Corporation falls under the my auspices, you may rest assured that this vast world will grow quite a bit smaller.” Al-Kutami produced the paper he had taken from the pocket of his suit jacket earlier and unfolded it to reveal a map of the area. The center of the map depicted a roughly triangular landmass, with a narrow isthmus at the eastern extent and a glacier to the west connecting to larger landmasses. “Let’s discuss our immediate travel plans,” the tycoon said. He cleared his throat softly. “We are currently here.” Al-Kutami’s spindly finger pointed at a settlement in the south center of the triangular landmass. “Fort Sarmiento, Perras Peninsula, Echo, et cetera, et cetera. We will be taking the rail through here,” he said, drawing a line through two nearby settlements, “stopping here, in Fort Kurtz, for the evening. I have a business meeting to attend to the following day, so we will be spending the evening in town and departing the following afternoon.”

“Sounds good enough, I guess.” Truthfully, Martin didn’t want to delay even a day, but recognized he had little choice in the matter. “We, uh, staying in a hotel?”

“Precisely. The Lakeview Hotel—the finest Fort Kurtz has to offer. So anyway, I’ll that ask the two of you to busy yourselves for the day while I attend to business matters. And please, stay out of trouble, would you?” There was an annoyingly accusatory inflection to the man’s tone.

“Don’t blame me! The cops were the ones who made a big deal about Namo being in town.”

“Well, see to it that they don’t have a reason to make it a ‘big deal’, Mr. Halsted. That is all I ask. The law is what it is.”

“And what is the law, exactly?” Namo interjected. “It don’t seem fair to me, whatever it is.”

Al-Kutami nodded sagely, as if recognizing that the faun would need to have the information fed to her. “In most cities here on Perras, fauns must be accompanied by a human at all times or otherwise have a permit to travel independently. They are subject to registration when residing in a human settlement. You’re lucky that we’re traveling, because you’re covered under my travel permit. But give the authorities a reason to, and they won’t hesitate to lock you up. So I mean it when I say: ‘behave’.”

Namo snorted and stared back out the window, scratching her scalp deeply. Her indignation caught Martin off guard. He understood and empathized with her distrust of the man, but why couldn’t she recognize that Al-Kutami was merely trying to help them? “Well, thanks for the advice. We’ll, uh, be sure to keep our heads down.”

An uncomfortable, tense silence hung in the air, interrupted occasionally by Namo scratching her head as she stared out the wide window.

The tycoon continued, after a moment of letting the tension try to diffuse on its own. “Upon conclusion of my business in Fort Kurtz, we will depart tomorrow afternoon by rail northward, arriving in the hamlet of Traegerville by evening. I wish not to tarry, so I will make arrangements to continue northward by carriage to Portsmouth. We will be traveling through the night, because if all goes according to plan, we will have a layover of just a few hours in Portsmouth before a ferry will carry us across the sea to New Kenai, arriving by the morning after next. Really a quite simple journey, you see.”

Martin felt that it was anything but. “Why not just take the train the whole way to Portsmouth? A carriage seems slower and more cumbersome.”

Al-Kutami nodded in acknowledgment. “And indeed you would be correct in that presumption. However, there is active construction on the tracks between Traegerville and Portsmouth: it pains me to even mention, but lowlifes and ruffians have vandalized some of the rail infrastructure along the route, and the repairs needed are unfortunately quite extensive. It just goes to show that no matter how visible its benefits, there are always enemies to progress. It is a reminder that we must stay resolute in the face of such opposition.”

Over the course of the next several hours, Martin watched the scenery of Traeger Lake pass them by. Waves crested in the massive lake. Distant dinghies and sloops dotted the waters, the seamen plying their various trades as flying creatures circled like silvery gnats; whether they were native lizard-birds or introduced avians from Earth, Martin could not say. As they clattered along the tracks, Martin reflected on just how far from home he was. Before this journey, the last time he had seen the coast was as a child on a visit to northern Sinoe with his parents and sister. The man allowed himself to remember the joyful time he had, but upon his thoughts wandering to how his family fared all these years later, he pushed the reminiscence aside. Such sentimentality served no purpose in his current predicament.

Speaking of sentimentality, he imagined how Namo must have been feeling. If the experience was novel to him, he could only imagine how the additional culture shock affected the faun. The man put a reassuring hand on the unsuspecting botanist’s shoulder as she twitched, but eventually leaned into, his comforting touch. There was something about her that puzzled the man: the nights she would cry when she didn’t think he could hear. The distant look she would give when talking about growing up, or her life back in Jeju. And now, the puzzling bargaining chip Al-Kutami played to win the woman over:

“Would you like to know what happened to your village?”

Martin could hardly forget the wide-eyed stare Namo had returned to the railroad magnate when he had asked her over their breakfast, the kind of wide-eyed stare that Martin imagined he might give if someone offered advice on Afzal’s or Arbour’s whereabouts. All available evidence pointed to the faun concealing something about her home, something painful. Something distressing.

A sobering epiphany struck Martin that perhaps fleeing from their past was one thing the pair shared in common. The man downed the rest of his glass of wine in a single swallow, as if to drown the sudden realization.

The engine eventually diverted inland, scaling a shallow but constant hill through tawny parkland. The grasses had concluded their growing season for the year and had begun dying back, leaving occasionally spherical shrubs to constitute the only greenery in the tree-barren landscape. The rolling hills and open sky above similarly reminded Martin of his childhood home of northern Sinoe, but much colder. After another hour of ascending a cliff, the engine made a brief stop in the town of Argent Bluff, which was barely a dot on the map in comparison to the sprawling Fort Sarmiento, but which nevertheless provided spectacular views of the lake below, silvery in the noonday sun. The man watched as a handful of passengers disembarked at a scenic cliff-side overlook of a gravelly beach, and as the train left the station and the sleepy-looking clapboard buildings gave way to unobstructed, though slihgtly less spectacular views of the gray-blue water below Martin could just make out distant, hazy glaciers reminding him of just how far south he and Namo had traveled from Vernon. As interesting as the vista was, however, the repetitive clacking of the rails and motion of the car, combined with the relaxation that accompanied being in the presence of his faun companion, lulled the man into a light sleep.

The vague sensation of deceleration stirred Martin from his nap, but a firm nudging from his right shoulder caused the man to blink his eyes open.

“Mister Al-Kutami says we made it,” Namo all but whispered into Martin’s ear as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

The group rose from their seats, accompanied by the three men in Al-Kutami’s direct employ, and departed the comfort of the train car into a grand terminal that managed to straddle the line between pragmatically minimalist and artfully embellished: The indoor structure was mostly concrete, but with ceramic mosaic inlays interspersed at regular intervals along the floor and walls depicting abstract reliefs in hues of blue, red, orange, and pale green. Two pairs of three sets of tracks were ceilinged by perpendicular vast stone arches forming a pair of half-cylinders connecting in an X that Martin supposed extended at least one hundred meters in either direction from where he stood. Judging based on this single intersection of six sets of tracks seemed the station was built to handle the intersection of multiple lines: the hub of the network.

Al-Kutami led the group out from the terminal where the throngs of people quickly grew from lightly congested into a crawling morass, and before Martin realized it, the six travelers stood in a cluster of bodies that roughly approximated a line. As if anticipating the foreigners’ confusion, the tycoon interjected: “Security checkpoint. You know how it goes. Remember: behave.”

The line moved slowly, too slowly for Martin’s taste. Quite some time had passed since the tramp had encountered so many dozens of people in one place, and in such tight proximity, no less. The man glanced at Namo, who noticed his gaze and gave a soft, if a bit forced, smile. Her glance gave Martin all the information he needed to infer that she felt similarly uncomfortable.

“Is it usually this busy?” Martin asked, after several minutes of standing in one place without making any progress.

The magnate nodded. “I’m afraid so; it’s what happens when the Society prioritizes security over efficiency.”

There he goes with “the Society” again. “Say, Mr. Al-Kutami?”

“Yes, Mr. Halsted?”

“What do you mean by ‘the Society’?

Al-Kutami gave a brief chuckle. “Hah! It slipped my mind that you may not ever have encountered any of its members before, and known you had done so, anyway. ‘The Society’ is the shorthand for ‘the Society for the Advancement of Mankind’, or SAM. Current president: Dr. Enoch Dumont. The Society is the local unofficial governing authority—sort of like a private contractor, you might say—for most of the settlements here on the peninsula, as well as some other areas across Echo and, yes, even the distant continent of Daphnis, which is where their de facto seat of government stands. Interestingly enough, I think Sinoe may be the only continent where they don’t yet have a foothold, which explains why the continent you two hail from is so, well—”

“—rustic?” Martin interjected.

“—friendly?” Namo offered.

“—unsophisticated,” Al-Kutami finished, as they took a few steps forward. They were near the front of the line at this point, approaching a series of parallel kiosks divided into five separate lines, each staffed by a pair of drab-uniformed attendants. “Anyway, they had their origins as a principally scientific organization that developed political, and then paramilitary, arms over the past fifty years or so. Their focus on human progress and advancement has won them many supporters across the continents, especially since they have the results to back it up. But as you can see, many of their policies are rather strict in the name of security; not everyone is partial to their brand of oversight.”

Namo piped up from her position behind Martin. “Ya shore talk a lot about progress, Mister Al-Kutami. Are ya part of ‘The Society’?”

Al-Kutami shrugged his shoulders. “Nominally, yes, I am a card-carrying member and have been for the better part of a decade. But understand that it’s a complicated matter. Recently, the leadership have pursued an agenda that departs in some ways from what I would deem fair and just.”

“What do they do that you disagree with?” Martin chimed in.

The railroad tycoon made to answer, but a gruff looking man summoned the group to the stand for inspection. A pair of middle-aged humans, one male and one female, both appearing equally dour and fatigued, stared the group down disinterestedly. They approached as a group, ordered to present their identification, and disclose any firearms they had on their person. Martin was grateful for Al-Kutami’s advice to conceal his single-action revolver in his backpack; the presentation of the tycoon’s travel permit seemed to have high enough clearance to allow his entire entourage to pass through without much scrutiny.

The dour woman gave a nod after reviewing Al-Kutami’s travel documents and handed them back to him unceremoniously. Her equally nonplussed partner droned after: “Just a reminder, sir, all non-human species must be accompanied at all times under travel permit regulations. If found unattended and without permits at any time, it will be impounded and subject to a fine up to five thousand credits. Any non-human species not claimed within forty-eight hours will be euthanized at the owner’s expense.”

Namo, who had been disinterestedly people-watching during the security procedures, furrowed her brow and turned to the security officer. “Wait, are ya talking about me?”

The man turned to regard her with a raised eyebrow but otherwise said nothing.

The faun snorted in disgust at his condescension. “Listen, mister. If ya have a problem with me, ya better talk to me, not this guy. Who do ya think ya are to treat me like I’m someone’s prop—“

A resounding swat across Namo’s face interrupted the faun’s tirade, the impact hard enough to stun her into smarting silence. “Dearest apologies, my good sir. This one is new under my supervision and is not accustomed to how Fort Kurtz keeps the peace. I’ll see to it that she is muzzled so that this doesn’t happen again.”

“See that it doesn’t happen again,” came the officer’s numb reply. “The next inspection may not go so favorably otherwise.”

After the group proceeded through the security gate and found themselves in an area where they would not be disturbed by the river of bodies flowing through the exit doors, Al-Kutami pulled Namo aside. “I want to apologize for laying my hand on you, Ms. Namo, but you must understand that it wasn’t really my fault; you could have put yourself and all of us in jeopardy with that little outburst.” He spoke in low, hushed tones, as one might chastise a misbehaving child in public. “I believe I made myself quite clear when I asked you to keep. Your. Head. Down. Please, in the future, think before you speak. I unfortunately cannot bail you out of incarceration here should you fall on the wrong side of the law.”

The woman said nothing, and did not even make eye contact with the railroad tycoon. Her defiance struck the man as so unlike her to where Martin almost wondered whether the woman had even heard him. He thought to rebuke Al-Kutami’s harsh treatment before reading her expression; her eyes burned with a cold anger directed toward the railroad tycoon that he had never glimpsed in her before. The asperity she held behind those typically warm, mirthful chocolate eyes of hers struck Martin dumb. With nothing remaining to be said, the six travelers the exited the station into the gray skies of downtown Fort Kurtz.