Pain racked Russ' body.

Body?

He wasn't dead?

His limbs ached, his head throbbed, and his breaths rumbled in his chest.

His chest. It should be leaking air, not holding it in. And losing blood.

Russ strained his arms, then his legs, but only managed to move his neck. Straps held his body down on top of some sort of table. His arms tried to reach for his chest, even though he knew they were strapped down. A hollowness, an empty void, filled the place where his chest should be. Arms, legs, head, even gut—they all felt right and in the correct placement. But his chest wasn't there. No feeling. Nothing but an empty cold, a frigid ice that matched his loss.

After blinking for minutes on end, his sight came into focus. A bright light greeted his waking stare. Russ tried to find his voice, but it hid behind a gruff scraping growl.

As his awareness grew, so did the waves of pain washing over him. "Shaledust and squalor," he groaned.

"Try not to move," said a familiar voice, a voice Russ couldn't place. "We're still running tests. We'll have you up and moving soon."

Russ grunted an incoherent response.

"It's a miracle you're alive, but you clung onto life by a thread of floss. You should be dead."

A freckled, tight-eyed man rested hand over hand on a lavish cane, framed by a rose gold tailcoat suit. His gaze bothered Russ. Like he was looking at a piece of property and not a person.

"Why'm I pinned down?"

"We had to operate on you. It was a success."

"I feel numb, and hollow inside. What'd you do to me?"

"The numbness will pass with time. The hollowness... that might be the new normal for you, Mr. Ghelus."

Without warning the table lifted and tilted forward. Vertigo spun Russ' insides. He hurled.

"A common side effect," said another voice. A squat man with the thickest arms Russ had ever seen stood on a stool and wiped Russ' mouth with a rag. Flipping the rag inside out, he began rubbing Russ' chest. Russ didn't feel it one bit. But he heard it. Sounded like wool on metal.

Russ snarled. "What have you done?"

A large mirror descended from the ceiling like a guillotine. Russ stared at his reflection, an image he should recognize, but didn't. A metal plated torso sat where flesh pecks and abs should be. His heartbeat thundered beneath the metal, reverberating like an analog drum. Cold and lifeless, the chest that now held the upper and lower halves of his body intact, housing his most vital organs, felt as dead as a frozen block of ice from Rubrum's northern hemisphere.

Russ screamed.

***

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Russ lifted the bulb, the severed piece of tentacle Leroux kept from the ordeal in the canyon. It could not hurt him now that it was severed from the thing.

The thing felt cold and smooth in his palm. A piece of an alien. Or, really, a true inhabitant of Rubrum. A real Martian, as Terrans might say. Terrans would see this different, he thought. They'd be amazed that life popped up out of nowhere on Rubrum. But to Russ, a native, born and raised on Rubrum, it was nothing more than confirmation of a truth he'd known for most of his adult life.

Humans were not alone on Rubrum.

And he didn't mean the Terran animals they'd brought over from the old world. Even though in his heart he remained a loyal Rubrum through and through, a part of him knew they shouldn't be here. They were trespassing on Martian native's territory. Now he held undeniable proof in his hand that at least one form of Martian existed.

Martian wastes whizzed by in a blur outside the bullet train. His new quarters on the train were even bigger than his home back in Tharsis. He thought he'd made the right decision to accept Sujin's offer. The hollow numbness in his chest begged to differ.

Now his life consisted of following the tycoon everywhere, finally getting paid what he was worth. No more handling all of the situations Leroux neglected. Russ smiled at his faint reflection in the window.

But even as he smiled, it felt hollow.

Quynn believed in the tentafang , as he had called it. When they were kids, his best friend had claimed to see one while out roaming the wild beyond the rye fields near the canyon at night. His parents scoffed at first, but as the boy kept insisting, they grew agitated, finally commanding him to never speak of it.

The settlers weren't much better either. They ridiculed him. Other kids had bullied him, until Russ beat them up. If Quynn were alive now, he would have been vindicated. He had not hallucinated or lied. The creatures were real. And dangerous. How Quynn would have marveled that Russ had encountered one keen on devouring him and survived. If he could call it that.

But his friend could do none of that, because Trace had caused his death.

Russ scanned his lavish room with renewed disdain. A part of him thought he could just move on. Excitement and enthusiasm for a chance to work for a new highfalutin tycoon filled him at first. And his first night on the job had proved exciting and full of wonder. He'd almost died. A part of him had. How's that for excitement?

But now, alone with his thoughts, he understood he'd lied to himself. He'd never be able to move on without bringing Tracy to justice and avenging Quynn. Every memory of his best friend was stained, soiled by the fact that the Terran marshal still trod on Rubrum soil.

Russ watched the dunes below rise and fall like waves of sand as the train flew above them, shooting down the length of the trestle bridge. Sujin had matters to attend to up north, at the arctic water treatment plant. Up north, in the frigid cold, all of Rubrum's water supply sprawled, the polar cap, a continent's worth of ice. Crews of workers and bots lived, retired, and died up north, never once even setting foot in the greater settlements like Tharsis or New Oklahoma. They slaved away their whole lives, hacking out slabs of ice, sending them through the distillation plant, and then through over ground pipes, tubes whose diameters were the size of a whole speeder across. Those pipes provided water to all the settlements. Without them mankind on Rubrum would die out.

In the distance he spotted ancient abandoned domes. The first human colonies from Terra lived under those domes, before the oxygen treatment plants had been constructed. They'd been confined to spaces smaller than Russ' train quarters, living their whole lives between walls. Even outside, they had to wear special suits in order to survive in the non-existent atmosphere of a Rubrum that had yet to be terraformed.

As a kid, when old folks explained to him how things were back in their day, Russ hadn't grasped it. But now he understood. He imagined they felt somewhat like he did. Unable to go back to Terra once they got here, they had to continue on no matter what the outcome, no matter what the hardship, confined to a narrow space of existence. Russ felt like the walls of his life hedged around him, forcing him to walk a narrow path, a straight shot to meet Trace the Ace, face to face. Time would prove Russell's ally. He knew where the Ace was going to appear. If he didn't die out in the wild wastes, he'd pop up wherever Roy was.

Tracy was dead set on capturing Roy Rothspalt. But soon, after Russ confronted him, Tracy would be just plain ole' dead.

Russ didn't know much about the fugitive, other than that he was a preacher and had some sort of business relationship with Sujin, but as to exactly the nature of their relationship, he couldn't say. It was a mystery. But they were friends. And Russ knew enough to know that Sujin did not want to lose Roy to some Terran lawman, U.S. Marshal or not.

So even though Russ was currently moving hundreds of kilometers an hour in the exact opposite direction of where Roy was, and thereby where Tracy would show up, he knew this trip was short, and the train could travel just as fast backwards as it could forwards.

As Quynn had known that true Martians existed, so too he knew he'd bring Trace a reckoning. All he had to do was wait patiently, collect his new weekly creds, and bide his time.