Ritchie woke to a haze of gray outside the window next to her bed. They were no longer in space; they were in the stormy atmosphere of Oymyakon. She felt a stab of panic that her time left with Guy would be all too short.
But then she checked the screen built into the wall over the head of her bed and saw the train had descended to a point as far from the Oymyakon Foreign Service Academy as it was possible to go without just going down over the second, smaller continent. She had slept through several hours of uneventful travel, but there was still a long way to go. Not only that, but the snaky line that showed the planned route was filled with the flashing lights of other stops on the way. She had thought the train was mostly filled with her fellow cadets, but clearly she had been wrong.
