Chapter One
Feverish Fleeing
For the first time in her life, Valentina del Toro was completely alone. No cousins clamoring around her demanding food and attention, no brother wrapped around her leg impeding her movements as she went about her chores, no crowds of fellow shoppers jostling her elbows as she traded a pocketful of eggs for a small sack of lentils. All around her, all the way to the distant horizon in an immense circle around her, there was no one but her.
For the first time in her life, Valentina del Toro was outside the science station that had been her birthplace, outside the polar tunnels that had been her home since she was five, out in the dim Martian sunlight she had only rarely glimpsed through the station windows; the last glimpse was nearly a decade ago. The world
