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heart and down her pale arms, not as an indication of cruelty—for she wasn’t cruel, even when her living came at the price of others’ breath—but as the metaphor of sadness. When she had nothing better to do—when she was far enough ahead in her accounts that she didn’t have to worry about her own death, at least for a little while—she could ride down to the bottom of the Gloss, to the Pacific Rim’s southern crossing, where the trains worked their way across ice floes and polar fields, past the great sliding glaciers and over the storm-lashed seas. She could lean her forehead against one of the luxury cars’ triple-sealed windows, feeling through the layers of glass and vacuum the cold of that world outside, seeping through her skin and into her flesh, meeting blood that seemed almost the same temperature. Across the tiny unfolded table in front of her seat would be twists of paper and scraps of metal foil, the snowy contents unwrapped and ingested in any appropriate way, molecules unlocking under a Velcro’d patch of skin, or gums and mucosa stinging under the attack of microscopic drill-bits tugging bad-attitude atoms behind them. Getting to her feet as the first shivering rush hit her, eons of glacial motion compressed into seconds as her spine was measured by endorphins and rage; knocking over the champagne flute of the man sitting next to her, spilling wet prickling stars into his lap; stumbling out blind into the swaying center aisle, the magnified thunder of her pulse knocking her off-balance more than the train’s motion as it tilted through the banked maglev tracks, under cliffs of ice, her heart seizing as though its hinges had snagged on hard crystals, lurching into the next beat by some lower brain-stem force of will—
    He could always kill himself
.
    The dead woman’s words echoed inside November’s skull; she could close her eyes and still hear them, rolling like thunder in the air and theiron wheels of the oldest trains that ran the circle. She supposed the dead woman was right. Though there were different ways of killing yourself, ways that efficiently and tidily left you still alive afterward.
    Ways like those in the memory flash that had blossomed inside her head, thinking about her own name. What came after the stumbling out into the train’s aisle: pushing her way past the backs of the plush seats, her vision opened into a blur-rimmed tunnel, tight enough that she didn’t have to see the faces turning up toward her, didn’t have to see anything except the auto-sliding door that led between cars and the door that didn’t open by itself, a smaller one, some kind of maintenance access, which opened into one of those spaces that people with a desperate need for privacy and little need for comfort could always find. The cross-treaded metal was always littered with orange plastic hypodermic caps, like thimbles for depraved faery folk, the needles themselves crackling underfoot like the blood-specked ground of a steel forest. The Antarctic cold crawled in sharper here, her exhaled breath nebulous in front of her face, inhaled ice burning down into her trachea. Pinpoint metal scratched her knees when some
teneviki
arbitrageur from the Gloss’s Vladivostok zone followed her into the narrow space, put his capitalist hands on her shoulders, and pushed her down. The one whose champagne she’d spilled; his crotch still darkly stained and smelling of wine, the teeth of the zipper and his polished fingernails glistening wet, his other hand already tangled in her hair and drawing her closer, his back against the hidden door, the world tight as a refrigerated coffin.
    He doesn’t have a prayer
…
    None of them ever did. She knew that was why she was named November. Even when she was alone again, kneeling in that little space, the side of her head against the metal separating her from the snow and ice sailing by outside, with the taste of salt and chlorine at the back of her throat. In the world