They reached the Trans-American rail line that afternoon, the maglev tracks a silver scar cut through the countryside. Wide concrete banks flanked the line to make it look like slashed flesh, skin pulling from the wound. A train shot by traveling at hundreds of miles an hour. Even so, it took minutes to pass, beautiful and terrifying in equal measure. Was this mankind’s exodus? The rewards too great, the penalties too fierce to remain? She thought back to Charles Takamatsu and his laboratory of corrupted people, his wish to link the organic with the mechanical and create a master race. No wonder people wanted to leave if the alternate was to be subsumed into that mechanized reality. She’d never spoken to him after his offer, events moving too quickly to control. She could add him to her list of enemies now.