Tory just shrugged.

“Come on girl, I just saved your life,” he reminded her. “Had to be a good reason for me to have to do it. So, tell me, what’s a kid like you doing running through the old maintenance level? Didn’t anyone tell you these tubes are prone to buildups of bad air pockets, what with the CO2 and chlorine seeping in through the cracks. Cheap fuckers think it’s OK since they only make people only come down here when the robots break down that they don’t have to do anything about it.”

I’m not a kid, Tory was about to retort, but she held her tongue.

She’d already turned fourteen before being packed unceremoniously onto the ion-driven Ares-Burroughs IV with all those other colonists. Since then she’d spent three months in space getting here, and three months so far packed under meters of red Martian rock like everyone else on this planet. She was practically fifteen by now.

His foul mouth finally registered. Funny, everyone she knew on Earth swore all the time. but that sort of thing seemed frowned upon here on Mars. Lupo and Min would have been so suspended all the time here.

“We’re building a new world,” her teacher told her. “It should be better than what we all left behind on Earth. And that includes potty mouths.”

One of the kids had even been sent home for swearing in class, even in the good way. Another reason to hate the place, Mars being way more strict than Tory was used to.

“I know that, they told us,” she told him, then trotted out some choice slogans she’d been forced to hear over and over again and the endless instructional practically advids. “But I figured that was just another lie, like ‘Mars is a great place live’ and ‘Once you’re here you’ll never want to go back to Earth’.”

He raised his white eyebrows. His whitish-copper wavy hair was longer than most people’s here. Maybe his fame meant he could get away with it.

“Got it,” he agreed. “Greenland all over again. But it will get better. A lot better. Count on it.”

“When?” Tory asked.

Did old Valentine have some kind of inside information that no one else was talking about?

“Not sure,” he offered, staring kind of through her now. “But I got glimpses of it. Beautiful, so beautiful. Like some kind of... paradise. Both ways. She showed it to me. You-”

His gaze refocused on Tory’s once again.

“It’s going to be a great home, for all of us,” Valentine insisted with a wink. “Trust me on that.”

In school, both back on her real home and here, people said hundreds of years, maybe thousands before Mars would be any kind of paradise. Even if she was imprisoned here all her life, Tory knew she’d never see that. And besides-

“This isn’t my home!” she asserted. “I want to go home, to my real home. And that’s Earth.”

A frown formed on his face.

“That’s an awfully long trip,” Valentine mused. Well, duh! “And a tricky, even if you can make it to a field and onto a ship. Elysium has some pretty serious security.”

“You have to start somewhere,” she said, realizing he hadn’t made any effort to make a call, or even pull out the spreader cylinder he had hanging on his other hip, to even start. Valentine didn’t seem too interested in anything but talking. Maybe... “I’ll walk if I have to. Elysium Field is only fifty kilometers south, right. That’s got be nothing for someone me.”

Tory’d been scouting all over the Sunken Angeles with her friends, without her parents knowing it since she was eleven and exploring whenever she could. Fifty kilometers wasn’t that far, especially in fractional gravity. Walking on Mars was like walking on a trampoline. She could just bounce all the way there if she had to. Too bad Greenie couldn’t have taken her place. If anyone could take advantage of what Mars was it would have been him.

He laughed a loud guffaw himself, and then turned serious.

“You’re not going to get far without a p-suit, or an oxyinjector, especially if you’re still planning on getting to the transport hub through these tunnels,” Valentine told her adding a wag of a finger for emphasis. “Left yours at home, I take it? Seems a bit risky, given your... condition.”

Tory scowled up at him. She hated that he was right.