The Mover’s schedule varied, of course.  By an hour or two.  Geir swiped on his wristband to the page that gave the train’s status—it hadn't even departed from its eastern terminal.  He tapped on the icon that showed it on the right end of the line crossing his screen, bringing up a dialog of basic diagnostics.
Status: ready
Power: 100%
Crew: on board
That was all.  He didn’t have access to any more.  Maybe there was a system error, and the computers weren’t updating its location.  A lot would have to go wrong for that to happen, though: the Mover had its own GPS, the crew and the terminals communicated constantly, and the rail itself knew where the train was.
Geir waited another hour, with no change on the status page.  The cold was much sharper when standing still.  Wind bit at his beak and eyes.  Finally he swiped to the other third page of his display, and tapped the call button.
Calling the station was harshly frowned upon.  Geir would forfeit his pay for this period, if the administration deemed the call unnecessary.  But there was no answer.  Presumably a number of railminders were calling now.  Possibly all of them at once.
The zoan took back to his route.  He reached the end of his hundred kilometers—he touched the tree that grew right on the end of it, as he always did—and waited.  In all his years, he hadn’t encountered the railminders who walked the stretches adjacent to his.  He had probably met them in the mess when he was off duty, but he wouldn’t have known which other sullen workers they were.  He stared off eastward, into the length of snow and steel and trees that was just like his but not, wondering if any distant dark mote in the white was his counterpart, headed this way.  Then he turned and headed back west.
“Do you know anything about it?” he asked the base camp when he set up for the night.
The two cameras only looked at him.  He wondered if anyone at the station saw him through those.  If so, they had seen him press the call button several times.  Geir sighed and took his place in the padded coffin for the night.
He didn’t walk the next day.  He remained in the base camp’s chamber as long as he could stand to, emerged, ate, worked his punching routine twice, and sat in his folding chair, facing the rail.
He didn’t like not walking.  He didn’t like where his mind went.  Thinking about the several years before he had volunteered to work, finding labor and trouble on the streets, sleeping under bridges and fighting for brief gigs bouncing at clubs or shadowing pushers.  It wasn’t that he was bothered by the memories.  It was that, the more idle he was, the more immediate they seemed.  A day waiting for word about the Mover’s silence compressed fourteen years into nothing.
It wasn’t the difficulties that he wanted distance from.  It was the bitter, alkaline frustration that had driven him out of the receiving home in the first place.  The weariness, and the anger.  It was that he was finally free of the dreams of Samuel, and he didn’t want them back.
When the zoans were decanted from the growing baths in their factories, there was a frantic dash to find homes for them.  There were millions—grown in secret, no longer commercially viable, but too close to human to summarily destroy (though it was well known that every manufacturer flooded at least some of their baths with ammonia).  Most were adopted by human families or communities.  It was charitable to take in a zoan.  Receiving homes sprang up, like the one into which Geir had been decanted, to take in a dozen or more, promising loving and communal upbringing.  There was no preparing for the world to suddenly receive a new population of several million. Born at the age of five, they bore the features of animals, and came imprinted with motor and sensory and rudimentary language skills.  Everything else, humanity had to figure out.
A barbatus model, Geir had the face, flesh, and talons of the lammergeier that lent him its name.  He had been earmarked as exotic.  He at least would always have that.
The Mover remained stationary at its eastern terminal, and the station was still silent.  Geir’s base camp had provisions for another week, at which point a car would come to bring him back to the station for his break.  By the end of the second day, he no longer believed that there would be a car at all.  He could possibly stretch his supplies out for a second week if he skipped meals.  And maybe he could put the base camp in power-save mode, stay in it and be protected from the wind but not the cold.
He called the base camp over to the rail.  Meals and collapsed firepit tucked into his coat, he gestured for the robot to crouch, and climbed onto it.  When it set its rubber forefeet on the steel wall and raised itself as high as it could, Geir could just get his fingertips over the edge of the track inset high on the rail.  Straining frozen muscles and digging with talons, he dragged himself up into the track—and from there to the top.
Geir had never seen the rail from any angle but below, except far in the distance where the ground dipped into a valley.  It was as tall as a house, and as wide as one.  The wind threatened to knock him off the edge as soon as he stood up, and, worse, the fear gripped him that the train could come after all.  He glanced repeatedly east and west as he tentatively stepped forward from the edge.To either direction, the rail disappeared into the distance, swallowed by the hills and forests on either side.  No Mover.  And no support engine coming from the west.  Geir put his base camp to sleep with a gesture, and crossed to the rail's northern side.
Below, the snow was piled much higher against the rail than on the southern side.  The ground rose gradually into mountains Geir often forgot were there.  And, far to the east, he saw his counterpart, the minder for the northern face of this section.  Only a dot in the white--but there was no way they had missed the figure standing atop the rail.
They met as the sun was setting.  Geir recognized the other zoan from the station, but they had never spoken.  A hare model, tall ears bound down to his shoulders for warmth, he was grizzled and suspicious.
"Armand," he offered a hand after Geir lowered himself to the snow, and rattled off the serial number he'd been decanted with.
"Geir."  The barbatus didn’t like to use his serial number as a surname.  "Did you get any word?"
"None.  And my car was supposed to come today."
"Mine's in a week, but something tells me it's not coming."
"I think we've been cut off.  They're shutting the MVR down."
"Maybe."
"I've been at this for fifteen years, they never tell us shit."  Armand scratched at his chin nervously, swiped back and forth on his display, in case there was any news.
"Just fourteen for me."
"A mere pup," Armand attempted a laugh, but was evidently not in the mood.  "They think we're good out here.  I mean, I am.  But there's what, forty of us?"
"Thirty-eight, between the two shifts."
The hare's nose twitched.
"Either way, all our last paychecks are moot."
"I was planning to abandon ship if you didn't have any news."
"I've been planning that for years."
"Give it one more day?"
The hare shrugged.  He gestured to the north with a wave of his snout, away from the Mover's wake if it came after all.
Armand didn't sleep in his base camp.  He carried a bedroll with him, along with a hunting rifle and other supplies.  He also didn't eat his prepared meals, most of the time: his base camp's sleeping chamber was stuffed with the carcasses of snowshoe hares and ptarmigan, each shot cleanly through the head and wrapped in linen.  He dressed and cleaned one of each by the day's last light, and cooked them over the firepit.  Geir had eaten worse.
"So which were you," Armand leaned in.  His lagomorph teeth were ill-suited to the meat.  One of many oversights in zoan design.  "Job, Street, House, or Adoption?"
"Receiving house," Geir said.  The meat was no trouble for him.
"Adoption," Armand bounced one of his legs with agitation.  "But it was a big house, with several of us.  So kind of the same thing."
"Just with a family, not a staff."
"Something like that.  Mother and Father were determined that zoans could be whatever humans can.  So they ran it more like a school than a house."
"Not that any of us would know," Geir allowed.
"I've known some jobbers though.  Getting spit right into a factory or a warehouse, it messes them up way worse."
"Sure."
"You think there's anything waiting for us if we go back?  Should we even bother?"
Geir shrugged.
"If not, there's a city right there," he said.
"For what it's worth."
"Right."
Under his scowl and his fidgeting, Armand was clearly not as stoic about the possibility of the Mover being shut down as he was trying to look.  His agitation was less anxiety than it was nervous excitement.  Geir understood.  He felt it, too.  But unlike the hare, he still hoped the train would run.