They began the trek back west together the next morning, when there was no change in the Mover's status and no answer from the station.  Their destination was seven hundred kilometers away, but Armand knew of a town a fraction of that, back west and a ways north of the rail.  They abandoned the Mover in favor of a straight line through the woods.  The base camp wouldn't come with them, so they emptied its stores into linen bags the hare had brought and left it too.
Armand pried occasionally about Geir's receiving home.  Not impolitely, but Geir didn't want to talk about it.
"It was okay," he said.  "But I ran away."
"To do what?"  Armand shifted his rifle to release his ears and let them stand back up.  The thick juniper forest blocked most of the wind but still let the sun through, so it was much warmer than at the rail's side.
"Just sick of living at home.  Did my own thing for a few years."
Armand nodded approvingly.
"A couple of us ran off," he said.  "Mother and Father drilled us hard.  They had us in university courses when we were seven.  Well, twelve.  Anaïs took off first.  My sister.  Or, you know."
"What'd she do?  Her own thing?"
"Not so much.  She's at the Animal Enclave."
"Ah."
"Always trying to get me to go there.  Good for her, but I'm not sitting around growing corn and singing songs."
They spent another night in the snow and had another half a day’s walk before they reached the town.  It was little more than a crossroads, with a few dozen houses scattered around a small cluster of old red-brick shops and civic buildings.  From a distance it looked like a spot of black mold among the foothills.
Every public screen in the downtown showed the same thing: the charred, bombed-out remains of the MVR-601 station.  There was little remaining, only a partial shell amidst crumbled ruins.  Three days after the explosion, firefighters were still putting out residual blazes, there and in the surrounding blocks that had been damaged.
“Better than I thought,” Armand muttered.  “We weren’t just sold out.”
Geir was quiet.  There was no coming back from this, most likely.  If the company didn’t close entirely, it would at least never return to the same model under which he had been employed.  He dug nervously at his knuckles with his talons.
“Let’s get something to eat,” he said.
A diner in the downtown recognized the zoans by the company accounts in their wristbands and fed them on credit.  Geir hadn’t needed to spend any money in years.   He didn’t make any to speak of, either—the company charged him back for his meals and use of the base camp, and anything else it could think of—but he wasn’t so destitute he couldn’t pay for a cup of coffee and a stack of pancakes.
“Shouldn’t have let us do that,” Armand noted when they ate.  “We’re off task; our accounts should be frozen.”
“I’m sure admin is just busy,” Geir guessed.
“Any day, they’ll lay all the railminders off at once.  And they’ll tear the MVR down and sell it for parts.  Cash out of whatever’s at the east terminal.  Move on to something else.”
“Probably.”
“What do you think it is over there?”
Geir shrugged.
“Above my paygrade.  And my paygrade keeps getting lower.”
“I think they’re building a new Uptown.  They know none of us could afford a single shirt there, so they don’t want us to know.”
“I think they’re mainly waiting to see if the other terminal gets bombed too.”
“Yeah.  We would’ve heard it that’d happened already.”
Geir connected his wristband to the town’s wireless and looked the news up for himself. There was little else to sift through: a UN representative had died in an aircar collision; scientists confirmed the presence of large pockets of water in the earth’s mantle.  But the Mover station was the big story.  Every outlet was still broadcasting live feeds of the burning station, from all different angles.  Lans-Cartier Industrial was saying nothing.  Some commentators expected the entire company to go under.  The cost to build a new terminal to receive the Mover at its western end would be in the billions, and would take months if not years.
While he was looking, the next wave of headlines came over all of the news outlets.  Someone had taken credit for the bombing.  Geir went still when he saw the photograph and chiron.  The serious canid features, half-lidded eyes and very slight, involuntary smile.  Much older than the last time Geir had seen them.  But also unmistakable.
It was Samuel.  Leader of the Zoan Front.
This changed everything.

It is 2208.  The zoans--all of them in the world--have reached ten years old, a threshold some geneticists and many media figures thought would be impossible.  Their mostly-human bodies have entered and in some cases completed adolescence, their mostly-human brains are wrestling with the social and the abstract.  In their first decade, they were quiet novelties, watched by the whole world, described and made predictions for; now they are starting to speak, and on occasion, to be heard.
Geir is one of twenty-six who were taken in by a receiving house in the old districts of Terrace, the city colloquially known as Uptown.  Like his fellows, he is curious, and anxious, and sometimes vocal.  He fights and plays with the other animal-faced wards and with their human neighbors.  He is not much given to thinking deeply, even if he likes to observe and understand the others and their world.
Of his fellows, he is closest with Samuel, a zoan modeled after the South American maned wolf.  The two of them sneak cigarettes between their lessons, steal beer from their caretakers' kitchen and throw the empty bottles off overpasses.
Of the original twenty-six zoans at the Andrew C. Brightlove Foundation's receiving house, three had died suddenly at age seven, as had almost a fifth of zoans worldwide.  It had been sad for Geir, but hadn't cast the seriousness over him that it did his housemates.  Samuel has been especially stricken.  He is angry, he wants Geir to discuss things with him that the barbatus has not considered and can only cursorily comment on.  Questions such as, whether a zoan is more alike to the animal whose appearance they were given, or to the human whose genetic makeup was much closer.  Questions such as, whether the caretakers had shown enough respect to the three who died, or if their tearful memorial was merely performative.
Not only Samuel, but everyone argues whether being decanted at age five means they are ten years old or fifteen.  Collectively the zoans, at least in the Brightlove House, agree that they are more alike to their teenaged neighbors than those born in the same year.   At fifteen, they are Not Children.  At fifteen, the Foundation needs to hear them.
Three things happen this year that deepen the zoans' seriousness. 
First, a wave of antipathy for zoans sweeps through the human world, now that they are more visible.  They find themselves openly mocked by their neighbors and the media; they hear public figures suggest that the UN was wrong for disallowing the factories to breed them with subhuman intelligence and sell them directly into labor.
Second, another of the surviving twenty-three vanishes and is found dead in a landfill weeks later.  There is no response from the police; the Foundation verbally chastises its caretakers, and that is all.
Finally, it is discovered that the Foundation receives almost one million dollars per year for each zoan it takes in at its several receiving houses, between childcare payments and tax incentives.  The money is intended for the zoans' care, the caretakers' salaries, and the upkeep of the facilities, but it is untraceable, especially for the children themselves.  Nothing the Foundation or even the ground-level staff can say will recover the trust they lose.
This is when Samuel ascends.
After pleading with the authorities and the staff to find and protect the murdered zoan, and hearing myriad unconvincing excuses for the Foundation's tax breaks, the wards of the Brightlove House are finished.  Samuel gathers Geir and five others who are strong and healthy, and they oust the Foundation staff.  With input from all who are willing--even Geir, to some extent--they draft their articles of emancipation, and a demand that the Foundation sell the facility to the zoans, collectively.
Samuel is willing to pay three hundred thousand dollars for the facility.  Geir cannot even guess how he has that money, but he is in awe.
Uptown never sends its police.  Besides that very little civic coin is ever spent in the working-class districts at the best of times, the police are occupied with the protection of a construction site in the leisure district and have no force to spare.  All twenty-two zoans of the Brightlove house are granted emancipation, and the Foundation doesn't fight the purchase.
The ensuing days are exciting, heady.  Plans, discussions, philosophizing.  Despite the stakes, challenges are welcome.  The independent household is a minor media darling, though commentaries are rarely charitable: The Animals are Running the Zoo.  Footage circulates of Samuel and Geir watching police drones through a barred window.
When the Foundation withdraws it takes all of its contracts with it, for supplies and utilities: Samuel puts together a team to badger the former staff to identify and re-establish them.  Geir helps with that, and sits in on negotiations with city authorities.  He has reached his adult height, and is transforming from scrawny to wiry.  His beak and talons are threatening enough that he need only be present to make a difference.
The Brightlove House isn't the only story like it, not even that same year.  But for all intents and purposes, Samuel is zoankind's first revolutionary.

"I took this job thinking I'd be away from civilization," Armand said.  He and Geir were outside again, taking stock of their meager supplies before they parted ways.  "It didn't really feel like it.  I couldn't get out of sight of the damn rail."
"Me too," Geir lied, partially.
"I don't think I could do it for real, anyway.  Just live out there.  I'm a city boy, all I've got is book smarts."
"Do you think you'll live with your sister?"
The hare shifted his jaw thoughtfully, and shook his head.
"Figure something out," he muttered.  "I always thought I'd have some warning before the job went away.  Granted, I always thought the moment it did, I'd just peel off and live in the woods.  I guess I'll stick around here, I know there's good hunting.  Did you ever have plans?"
"No.  I kind of thought I'd sprain my ankle one day and they'd find me frozen three weeks later."
Armand glared, evidently not realizing the bird was serious.
"But since that didn't happen, there are a few couches I could surf," Geir added.
"Life's too long to make plans," Armand said.
Geir nodded.  He smiled, a little.
Presumably they had a few more days before the company realized their credit was active, but they withdrew a few hundred dollars each in cash to be safe.  Geir was willing to bet that any number of abandoned railminders had done so already.  Considering the millions the company hemorrhaged every day, he didn't think there was any reason to expect any reprisal.  Geir took the last few frozen meals, and Armand the last of his game.  They shook hands, and Geir went to find a ride.
"Nice working with you."