I looked at her, wondering if she’d caught the man’s reaction. But her eyes were on the four Fillies. “You think they’re associated with our friends?” I asked, keeping my voice low. No telling which of the other passengers waiting their turn to board might be Modhran walkers.

“I don’t know,” Bayta said. “I was just noticing that none of the other Filiaelians seemed to mind letting those four push their way aboard first.”

I looked around. Focused first on the Fillies, and then on their Human associate, I’d completely missed the audience’s reaction to the little drama.

Bayta was right. All six of the other Fillies waiting to board our car were silently standing by, with no hint of impatience or annoyance on their long, horse-like faces. That probably implied the other four Fillies were even more upper-crust than the rest of us, though what the clues to that status were I didn’t know.

What I did know was that the Modhri worked especially hard to get into the Twelve Empires’ upper-upper crusts.

Terrific.

The four Fillies disappeared into the train, their luggage obediently rolling through the door behind them, followed by the Human and his three bags. Only then did the rest of the waiting Fillies make an orderly surge for the door.

I hung back, partly out of respect, mostly so I could watch the order in which the Fillies sorted themselves out. But as with the first four, the pecking-order cues they were using were too subtle for me to figure out.

When we ran out of Fillies, I let the waiting Shorshians, Halkas, and Juriani board. Then, with our section of the platform finally empty, I nudged Bayta ahead of me and we headed in.

I’d rather expected our double compartment to be different from those on standard Quadrail trains: a bit larger, or at the very least a bit more plush. But it looked very much the same as every other first-class compartment we’d traveled in over the past months. The luggage rack above the bed was longer, and there was an extra underbed drawer, both clearly put there with the assumption that passengers here would be traveling with larger wardrobes. But aside from that, the layout was the same. Super-express trains might include a plethora of extra cars, but the basic passenger accommodations had largely been left alone.