The Engineer

“We’re dead,” the Gambler summarized, when they came back down into the car.

“The abhumans decoupled the cars,” the Ghost-catcher said. “Disconnected us from the train, left us stranded in the middle of the Desert. I shot one, but the other one managed to uncouple us from under its body. The rest of them are hanging back, waiting for their chance. I expect them to try to get in pretty soon, but they know the first few will get shot, so they’re probably doing whatever creatures like that do instead of drawing lots.”

“‘Stranded in the Desert,’” the Gambler pointed out, “is just another way of saying ‘dead.’”

“Could be worse,” the Medicine Seller slurred. “Could be worse than dead.”

Nobody argued the point. The Medicine Seller seemed likely to live, if anyone was going to live, as the Preacher and the Gambler had managed to stop his bleeding and had given him a generous dose of several of his own nostrums. Whether they worked remained to be seen, but they did seem to be killing the pain, at the cost of making the Medicine Seller as slurred and unfocused as a drunkard.

The living guard and the Preacher had cooperated in arranging the bodies into a more dignified position. Other than that, there wasn’t much to be done with them.

“We do have a chance, I think,” the Ghost-catcher said.

“No chance,” the Medicine Seller mumbled.

“Possibly a chance. We’re the last car. There’s a caboose behind us, and there’s generally an apprentice Engineer in the caboose.”

“Won’t an Engineer just make things worse?” the Kid wondered. “I mean, he . . .” He trailed off, looking at the body of the Businessman, now laid out with its hands on its breast and its eyes closed.

The Ghost-catcher shook her head. “You want to be careful, just believing the stories of strangers. Of course Engineers sometimes abuse their privileges. They’re humans. So do ghost-catchers. So do preachers.”

The Preacher looked like he had swallowed a bug, but he finally allowed, “That’s . . . true.”

“Engineers sometimes abuse their privilege, but usually, it takes a lot for the Guild to blacklist a business. Which makes me wonder what our friend was doing that he didn’t feel worth mentioning. And as for the trains—they’re escape, they’re freedom, they’re connection, they don’t even charge you money if you don’t have any, and they go to anyplace that isn’t completely lost. Sometimes I think the trains are the only really good thing on the Network. Just because one person assumes that they’re wrong, doesn’t mean that you should believe him.”

“Okay,” the Kid said, a bit doubtfully, “but what can an Engineer do?”

“Depends on what the package is.”

“Do you know what the package is?”

“Not . . . quite. Not really. I just know it must have been very important to the Thirty-seven.”

“That’s what you meant,” the Gambler realized. “Grievous harm to another party, not grievous harm to another person. You think the guy got chased by that Tatter-thing because he did grievous harm to a train?”

The Ghost-catcher shrugged, very slightly. “Wouldn’t be the first time a quirk in the wording nearly got some poor sap killed. I think everyone on the Network knows by now not to bargain with some wrong thing so that no man born can slay them. And only the Engineers know whether the trains actually think, but I’ve run into more than enough to make me wonder. Why would the Tatterdemalion make a distinction between one sort of thinking thing and another? It’s not human. It doesn’t care about the difference between humans and trains.” The others were silent—not convinced, the Kid thought, but not disbelieving, perhaps because they couldn’t bear to be. “Any road, I think that if something can save us, it might be a mysterious valuable train thing. We’ve got to climb to the caboose, and we’ve got to keep the abhumans off the Engineer if they agree to come back to this car.”

“I’ll go,” the guard said, swallowing. The Kid wondered if he felt guilty for his part in bringing the package here. The package, after all, was what the abhumans were after.

Well, strictly speaking, they were after a train. That was what the Gunslinger had said.

If the package could call a train, or interface with a train, or somehow do something with a train, then maybe, maybe . . .

Hope felt almost more painful than the despair. The Kid tried to shove it aside. “I’ll go,” he said.

“You’re a child,” the Gambler objected. “He should go.” She nodded to the Preacher.

“I’m caring for him,” the Preacher said, nodding at the Medicine Seller, whose eyes were meandering boozily between them.

“I can do that just as well, and you know it.”

“You’re a woman of loose morals.”

“And you’re a man of an uptight a—“

“I don’t really care,” the Ghost-catcher cut in. “You two, with me, up top.”

The Desert, seen once again, was still a confusion of rocky forms and holes that had stars at their notional bottoms and moons that seemed to be fragmenting, or hatching, or just dueling each other for placement in the sky. “Don’t look,” the guard muttered nervously to the Kid. “They say you look for too long, you don’t look away again.”

“They say a lot of things.” The Ghost-catcher wasn’t looking at either of them. She was striding to the rear edge of the car. “I’m going to get the apprentice Engineer. Your job—both of you—is to shoot any abhuman that gets close, because if they realize we have a plan, they may get aggressive. Best face away from each other, and look out into the Desert to see what they’re doing.”

The guard made an unhappy sound, but he did it. “Hey, Kid?” he asked in a moment.

“Yeah?”

“What does an abhuman look like?”

“Flying awful thing made of human bits,” the Kid said.

“Any of them crawl?”

“I—don’t know.”

“Because there’s something crawling—“ The guard’s voice was tight. “Can’t really tell how big it is. Can’t tell how far away it is. Actually, I think maybe it’s really big—how big is an abhuman?”

“The one I shot was about human-sized,” the Kid said. He was, he realized, almost whispering. And where had the abhuman gone, the one he had shot? “But I think—I think they make themselves. Out of—parts. So if one of them could find enough—“

He saw something on his side of the train, then. Something worm-like, lumping along like a caterpillar. It didn’t look like an abhuman. Unless he didn’t really know how abhumans look. “Does yours look—sort of like a caterpillar?”

“What’s a caterpillar?”

The Kid was momentarily at a loss. “Inchworm?”

“Don’t think we have either one in Underledge,” the guard admitted. “I’ve never left Underledge before. My first trip out into the Network. And it had to be like this—does yours look like it’s—sort of smelling? Testing the air, sort of?”

“Yeah,” the Kid said. In fact, the thing looked a bit like it was picking up their scent.

“You think maybe—stuff lives in the Desert?”

“Dunno,” the Kid said. “How? I mean, there are holes in the land.” And the caterpillar-things, with their ponderous movements, might not blunder into one the way a walking human might. “I guess maybe?”

“I mean, it just seems to me—must’ve been trains stopped in the Desert before. Accidents, problems. Everything that is made can break, and everything that is alive—if the trains are alive—can get sick. So, if trains break down in the Desert—why isn’t there a train on the rails when the next one comes through?”

The Kid thought about it.

The Kid didn’t want to think about it.

The problem with not wanting to think about something was that you thought about it anyway.

“I think,” he said, I think—oh!”

A flying form had just dove on the caterpillar thing and smashed into it sideways.

The flying form was considerably smaller than the caterpillar. As the Kid had somewhat suspected, the crawling thing was easily the size of the train car, maybe bigger. At least, it was if the flying thing—had to be an abhuman—was human-sized.

“The abhuman’s trying to scare it off,” the Kid narrated rapidly. “Scratching it about the head—or maybe kicking it—I don’t know if the abhuman has claws like a hawk or feet like a person, but it’s trying to get the creeping thing away from us.”

“Wants us for itself,” the guard said tensely.

“I think so.”

Even from behind, the Kid could hear the guard swallow. “We’re roadkill,” he said. “We’re roadkill, and everything that likes a bit of good meat is gathering. The abhumans want us all to themselves, but there are other things . . .” Another swallow. “You don’t suppose—I mean, the creeping things—they couldn’t have ever been human. Could they? I mean, nothing can change that much.”

The Kid thought about the abhuman’s many mouths, and didn’t answer.

“Nothing? Good.” The Ghost-catcher’s voice startled both of them, making the Kid jump and the guard swear. “Come on down the hatch as soon as we’re down. Staying out here is just asking for trouble.”

There was a girl with her, perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, only a few years older than the Kid, but a few significant years. She had bob-cut straight hair that looked almost as dark as the Kid’s, in the moonslight, and was otherwise pale behind her freckles. “Are you an Engineer?” the Kid asked.

He got a short nod in return. “Going to be,” the girl said, and she sounded just as scared as the rest of them. “Going to be, but . . .”

She followed the Ghost-catcher down the hatch into the train car.

“He stole this?” The Engineer seemed honestly shocked.

“Pretty much,” the Ghost-catcher said. “You know what it is?”

“I mean, I’ve never seen one before—I don’t know how many people even get to see one, but—“ The Engineer took a gulping breath. “Yes. Yes, I know what it is.”

“Can you make it work?” That was the guard. “Make it—“ He waved his hand vaguely. “Do whatever it is that it does?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s—it’s a guild secret. You understand.”

“I understand,” the Ghost-catcher said. She probably did, the Kid reflected. No guild had secrets quite like the ghost-catchers did. “What do you need us to do? And what do you need us to swear?”

“I need you all to swear that nobody knows how I got the train moving again. If—I mean, if I can get it moving again.” The Engineer looked around.

There were no objections. Even if the Businessman had been alive, the Kid thought, he wouldn’t have objected. Everyone was too scared.

Or maybe the Businessman would have sworn and used the information for his own advantage anyway.

The Engineer took a deep breath. “And—I need to get the cube to the front of the train.”

The Ghost-catcher looked around. “You, you, and you,” she said. The guard, the Preacher, and the Gambler.

“Why me?” The Gambler looked disgruntled.

“Neither of you two do physical labor,” the Ghost-catcher acknowledged, addressing the Preacher and the Gambler, “but I’m sixty-five and the Kid is, what? Fourteen?”

“Sixteen,” the Kid said, offended. And then he remembered who he was being offended at, and thought that maybe he shouldn’t be.

And then he remembered how the Ghost-catcher had treated him—matter-of-fact and businesslike, but not unkind for all of that—and decided that he didn’t need to worry too much about offending her. If he offended her, she would probably tell him not to do it, and that was all.

“I’ll help,” the Engineer said. “And—it might help. Maybe. You clear the table away, we’ll push it towards the wall—“ The designated pushers gathered around the cube. “One, two—three!”

There was some confusion about whether they were supposed to push on three, or after three, but it didn’t seem to matter. The cube moved, slowly, and then sliding faster and faster towards the front of the train. It hit the wall—fused through the wall, somehow, and then disappeared.

“What happened to it?” The Gambler’s voice was sharp.

The Engineer swallowed. “Now we see if it was ready. And if it has—enough. What did he do to it after he stole it?”

“What didn’t he do, more like,” the Ghost-catcher said grimly. “Everything from beat it with a hammer to attack it with acid, it sounds like.”

The Engineer swallowed. “I—don’t know,” she said. “That could have—I don’t know.”

“What do we do?”

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault,” the Ghost-catcher said. “Have a seat. Probably not the time for a game of stories while we wait.”

“Not after the last one you told,” the Gambler muttered, loud enough to be heard, at the same time that the Medicine Seller slurred, “Story!” and then drifted back into drugged unconsciousness.

The Ghost-catcher just nodded, and poured herself a finger of the amber drink, and passed the bottle to the Engineer, who hesitated and then poured herself a generous measure.

“I don’t need any,” the Kid said, as the bottle came to him.

“In large enough amounts, it makes the Network a blurry, beautiful place,” the Ghost-catcher advised. “Your choice, but you might not want to be fully conscious, in case.” She didn’t say in case of what. They all knew.

“I—“ The Kid hesitated, and then shook his head. “How about you? Are you going to drink that much?”

“Not so much,” the Ghost-catcher said, “that I can’t undo every stopper on my bottles, if the time comes. It’s a suicide option, but it ought to take some things with us, if it comes to that.”

The Kid swallowed and nodded.

So they waited. Seconds crawled by, and minutes dripped like molasses off of a spoon, and none of them were sure if an hour had gone by or not, when the Preacher straightened up and said, “Did you hear that?”

“Ears aren’t what they were.” But the Ghost-catcher had her gun out anyway. “Scratching on the roof?”

“Scratching on the roof.”

The Kid could hear it too. It didn’t sound like humanlike feet. It didn’t sound like claws, either, if it came to that. It sounded, if anything, like a brush scraping across the silvery train-metal, a hundred little hairs plucking at microscopic irregularities like insect feet.

He tried to imagine what might make a sound like that.

He didn’t want to think about it.

The problem with not wanting to think about something was that you thought about it anyway.

He took out the pistol he had scavenged. One last bullet for yourself, that was the cliche, but he wasn’t sure how to tell what was the last bullet anyway. The least he could do was to make it very, very difficult for whatever was up on the roof—

Something banged on the hatch.

Something banged on the hatch hard enough to dent it. The Kid thought, good, because they couldn’t get in if they dented the door too much, but then something banged on the shuttered window, and then another window, and there was a horrible screech of metal as something—it looked slightly like a claw—pierced through and started to pull the door open—

It was sheer chance that in his terror, the Kid happened to look at one of the light sconces.

And saw the number above it—the gold letters bolted to the wall—flow and change.

Instead of “seventy-six,” they said “ninety-five.”

The train lurched, and the whistle let out a scream, and they were moving again. Moving, picking up speed, the beat of the wheels accelerating until it became almost a hum, and the Things fell away from the train. At least one got run over, if the jolt of the car was any indication, but whatever the way, they were gone, they were gone and the train was moving—

The Kid looked around.

The Ghost-catcher put the vial of blue light back on her bandolier as if she had just taken it out to inspect it. The Preacher and the Gambler moved apart, as if to deny that they had ever backed closer together. The Medicine-Seller mumbled something, half asleep, and the guard picked up someone else’s drink and downed it whole.

The Engineer was looking at the numbers on the wall. She was shaking, and pale as death, but she was still the first to speak. “All aboard the Ninety-Five.”

The whistle sounded again, as if in response.

“Promise me something.” The Medicine Seller’s voice was querulous, but the Kid thought it was the tremor of someone exaggerating for effect. “Promise me you won’t go back to the Crystal City.”

“Been thinking about that, actually,” the Gambler said.

“You have?”

“Been thinking maybe I could bring in enough to buy someone else’s way out. Or maybe my way out, too. Hadn’t decided. It’s an awful lot of money to win.”

“I could pass my hat around,” the Preacher offered. “It is for a good cause.”

“I’ll think about it,” the Gambler said.

“So it was a sort of train egg,” the Kid said quietly to the Ghost-catcher.

“Not sure. She’s not going to tell us, she’s taken too many oaths. But it seems like.” The Ghost-catcher leaned back against the wall, and for the first time, she looked exhausted. “I imagine that was why the Tatterdemalion got involved. Think of it, stealing someone’s egg. Kidnapping. And of course he was thinking of nothing else, so that fulfills that part of the conditions.”

The Kid nodded.

“You’re not bad in a crisis,” the Ghost-catcher noted.

“I didn’t do much.”

“You didn’t make yourself into more of a problem. That’s plenty enough for me. You have no idea how many people make things worse, just by not keeping their heads about themselves . . .” The Ghost-catcher sighed. It seemed to go on for a long time. “It’s grim work, and dangerous work, but if you want a sponsor to the ghost-catching guild, I’d vouch for you.”

“I.” The Kid fumbled with his words. He badly needed to get this right. “I didn’t think anyone would care. After I left. About me.”

The Ghost-catcher shrugged very slightly. “Never did have the knack for not caring.”

“And, I mean—you’re—you did—what you did, it was—“

“I did my job,” the Ghost-catcher said. “Sometimes I interpret my job a little bit broadly. But it comes down to keeping everyone safe.”

“And, I mean—“ The Kid swallowed again. “I really, really don’t want you to feel bad when I say no.”

“No?” She seemed a touch surprised.

“No. I mean—I’d go with you—I’d like to—but what you said. About the trains, about how they’re escape and, and connection, and it’s true. The trains were my hope. The trains—are hope, I think.” He took a deep breath. “And I want to be a part of that. If they’ll have me. I want to be an Engineer.”