The Kid

The Kid ran for the train.

The Kid’s previous name was gone, as if shorn away by shaking scissors like his hair. He remembered the long black strands hitting the floor in the candlelight, the feeling of this is it, there’s no going back, and then the sinking, horrible swooping of this really is it, there’s no going back. And now he knew, deep in his stomach, that if he didn’t get to the train before it left, he would die. He might die tonight.

He ran, head down.

He hadn’t run in far too long, and his breath came harsh and painful in his lungs. Even in his younger days, when it was allowed, he hadn’t been much of a runner.

Around the bend in the road, then, past a stand of pine trees that was carefully tended to by Mr. Hesham, and there it was, gleaming silver and half as long as Main Street. It didn’t seem to matter that there was no light out here for it to gleam silver by. The Kid’s childhood storybooks had contained a moon (usually only one), but the town of Taun’s Hollow had never had one, at least not as long as anyone could remember.

As he sprinted towards it, the train gave a sudden, sharp, sigh, a hiss of air all up and down its length, as if it were tired of waiting. The doors had closed.

The Kid would have yelled, “No!” except that he needed the air for running. He tried to redouble his pace. It didn’t work. He had already been running as fast as he could.

With horribly inexorable slowness, the train’s wheels rolled halfway through a circle. Then the other half. Then around again.

The Kid’s mind was a fog of no, no, no, no as he sprinted. The train couldn’t leave him, he couldn’t be left behind, he’d die.

Up beside the train, now, and what to do then? The doors had closed. There were stairs, to get up to the doors, and long vertical bars to hold onto as you swung yourself up onto the stairs, but what then? Climb and bang at a window until someone let him in? If anyone was willing to let him in?

The Kid thought, I don’t care, I’ll ride on the outside if I have to.

He’d heard the stories. Well, not all the stories. Fragments of them; fragments, it sometimes seemed, were all anyone ever told. But enough.

It didn’t matter. He would ride on the outside if he had to. He jumped for the bar, grabbed it—felt it nearly ripped out of his grasp, and he would have tumbled underneath the wheels and died that way if he hadn’t somehow managed to hang on—and then he was on the stairs, the silver stairs, with a closed door in front of him and the train accelerating too fast to jump off without breaking an arm, at best.

The ride was bizarrely smooth, considering what was coming, and the Kid felt his stomach swoop with dread.

Then the silver door slid open, with another sharp hiss.

The Kid dove for it. He didn’t realize he was moving until he was in motion, too desperate, too reflexive, to let such an impossible chance get away from him. Through the door, sprawling onto the floor, into the yellow candle-like light of—a parlor?

It looked like a parlor. Wood-paneled walls, yellow lights in sconces. The number seventy-six was above the lights in gold letters bolted to the wall. There was a ladder on the far wall, but the hatch it led to was closed and bolted.

The Kid had never been on a train before. He had met people who had, but they never stayed. And lately, he had not been allowed to talk with them. Bad influences, his parents had said.

“Cutting it a little bit fine,” a man’s voice observed, and the Kid looked up sharply, breathing hard. There were other people on the train. Of course there were other people on the train. That’s what trains did, they carried people.

The other people had gathered around a single table, and they looked like exactly the sort of people that the Kid’s parents wouldn’t have allowed him to talk to. There was a Rebirth preacher, a man who was overly tall even sitting down, with all-black clothes, long black locks, dark skin, a black hat, and a face that looked like it had never smiled despite preaching a supposedly joyous Word. There was a round, pink, friendly looking man in a green suit, his suitcase (which was next to him) proclaiming “Nostrums For Sale!” There was a buxom woman, with yellow-ringleted hair and a low-cut dress and eyes that measured the Kid up as if assigning him a price. There were two armed men sitting on either side of a worn leather trunk and a fat man in a dark suit sitting nearby, smoking. There was a gray-haired, thin-faced woman in dark glasses and another black hat, this one lower with a wider brim, and the Kid realized with a jolt of fear that she had a bandolier of blue-glowing bottles across her chest: a ghost-catcher.

They weren’t the person who caught the Kid’s interest. He was a man, sandy-haired, with a calm, collected look about him, hands resting near his two low-slung pistols. One pistol, the Kid’s mother had said once, that’s just good sense. But only a true gunslinger wears two.

From somewhere towards the front of the train, there was the howl of the whistle. The Kid jumped.

The Gunslinger’s lips twitched, just the tiniest bit, and the Kid burned in shame.

He did his best not to startle again as silver shutters hissed over the windows. But he couldn’t avoid looking at them.

“It isn’t a good idea,” the Preacher said in a lugubrious voice, “looking at the Desert.”

“I-its all plains around Taun’s Hollow.” The Kid used to stand at the border of the town and watch the thunderheads come in, towering and flashing. He had walked into the tall grass once, only a few feet, and his panicked mother had stood at the border and screamed at him to come back, unwilling to cross the boundary to retrieve him. Sometimes, she had wondered aloud if that was what was wrong with the Kid—that he had taken those few steps.

“It’s all Desert,” the Gunslinger said, “whether it looks like desert or not.”

“There are towns,” the Ghost-catcher added, “which have never seen rain, and stand in the shadow of fossil behemoths from another age, but inside the town, it is not Desert. There are towns with rolling grass plains outside their borders, and the grass is still Desert.”

The Kid wasn’t sure this completely made sense, but he didn’t want to say anything in case he looked stupid in front of the Gunslinger.

“Have a seat,” the Medicine Seller said. “Nothing to do except pass the time until the next stop. We were going to play cards, but, well—“ He looked at the two women.

“Wouldn’t be polite,” the golden-haired woman said, “making her sit out, would it.” She cocked her head at the Ghost-catcher. “I played against a ghost-catcher once. Never again.”

“She’s a gambler,” the Medicine Seller confided. “Played in places all over the Network. Might have even traveled further than I have, and that’s saying something. She’s bound for the Crystal City.”

That put an identity on most people except for the well-dressed man—and the two men flanking his traveling chest, the Kid supposed, but they were clearly guards, and guards in the stories never mattered much or said much. “How were you passing the time?” he ventured, feeling bold for speaking up.

“Stories,” the Medicine Seller said. “Stories of all the things we’ve seen around the Network. And, ohh, there have been some strange things. Our businessman friend,” he nodded at the well-dressed man, “once visited a city without sound. And me, well, I don’t like to brag—“

“It ain’t your turn,” the Gambler pointed out, a little bit sharply.

“Of course! Of course. Technically speaking,” the Medicine Seller confided, “it’s his turn.” He nodded to the Preacher. The Medicine Seller had a way, the Kid noticed, of making it seem like he was talking just to one person, and like that one person was very special indeed.

“What about it?” the Businessman asked. “Do you have another story?”

“I have,” the Preacher said. “I am not sure you want to hear it.”

The Medicine Seller refilled his drink with something amber and sharp-smelling. “Of course we want to hear it!”

The Preacher paused, and for a moment, the Kid thought that he was going to decline. But then, after a moment, he began.