All Those Vanished Engines (7 page)

How could that be? How could he even think that was possible? What did he even mean? “Why is it so dark?” she asked him.

As if in response to her question, the whistle blew. The left-hand door slid open, and there was Lizzie mounting the steps, dragging behind her a man—no, a boy, dressed in a woolen coat and gloves.

Paulina recognized his clothes. He had lost his scarf somewhere. Perhaps in the heat of the bonfire he had stripped it off.

“Obstruction on the track,” Lizzie announced.

The train started to move, a gentle shriek. “What do you make of this?” she continued. “Almost ran him down. But he was alone.”

She wasn't wearing her goose-down coat. But she still had her flare gun, which now she tossed onto one of the banquettes. “What do you make of him?”

Paulina would have preferred not to say. A bomb, maybe, had stopped the train, an incendiary device dropped from a balloon. Wouldn't she have seen the flames? She darted down the opposite steps, but the door was locked.

“Here,” said Colonel Claiborne, suddenly above her, hat in his hand. With no gentleness at all, he reached into the well where she was cowering against the door. He pulled her up the three deep steps. “What do you know about this?”

She preferred not to tell him. She recognized the clothes, the flannel shirt under his coat, but not the boy himself under his spectacles. Or maybe it was just that he was different from the way she had imagined, smaller, younger. She'd assumed he'd be good-looking. Panicked, she twisted out of the colonel's hand, sure now there was a problem. She felt giddy and light-headed, because the world and the invented world were twisting inside out. Someone else was in control; someone else was making the decisions. Her mind was full of questions that could not be answered. Who had been in those beds in the three cars she had run through to reach this one?

Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA, sitting at the end of the fourth car with the golden light around him—had the train itself taken the shape of Elly's bracelet? What were the limits to what she could create, what she could perceive?

There was something unformed about the boy's face, a blank quality that frightened her. By contrast, elsewhere she could see every detail: the colonel had dented between the long and subtle fingers of his left hand the crown of his felt hat, decorated with white feathers—in the old days “the knights of the white cockade” had been his regiment's sobriquet. How to get away from him now? She retreated up the car the way she came, and he followed her, right hand outstretched. Lizzie dragged the boy by the collar of his coat. He looked stunned.

It was only later that she understood why. Now, whether lightning had struck the train, or else the conductor had thrown the switch, but all of the electric tubes and chimneys failed simultaneously.

Colonel Claiborne lifted up his hand, and as the shadows engulfed him Paulina saw the flash of a gold bracelet on his narrow wrist. And maybe the boy was somehow prepared for the sudden blackness, because he took his chance. “Shit,” Lizzie remarked, a word more suited to a future century. She had lost him in the dark.

Paulina reached backward and pulled open the door behind her. Standing in the rattling gap between the two cars, she could see the hinge had come uncoupled. The electric cable had pulled apart. It sparked against one of the chains that held the cars together now.

Light came from the door of the preceding car. Full of a strength that was not her own, with her naked hands she tore out the pins that held the chains in place, and it slid away at about five miles per hour while her car drifted to a stop. Chased by a panic that seemed almost artificial, she jumped down and to the left, away from the track, and stumbled down the berm. It was made of cinders. She fell to her knees and barked the heels of her hands. But nothing hurt her. Puzzled, she got to her feet and staggered off into the approaching dawn, across the unformed plain and toward the lightening horizon. In the distance she saw an anomalous spire of rock, in whose shelter she found the boy waiting, out of breath.

How could he have gotten there first? Then she understood. In this landscape there was nothing he couldn't do. Their enemies weren't chasing them, and couldn't chase them till he gave them his permission. The train couldn't move until he raised his hand. He'd found a place to hide, a bed of rust-colored pine needles amid the sheltering boulders.

She looked at him more closely. In the new light, his face had lost some of its terrifying blankness. She could see he had blue eyes, a square jaw—she saw that now. He was young, it had turned out. Fourteen was young. How could she have forgotten? She had not thought he'd be so young.

Yet he was dissatisfied with the shelter they had found, the rocks that had loomed up suddenly and miraculously in the empty sand. “They'll see where we have gone,” he said, sounding older than he was. But how could she have forgotten what fourteen-year-olds were like? “There are no pine trees around here.”

“So then where did they come from?” she said, digging her bare feet into the needles. But she knew. He gave her a pained look.

“I should have thought about the pine trees first. And you—you were on that hospital bed. There was no time for you to put on any shoes. I'm not even sure what kind of shoes you should be wearing. Aren't you cold?”

“No, I'm not cold.”

“Neither am I,” he said, taking off his coat.

The sun, as it rose, illuminated a landscape different from any she could have imagined. Because he was doing the imagining: they sat in the pine needles, watching the sun rise, an opaque glow at the bottom of a deep defile, slowly revealing the peaks of snowcapped mountains. He said, “My little sister has a bracelet that my mother gave her, something from her family in Virginia. It looked like something made for a woman, but a man had worn it, a Confederate officer. I'd never thought his wrist would be so thin.”

She said, “I have a bracelet too, though I haven't seen it since I was a little girl. My cousin brought it from the island of Ceylon. I remember it was made from elephant hair and braided gold.”

He looked startled. Now that she was used to him, she imagined his face was one she'd known for years. “It is possible to make a mistake,” he said. “Not remember right. How likely is it that he went to Asia after the Civil War?”

“Several times,” she answered stubbornly.

“How likely is it that he gave you a gold bracelet with his name on it? He probably just showed you the one he had on.”

Now she could see the land more clearly as the shadows of the mountains retreated toward them. Looking back, she could see the steam engine in the distance, the stalled train, its windows winking in the sun. How could she have come so far? And in the darkness, propelled as if by fate, she had found the only level ground for miles. The railway tracks skirted a wide plain, but on the near side the ground fell off suddenly. They sat at the edge of a cliff face with the valley below them. What originally she had mistaken for pine needles, now she could see it was just sand, rust-colored sand, and she dug her toes into it.

“Maybe you can answer all my questions,” she murmured. “I don't usually get the chance to ask—I didn't trust him,” she said, meaning her cousin. “Why was he dressed like that, in his old uniform? Why was he wearing a medal from the UDC? If you had rescued the daughter of your former enemy, is that what you'd wear? If you were bringing her to meet her mother at the station?”

Matthew smiled. “Work it out,” he said. “It's not so hard.”

“Perhaps he's not a traitor after all.”

“Let's say.”

Her hands didn't hurt anymore, and the ache from the cuts along her legs had disappeared. She had a bandage below her collarbone. Turning her back, she worried it out from underneath her camisole, between the buttons of her blouse. There was no trace of a scab or even a scar. Was it possible she'd been asleep for longer than she'd supposed, and instead of north she'd traveled west, perhaps as far as the Oklahoma territory?

No, that wasn't it. The answer was more simple: her cuts and bruises had no further part in the story. She didn't need them anymore.

The shadows were receding from the landscape in front of her. On the plateau where they sat, the rocks were dry. Far beneath their feet, the dusty valley was bisected by a river. A mile away, level with her eyes, an eagle hunted for the updraft. “Gram,” she said, “is she a part of this? If he was pretending, maybe she was too.”

“What would she have to gain?” he said, less a question than a prompt.

“Maybe they were working together all along. How could the doll and the diary be in the train, unless she had a part in it?”

“Good question.”

Paulina turned toward him, suddenly furious. “You know, don't you? You could just tell me!”

“I don't know everything,” he said.

“What was on the beds I passed in the compartments? I couldn't turn my head to look!”

His mittens were gone. He examined his fingernails. “I hadn't decided.”

“Tell me this,” she said. “If they were part of the same scheme, why did they go through all that at the library? I could have just climbed down the wisteria and ridden away.”

“I don't want to talk about it,” he said. “It's in the past.”

“Maybe the Yankee empress would have been suspicious otherwise. Or maybe Gram had some enemies among the UDC.”

“Maybe,” he said, picking at his nails.

“You don't even care! Maybe they needed all that bloodshed, for him to be a hero one last time. And then the empress would have to take him in. He would have no place to go. He'd have sacrificed everything, and she'd have to bring him in and thank him personally. No wonder he's dressed up.”

He didn't answer. “Tell me if I'm right!” she said. “It's an assassination, isn't it? The colonel's last, heroic mission. They'll dress Lizzie in my clothes, and fill her pockets full of sticks of dynamite.”

Then after a moment she continued: “No, there're no pockets. It's the doll. He was packing a bomb inside the doll. That's what he was doing when I interrupted him. I wonder if she knows.”

There was no sound or movement from the train. “She doesn't know,” she guessed. “Her plan was to drop me from the car and switch our clothes—she's desperate. But she loves her mother. She would never hurt her. His plan was to blow me up, and himself too.”

They sat as if on a divide, the world behind them a flat, featureless plateau, already burning in the sun. “He's changing his plan now,” said the boy. “That's what's taking so long. He'll take half his plan and half of hers. Elements of both.”

In front of them the land descended, red rock with black striations, dusted with what looked like snow. “He's happier now,” he continued. “That was always the part he hated, using you. Lying to you. Hurting you. He never would have done it willingly. I think even at the end he was wondering if he was able to go through with it. He was drinking whiskey, wasn't he? This must seem like a perfect solution.”

The boy smiled. “And to me too. That was always the part of the story I disliked.” Then he changed the subject. “You're disappointed in the Yankee empire. It's not what you expected.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “No, it's just…”

At first glance the valley seemed as desolate and strange as Mars, the snow, perhaps, not frozen water but some other substance. But as the light changed it revealed, at the bottom, by the riverbank, canals and walls, straight as if drawn by a ruler, a multicolored grid. “And you're disappointed in the story. I know you wanted a love story,” he said.

Exasperated, she stared at him, his curly hair, his wire spectacles. “You're just the same,” he said. “You are. Except for one big change.”

He had on a plaid flannel shirt. He was too fragile, too delicate, too young.

“It's just that you don't know me,” he said. “All the rest, the way you look, even the way you talk…”

She got to her feet and walked over to the cliff's edge, where the plateau subsided into a series of ravines. Small, bristly plants grew out of the sand. The train sat in the morning sun a half-mile away, immobile, silent, without steam.

“They'll wait.”

“Of course they'll wait,” she murmured. The eagle had disappeared. In the distance, still in the shadow of the peaks, in a cirque below the glacial moraine, she saw a sequence of three lakes, one above the other. Their dark, metallic surfaces—orange, olive, pink—suggested liquids different from water. If there was life on Mars, for example, perhaps it spawned or reproduced in pools like these.

He yawned. “I live in a little town in Massachusetts.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that. Tell me more. Tell me something new.”

“My sister likes to draw. She has a golden bracelet which she rubs and moves up and down her arm, sometimes until the skin is chafed away.”

“Yes,” she said, “but something new. Something I don't know. You said you weren't interested in the past. Why should I be different?”

“Well,” he said, “what's coming next is up to you.”

Impatient, she glanced behind them. “There's no time.”

“They'll wait! Damn it, they'll wait. They will wait until you tell me.”

She looked out over the strange terrain. And she took her time, because she was making it all up as she went along. “Oh, it's very bad,” she summarized, finally. She allowed the landscape in front of her to direct her thoughts. In the snowy woods, Mars hung low enough to touch. Perhaps through a trembling, handheld telescope you could see the dusty red deserts, the enormous mountains, the deep valleys scoured by ancient torrents, all sifted over with what looked like snow. You could imagine the channels and stone walls, too straight to have been dug or laid by chance, and if you twisted the brass ring you might see movement, and the clouds of dust and vapor raised by powerful machines.