 
## Beautiful Machine

### pw cooper
Copyright 2013 - pw cooper

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

### Departure

You watch the soldiers load coffins onto the train. They are shivering, faces pinched with effort as they drag their cargo down from the army trucks idling on the edge of the platform.

Coffin-wood, all pale pine hauled naked to the sawmill and eaten into by tearing silver teeth, chewed to smooth planks in hot air full of soft dust thick as a snowfall on the cavernous floor. Bright nails shine at the joints, brand new and gleaming like bullets. There are so many coffins, hundreds maybe. It seems there is no end to them. You can tell by way the soldiers' arms tense when they lift the boxes that they are none of them empty.

You feel as though you are having the most terrible dream.

The air on the platform is biting cold. You shiver and hold yourself tight, wishing you had been allowed to bring your wool coat. You won't need it, they said. You asked why. Don't ask questions, they said. You asked where they were taking you. Away, they said, away to be with your parents.

Your teeth chatter. The wind hisses. The train groans. The dull leather boots of the soldiers creak on the wooden platform.

You are so tired that you can barely stand. Your arms ache. Your feet ache. Your neck aches as you look around. There are masses of frightened men and women standing in huddled groups on the crowded train platform. They all look like you, like they could be members of your family, distant relatives. Weary old men huddled together with their caps pulled low, women clinging to each other; they wipe at teary eyes. You can taste their fear.

The headmistress stands behind you with her hand on your shoulder. Her lace gloves cover withered and bony fingers, nasty fingers that dig down into your skin. It feels like days have passed since she dragged you out of bed, though it was only a few hours ago. How strange time can be. Your fear, so raw and sharp when she first yanked back the sheets, has dulled to a miserable throb. You begged her to tell you why she was so furious, you pleaded to be forgiven though you had done nothing wrong. She ignored your every word, propelling you silently into an old classroom on the third floor. And she locked you inside, alone with the man in the dark red coat who called himself Captain.

He is standing at the ticket booth now, watching hawkishly. He frightens you. His teeth perfectly white and perfectly straight. His long cruel fingers. His hair so blond, the bloodless color of fresh-churned butter. His cheeks and jaw are tight, like the skin is stretched over fleshless bone.

He asked you strange questions in that empty classroom, his eyes never leaving your face and never meeting your eyes. Where were you born? Where do your parents go to church? What have they told you about the war? Do you have many friends here at school? Why not? What have you told them? Tell me their names. What do _you_ think about the war? Have you ever touched one of your classmates? Where did you touch them? Have you touched yourself?

You did your best to answer all his questions correctly, but nothing you said pleased him. The sound of your voice seemed to infuriate him. You tried not to cry. The man gripped the edge of the desk, his eyes gleaming cat-like. When you tried to turn away he reached out and grasped your wrist in his hand. Your dark skin looked soft wrapped in his black leather fingers. The color of your skin seemed to change under the humming electric light. Now dark amber now blue black now mahogany now jet now toffee brown. You looked back towards him and did not look away again.

When he'd finished his questions the Captain called for the headmistress. The two of them spoke privately, nodding and murmuring and glancing at you. They took you to the Captain's automobile without even letting you say goodbye to your classmates, without even letting you get any of your things.

It was a long drive down from the boarding school. The car gleamed chrome black, as though the dust and filth of the road dared not touch its metal skin. The headmistress sat on one side of you and the strange man on the other. They did not speak.

No one will talk to you. You stare at their faces and wonder who they are, where they come from. Sometimes you think you see one of your parents or your older brother and you cry out for them. The headmistress strikes you every time and orders you to keep silent. Your family is not here, she says, you will meet them further on.

You sniff back tears and try to hold her hand. She will not take it.

There are many more men with guns. They look like soldiers, but dressed in dark red rather than the cobalt blue of the army. They surround the platform. Their clothing is immaculate, folds sharp and cufflinks bright. Their black gloves and their black shoes are shining. They have fierce noses and beautiful blue eyes. Their skin is so pale; it turns back the meager gray sunlight. You can't help but stare at them. They are beautiful as cruel birds of prey.

You look at the headmistress. You'll need a ticket to get aboard. You don't have a ticket, you tell her.

She says that it has been taken care of. She will not look at you.

There is a sharp whistle blast. The conductor wears a blue suit. He waves one white-gloved hand. The men in the dark red coats move like wolves, herding people towards the train.

The train seems grim and cold, burdened down by the dead in their fresh pine boxes. You look up at the headmistress. "Please, Ma'am." You are unsure what it is that you are asking.

She looks down at you. Her face is hard and cold. When her eyes meet yours her jaw begins trembling. You think that she is angry and you flinch, afraid she will strike you again. But she does not hit you; she seems to be fighting back something, her imperious face crumbling. Is she going to cry?

You feel a cold shiver of panic running down your spine. You hate it when adults cry. Your mother cried sometimes when she argued with your father, though they always made up in the end. Almost without thinking you reach out to hug the schoolmistress. "I'll come back. I promise I'll be good if you let me come back."

She tears your arms from her, stumbling away. She seems to be choking. "Don't _touch_ me!" she cries, brushing at her clothes as though to wipe away dirt. She glances fearfully at the men in the dark red coats, at the strange man by the ticket booth. And then she runs, skirts swirling. She leaves you there on the platform.

The conductor blows his whistle again. His gloves are so white, you cannot look away from his hands as they weave through the air, ushering people aboard. He shares a significant look with one of the men in the dark red coats. He seems frightened by them.

There is an old couple in line beside you. They remind you of your grandparents. Your grandmother, smelling of fresh-baked bread and lavender perfume. Your grandfather, who used to sit back in his rocking chair and smoke a pipe and argue at the newspaper. The old man takes his companion's arm. She clings to him. Her voice is very soft, very subdued "How can they do this?" she says.

The old man just shakes his head. Asima, he calls her, and holds her close.

You feel very lonely. You miss your family, even the classmates who never seemed to like you. You want to sink down to the hard platform and cry, but you know that you mustn't. You cried when your parents sent you away. They sent you to this place out in the desolation where there was nothing worth destroying. The crumbling old boarding school on the edge of the world. When they sent you away your mother knelt down beside you and she kissed your cheeks. "You've got to be strong, little angel; you've got to be good. Come on now, don't cry. There's a good girl."

You are a good girl. You do not cry.

The coffins have all been loaded; they are stacked like bricks in the cargo car. The doors are pulled shut. The guards cradle their rifles and tuck cigarettes into the corners of their sour mouths. Your breath fogs like vapor. A darker smoke billows from between the thin lips of the soldiers, lingering about their faces in filthy halos. They watch without interest as the people on the platform are led aboard.

You want to ask somebody where the train is going but you don't know any of them and you've been taught that you must not talk to strangers. You hope you will see your parents soon. You think that maybe when it is your turn to board the train you will ask the conductor with the immaculate white gloves where he is taking you.

You are near the rear of the line, staring at the back of a young man. He has a loose gray scarf about his neck and he trembles with nervous energy. The closer he comes to the entrance of the train the more he shakes, until as last he gives a great cry and breaks free of the line. The conductor reaches out to take him by the arm but the young man throws him off.

At once there is a soldier in a dark red coat there; he strikes the young man hard across the face. The young man hits him back. There is blood on his lips. The conductor slaps his mouth, and his beautiful white gloves are smeared red. Another of the guards grabs a handful of the young man's starchy hair. They throw him down and kick him. You cry out. You stumble. Hands reach from in the crowd and draw you closer, pull you inside the train. It is too late to struggle. The doors are closing and you are on the train.

On the other side of the door the young man is grabbing the leg of the conductor and pulling him down. The young man gets up and runs, staggering a little and holding his side. He tumbles over the edge of the platform and he runs at a stagger along the tracks.

You push against the door; it will not open. The Captain steps away from the ticket booth. He draws a pistol lazily from the holster beneath his coat. The train is beginning to move now, chugging and groaning steadily. You hate the sound, the metallic strain of it. The noise of the pistol being fired is swallowed by the roar of the train.

Someone is taking your hand and leading you into the train car.

The old man is looking down on you. "My God. Only a child."

His wife is weeping. "How can they _do_ this?"

You take a seat by the window and press your nose against the cool glass. The young man is lying still beside the track. His gray scarf flutters in the wind. On the platform the men in the dark red coats stand like vultures with their hands hooked into their belts.

The train carries you north.

* * *

He stands over you. He sees a little girl pressed up against the glass. She is clinging to the cold clear sheet like she is trying to get through it, push through the watery surface and tumble into a different world. The glass will not yield. The seat beneath her is hard and unyielding, all the padding stripped out from beneath the leather cover. The shapes of thighs and buttocks are worn in like a ghostly afterglow. The armrest is dotted with cigarette burns and alcohol stains. More recent is the hard bite mark of a metal ring looped round the hasp. Tugged hard in by one chained there and drowning. Pulled until their wrist bled. Until the bones broke and they wrenched their crippled hand through.

He sees peculiar pipes and tubes running along the ceiling. Black guts, black veins pumping strange and alien blood, machine blood. The pipes run into wide-mouthed vents that gape down like horrid wounds. A sound like breathing echoes through.

There is a torn scrap of newspaper on the floor, caught between interlocking steel plates under the threadbare carpet pale green and stiff as a corpse's hair. The paper is yellowed. Yank it out and read the remaining letters. Half-faded words in a foreign tongue. They mean nothing to him.

He sees everything. There are thirty-six of you scattered out amongst the seats. No luggage. No jewelry in your ears or at your throats. No watches on your wrists. No wedding bands on your fingers. Some of you bleeding from the mouth, holding bunched sleeves to the raw holes where gold-capped teeth had once been.

He sees you men with fear and hate in your eyes. Some of you torn from the front lines. Your fingers twisted together to stop the shaking. To be wrapped around his throat. Toes poking out through the holes in your shoes, fingernails torn and bleeding. Faces smudged with smoke and grit and dirt and blood. They could have been your own brothers, those men who came for you. They could have been your own stern fathers.

He sees you women, your faces streaked with tears. Thin mouths set in tight lines. Secretaries, shopkeepers. Poets. The papers the pen torn from your hands, the ink bottle smashed on the floor. Pencils snapped in the struggle. You screamed when they took you, when they tore you from your husband's arms, from your children's arms and they dragged you out into the cold gray street.

Old men, you have seen this all before. You have lived all of your lives with the cold blue eyes that will not look you full in the face, that look away like you are an animal. You thought that such ways had vanished long ago, that those were only the petty hatreds of a youthful world, that your children would grow up free of it all in an age of reason. That they would not be hated. You thought that your children would have better lives than yours, but children always find their way back to the old hatreds. There is nothing man loves so well as war.

He sees you old women crying tears of shame, you who cannot anymore bear this life. Your beautiful faces which have weathered with a lifetime of grief. Your beautiful eyes which have seen so much. Your beautiful hands which have held children and children's children. Your beautiful lips which have kissed beloved faces. Your beautiful eyes, which will see no more.

The train car is long and foul. There are stains on the floor that will not wash, blood and feces and urine. Dark shapes left in the carpets like a map of alien continents and foreign shores, of strange lands beyond his knowledge. Savage kingdoms on the pale green sea. Just under his feet, swaying with the motion of the train. Lurching into an outer darkness.

Iron hooks hanging from the ceiling, chains strung up in long lines along the length of the car. Butcher's hooks to pierce flesh. Bodies could have swayed from those hooks. Their faces like your own, their skin the same shade as yours, torn from their shoulders. Do you remember them? When you see their faces peering in through the dirty window will you recognize them? Can you tell him their names? Can you tell him what they dreamed of when they were rocked to sleep by the motion of the train?

He rides with you on this terrible machine, listening to the pistons and the wheels and the clanging bells. Smoke vomiting from a putrid black mouth thick as bile. Steel guts and iron viscera, track laid like a rib across the earth, like a tooth biting down.

Dark drapes itself over the face of the world. He feels the train crawl blindly into that night, blind as an infant squalling, blind as the milky gaze of the dying.

He turns back the cuffs of his blue uniform and he sits. Watching you.

* * *

Outside the window is a perfect darkness.

You gaze into it, forcing yourself to look past the reflection of the little girl with the wide and staring eyes. The soft hills are charcoal gray, shrouding farmhouse fires behind their rolling forms. The moonlight-blue grass rolls in waves down at the bottom of a sunless ocean. The yellow eyes of foxes glitter there like dropped stones in deep water. The sky is black, endlessly black and starless. You can see tufts of train-smoke sweeping against a gleaming moon.

Outside the train is a perfect silence.

Your ears are full with fearful whispers. People, strange people, pressed in close all around you, their heads put gently together, lip to ear, mouth to mouth in subdued conference.

There are two guards on the train car, soldiers in cobalt blue standing one at each end of the compartment with their rifles held across their chests and their fingers twitching at the triggers. Eyes flicking across the width of the train car. The guard at the front has a scruffy beard and a drooping face. You cannot see the other. You lean out and twist your neck to look at him. His face is sharp and narrow. His eyes catch yours and flash and you jerk back against the window. You press yourself against the side of the train, curling in your seat. You shut your eyes so tight that it hurts. You strain your ears for footsteps, for heavy footfalls moving towards you, for hard boots on the hard floor. He is coming for you. He is going to hurt you. You cannot hear anything; you clamp your hands over your ears. The roar of your own blood competing with the roar of the train.

Nobody is coming. Your back straightens. Your ears are uncovered. Your eyes open, you feel tears on your cheeks. You have been holding your breath. Try to keep breathing. You need to stay calm. Do not panic.

Your father said those words to you once: _Do not panic_. Half laughing, walking down the dusty street with your little hand clutched in his. His hand so rough. He held you very gently. Like holding a bird: the soft cooing, the fluttering heartbeat. Remember, he told you, remember to stay calm. Kneeling down to take your face in his hands outside the dentist's office. You had got a cavity, a rotting hole in the bone. It will be alright, he said, as long as you do not panic. You smiled at him. You showed him your teeth. Dark gaps in your mouth, coins found under the pillow, a little collection of teeth in a jam jar beside mama's scrapbook.

The man across the aisle from you is holding his mouth and weeping. "They took my fucking _teeth_!" His voice is a ragged lisp. Tears and blood mingled on his face. The woman beside him softly sobbing, her arms tight around him. "Stop crying, please please stop crying," she whispers, her voice so quiet that it is scarcely more than a breath. "They'll hear you, they'll hear you. Don't let them hear you, don't let them come. Don't let them find us."

The man clutches at her, his hands running with blood and saliva. "They already found us," he says, his voice spitting through his broken mouth, "what more can they do?"

" _Please_ , Jamil, please stay quiet!" Hissed.

He strokes her hair. "Alright," he said. He wipes his nose on the back of his sleeve. "Alright, I'll keep quiet." He pushes his face into her hair and he shuts his eyes and he is silent inside his pain.

There are two old men sitting in front of you. You cannot see their faces. They speak in low voices. "Do you have any idea where they're taking us?" the first man says.

The second man answers. "Not for sure. I've heard rumors but..."

"You never believed any of them?"

"No. I never did."

"And now?"

"I'm still not sure. I hope to God they were exaggerated."

"Somehow that does not seem likely."

"When did it get this bad?"

"When we started losing the war. Somebody has to be blamed."

"Is it going that poorly?"

"I was in the Ministry of State before this all started. It's far worse than they're letting on to the papers. We're being pushed back on every front. Look there. You can see it right out your window. The enemy is very close now. It won't be long before they reach the big cities."

The old man looks. "My God..." he says.

You press your nose against the glass. At first you don't see anything. The world is quiet and dark. Then there is a soft flare of light, far far in the distance. A flash like a match being struck. Then another, and another. Bursts of light that make the distant hills glow. There is a fire there, far away, burning behind the hills.

_The War_.

You've heard about the war only in whispers and rumor. The headmistress didn't allow anybody to talk about it, and since newspapers were not allowed at school none of your classmates knew very much. Sometimes a girl would receive a letter from an older brother on the front, she would read it and cry and you would wonder what could be inside those words. Your own brother is too young still to fight. You wish that they hadn't ever sent you away. You don't care about the danger; at least you would be with them. Anywhere but on this train.

You wonder if they have been hurt, if they've had a bomb dropped on them. You shut your eyes tight. _Do not panic._

Your head droops down, lulled by the rumble of the train. The bombs are so far away, just a fireworks show in the distance. You hold yourself tight against the chill.

Somebody screams. Your body tenses, your eyes open. A woman is screaming. You can see her standing in the aisle, mouth horribly wide and screaming wordlessly, a scream that seems to crack the world.

"Sit down! Sit down and _shut up_!" The sharp-faced guard barks like a trained dog.

The woman comes down the aisle towards you, stumbling and tripping. The guards move in. You cower in your seat. You will not look. You will not watch. You stare at the floor.

But you cannot stop from hearing it. You cannot stop from feeling it as it happens.

The shadow of the soldier sways on the floor below you, cast there by the dim lights which run along the ceiling.

The woman's shadow clutches uselessly at his, fighting to get past. "Please, I'm not supposed to be here! This is wrong. I'm not supposed to be here. You have to let me past! I have to go." And her voice is empty, quiet and reasonable and empty.

You hear the guard's horrible laugh. "Get back in your fucking seat, you goddamn –."

He says the word.

You remember that word. You don't know what it means, but you have heard it used before. Some kids shouted it after your father one day, children hardly older than you. His face got very cold and hard and he grabbed your arm tight and he propelled you down the road, walking so fast that you could hardly keep up. When the boys were far out of sight you asked him what it meant, that word. "It's something that they call people like us," he said. His face seemed carved from stone.

"People like us?" you asked him. "What's wrong with us?"

He seemed so angry. Was he angry at you? You didn't think so. "Nothing's wrong with us," he said. " _Nothing_. Some people just... don't like people who are different."

You tried very hard to understand. "We're different?" you asked.

Another time, somebody at school said the word to your brother, called him a dirty –. Your brother attacked the other boy. He got detention for a month, and the other boy only had to apologize even though he'd started it. You asked your brother why he hadn't just walked away like papa did. Your brother wiped the blood off his lip and he said that sometimes you couldn't just walk away.

The woman in the aisle is crying. The sharp-faced guard laughs. There is a horrible crack, a sort of wet crunching sound. Then another. Then another. The guard pushes the woman down into the seat beside you. You feel the weight of her pressing against your side. There is no more crying.

The guard walks back to the rear of the car.

You stare straight ahead. You can see the old men through the slit between their seats. They are staring at the woman. "Oh my God..." one of them says. Then he looks at you. "My God... just a child. Don't look, child, don't look. How old are you, child?"

Your voice is very still. "Eleven," you say.

"My God," he says once more, and then again: "Don't look."

But you cannot help it. You cannot _help_ but look.

The woman isn't a woman, not really. She's hardly older than you, sixteen or seventeen maybe. Half a girl still. Her long curling hair sweeps luxuriantly about her face. She wears dark purple lipstick. Her coat is some sort of fur; it looks very expensive. Her fingernails are painted red.

The girl's face is broken. The whole right side seems to have collapsed in on itself. The skull is shattered, the eye pulverized. You can see the horrid white flicker of broken bone in the bloody mess. Her mouth is open, drooling red saliva. She doesn't move except to twitch and quiver. Her remaining eye rolls wearily in the socket, searching for something.

You bite down on your hand to stop from crying out. You bite so hard that the coppery taste of blood fills your mouth. You look away, but you cannot keep the image of from your mind. You try to look out the window, but all you can see there is her reflection behind you, gaping and broken. You squeeze your eyes shut. _Do not panic_.

The two old men are looking through the crack. "We must get off this train," one of them whispers.

* * *

An hour passes, and the broken girl ceases to breathe.

They take her away, dragging the limp thing between them like a sack of bones. The smell of her remains.

Eventually, a kind of silence. Faint snores. The soft murmur of sleep. The moon is bright in the sky outside. Even the soldiers seem to relax, letting their eyes go half-lidded. They sleep in shifts, first one and then the other.

You do not sleep.

The man Jamil with the broken teeth, he does not sleep either. He is looking at you. You look back and he smiles. His smile is bloody and terrible; he hides it behind his hand when he sees your horror.

"Can't you sleep, girl?" he lisps softly.

You shake your head. You do not think that you will ever be able to sleep again.

"Me neither."

You ask him why. Your voice is so very small. He makes no response; you assume that he did not hear you. You are about to repeat the question when he answers:

"My mother used to say that we went to another world in our sleep. A dreaming world where everybody you loved was alive again..." He smiles again, a wild eerie smile, "I'm afraid to sleep, afraid that this is not a dream. That it is real and not some nightmare..." He shuts his eyes. "I'm sorry. Ignore me, you shouldn't be thinking about these things."

"Do you know where they're taking us?" you ask.

He looks at you. "Just sleep, girl. Where does it matter? We're dead anyway." He starts to laugh at this, and covers his broken mouth with both his hands. The woman beside him moves in her sleep; she wraps her arms about him and he goes silent at once, clutching to her and staring at nothing, staring like a blind man.

You look back out the window. There is a town out there in the night, closer and closer. The lights of the houses flicker by, snatches of illumination in an overwhelming darkness. The world outside does not look real. There are shadows crawling like black dogs in the cobbled streets of that nameless village. The train rushes past a little station without stopping and the town fades in the distance, fewer and fewer houses until there are none. Only the starry wilds. You press your cheek hard against the window, trying to look back towards the lights. If only you were inside one of those houses right now, your mother tucking you into a warm bed. To be safe and warm. Your mother smelling of clean laundry and spices. Her flour-dusted hands. Her round face beaming. Her arms wrapping around you. Your mother sang to you every night. Her voice was so sweet, like something not of this world. When you were in her arms you shut your eyes and just listened to the music of her voice, just felt the warmth of her body.

You shiver. You draw your knees up under your chin and you start to cry. You cannot stop the tears, the fierce sobs. You struggle to breathe. You feel as though you are drowning in your own tears, and you cannot stop.

"Quiet!" the sharp-faced guard snaps. The sound of his voice only makes you cry harder.

Your eyes are wide with terror. Your breath comes in desperate little gasps. You tell yourself that you must stop crying, that you must not panic or you will end up like that other girl, that older girl they dragged out like a piece of meat.

The man Jamil with the broken mouth leans over towards your seat. His eyes are wide. "Stop!" he hisses, "You have to stop. Please, please! It's alright, it's alright. Just _stop_ crying!" The girl in his arms wakes. She stares at you, trembling and unable to speak. Her lips move silently, mouthing one word over and over again so clearly that you could almost believe she was actually speaking it: "No, no, no, no, no, no."

The sharp-faced guard is coming towards you. His boots clomp on the threadbare carpet. The train is rocking so much, you feel that it would shake itself off the track if you moved even a single muscle. You feel yourself tensing, your fingers digging into the cushioned armrests. Your breath is choking in your throat.

The old men sitting ahead of you have turned around. Their panicked eyes flicker in the gap between their seats. "Girl, girl!" they say, voices thick with sleepy fear.

"Stop that fucking _noise_!" the guard snarls. He is very close now. Only a few steps away.

The train shrieks on the track. The whistle screams. Is the train going to hit something? You're sure that it will crash.

You try to hold your breath; you bite wildly at the soft flesh of your arms, trying to stop the sound. You cannot stop, you have lost all control. You shove your whole fist almost into your mouth but it will not stop the noise.

"Please, let me go to her!" It is the voice of a woman, the old woman from the train platform. Asima, the man called her. "She's only a child, she's _frightened_."

The sharp-faced guard is standing over you now. You cannot look, but you think that his eyes must be red as a devil's and smoldering in their sockets. His teeth slavering like a wolf's open jaws. You feel hot and wet down there and you realize that your bladder has let go. Steaming urine runs off the edge of the seat in a warm cascade.

The guard sees it and he cries out with disgust and he reaches towards you.

" _Burton_!" An unfamiliar voice. The guard with the beard and the drooping features. He is awake, talking to his sharp-faced companion. "Let the old woman handle it. I don't want to deal with another corpse."

Your eyes flicker, rolling wildly. You see the sharp-faced guard, Burton, sneering down at you. The old woman is coming slowly down the length of the car. She holds the seats to either side of her to keep upright. She sits beside you.

Burton laughs softly. "Fine," he says, mutter soaked with horrible reluctance. He looks at the old woman. "Don't let me hear her mewling again, or I'll take care of you both." And he leaves you.

She wraps her arms around you. "There there." Her murmurs like clear-running water. "There's nothing to cry about, child, nothing at all. Oh, poor thing." She unwraps the shawl from about her shoulders and starts to mop up around your seat. The acrid stench is heavy around you; it fills you with shame. Still, you feel a little better now. Your ragged breath isn't so loud anymore.

The old woman waves for the bearded guard. He approaches, his face dull.

"This poor girl needs to use the washroom. There is a washroom on the train, isn't there?"

The guard nods. He hesitates.

She laughs harshly. "Are you so afraid of us?"

He stares at her, finally jerking his head back towards the next car. He says, "Come on. This way."

Your face burns with shame as you are led past all those strange people. They are all watching you. They look at you sadly. You stare down at the floor and let the woman lead you. Her hands are very soft and warm, their texture like wrinkled paper. Your damp tights cling to your thighs like another skin.

The soldier takes you to the door at the far end of the car. For a horrible moment you think that he is going to throw you off the train. Your fingers bite into the old woman's soft hand. "Toilet's in the next car," the soldier says, his voice thick and sullen.

The old woman nods her head.

The soldier stares at her. His eyes are gray, his face jowly and long. A very strange look crosses his face, something like understanding flickering deep in the gray of his eyes. "I'm Rudy," he says, "Uh... Rudolph Harris." He blushes, "I mean, Private Harris." He looks down at his boots. "It's this way, Ma'am. Just across."

And he opens the door. The night roars in, cold and black. There is a round window in the door of the next car like a chrome eye gazing sightlessly back. The gap between the cars yawns and sighs. The slats of the track rush by in an invisible blur. You think that you might die here.

He leads you across to the bathroom and tells you to hurry. He locks you both inside.

There is a little window in the bathroom, a little sink and a little toilet. There are trees outside the window, crooked black limbs reaching angrily for the sky. You stand in the narrow room, swaying.

The old woman looks down at you. "What's your name, child?"

You just shake your head.

"No name?"

All you can think of is the dead man beside the platform, of the dead girl in the seat next to you. You wonder what their names were.

"Is there something I can call you?"

"I don't know." Your voice is soft.

"May I call you Ahlem?" she asks. As she speaks the old woman is removing your clothes. Her old fingers work skillfully at the buttons, the hooks, the zippers, the clasps. The clothing comes slowly away and is piled in the sink.

You nod. "Whose name is it?"

Her eyes do not meet yours. "My daughter's."

"Where is she?"

"Gone," she says, and pulls your shirt up over your head. "My name is Asima." She wrings out her shawl in the sink, running cold water over it.

The old woman kneels down before you and clasps your naked hands in her own. "I will keep you safe, Ahlem. Do you understand?"

You nod.

She wipes the tears from your cheeks. "There now. That's a good girl. It's going to be alright, understand?"

"How do you know?" you ask, very quietly.

She smiles sadly. "I just know, darling." She gives the clothing in a sink a perfunctory rinse and gathers them wrung out in her arms. Her own coat she takes off and wraps about your shoulders. "Wear this until your clothes are dry."

You thank her. Just as you are about to leave the little bathroom, a thought comes to mind, a thought so pressing and simple that you feel you cannot wait any longer to give it voice. "Misses Asima?"

She looks at you. "Yes?"

"Why are they doing this?"

She stares at you. She says nothing.

You sit on the toilet. It is cold against your bare skin.

"Are you alone, child?" she asks you.

"They're taking me to meet my parents," you say. The words feel heavy and sick in your mouth.

Asima shuts her eyes. "Oh, child. I hope not."

Private Harris leads you back to the car. Just before you step over the gap between the cars you look up. The trees above are webbed over the train like a fragile cocoon, interlaced fingers reaching. They look very old. The trees to the left are a ghostly white color, birch, maybe. The trees to the right side of the train are dark as pitch, so dark they can only be seen in the night gloom as blank spaces against a star-washed atmosphere. The white fingers cling to the black, writhed together like lost brothers embracing. They have been growing back towards each other ever since the cruel path of the railway was cut through the wood.

Private Harris slumps to his post. Private Burton watches you with glittering eyes.

Asima sits beside you; she gathers you in her arms. You look out the window of the train. There is a long low lake outside. The train moves along the shore. Moonlight glistens on the velvety black surface. You can see a family of ducks floating on the water, bobbing down for morsels of food. The grass on the far shore shivers.

Asima wraps her arms around you.

"Would you like me to tell you a story, Ahlem?"

For a moment you are confused. Who is she talking to? Is this your new name? You nod.

"I used to tell stories to my daughter. To help her sleep."

You curl up against her. "Tell me the story, grandmother."

She kisses the top of your head. "Alright."

As she tells her story you find your gaze returning to the lake. The smooth dark surface is rippling like an enormous swath of black silk. The train groaning.

A little while later, someone begins to pray.

* * *

The mother looked down at her child. Sickly girl dying in a hospital bed. If only there was something she could say to change it. Can't a mother save her little girl? Can't she die in her place? The mother reached down to hold her daughter's hand. Such soft skin, so pure. Untouched. That little girl would never know what it was like to be in love, to be held and loved. She would never be scarred by love. The mother began to cry. The girl did not cry, but replied with those wracking coughs, those ragged throat-tearing coughs. The mother bit down on her tongue very hard, hard enough almost to bite clean through. It seemed right to her that there was blood in her own mouth as she bent to wipe the crimson spatters off her daughter's hands and chin. She stroked the little girl's hair. The child was sweating and weak, her pulse faint, her eyes moving in their sockets too fast and then too slow. Her breathing shallow and strained. The little girl's body breaking down.

She leans close to kiss her daughter's forehead. "That is only the beginning of the story."

The girl in the hospital bed nodded. "I would like to hear the end."

"You need your rest. The doctor said that you-"

"Oh, _please_ mother! Please don't stop!" the girl tried to sit up, something like real alarm flashing in her eyes. The little girl, sickly and pale. Dying. "Please tell me the rest of the story."

* * *

"What is the matter, Grandmother? Why are you crying?"

"Forgive me. I was thinking about my daughter."

"Ahlem?"

"Yes."

"What happened to her?"

"She was very sick."

"And she died."

"Yes."

"You must miss her."

"Every day I miss her."

"How old was she?"

"She was your age, when she died."

"I think about dying sometimes. What it would be like. Do you know...?"

"I do not know. No one really knows. But I do not fear it anymore."

"I'm very afraid, Grandma."

"There is nothing to fear in death, child. Death is an end to fear, to grief. It is only for those left behind to fear. And to grieve. In death there is no pain. It is only the leaving of the body. We must all abandon these shells one day."

"But I'm not ready, Grandma."

* * *

The old woman is asleep beside you. Her cheek rests on your shoulder. The rubber lip of the window is growing a black mold. The windows are laced with iron. Like prison windows.

The coat wrapped around you shifted sometime in the night. Your bare legs hang out over the edge of the seat, dangling and cold and exposed.

The sharp-featured guard is staring at you. His mouth is curled in a gruesome smile. He leans against the seat across the aisle, and he watches you. He watches all of you. Good morning little girl.

You blush and you pull on your damp clothing. Shame and fear and a cold skirt. You won't look at him. If you ignore him then he will disappear, he will go up in a puff of smoke. You pull on your shirt and the wet cloth tangles about your head. For a moment you are blind and you are sure that he will step closer and touch you, touch your bare skin. You wriggle the shirt down in a panic and when you push your head through the hole there is nobody standing there in the aisle. You are alone.

The air in the train car is cool, like the inside of an underground cavern. Way down, far below the earth. You are so very cold.

The sun oozes across the sky. Faint heat is coming through the glass. You press your nose to the window and ache for summer. The golden fields shimmer in a rising light. Old red barns like picture postcards standing against a blue sky.

The train stops for water at a lonely filling station. The silver tower glistens. Steam rises in pale white clouds.

The fear lapses to a dreadful boredom. People are trying to stretch their legs and their sore backs. They wander occasionally from seat to seat. The guards seem not to care any longer; they watch with bemused indifference. The prisoners ponder escape openly. You realize that if they thought there was any chance of success then they would whisper, and your fear returns.

The train is still taking on water when they bring you food. A thin gruel and a hunk of bread to sop it up with. Somehow you did not realize until now how hungry you are. It has been almost a whole day since you last ate.

You always ate well at the school. Breakfasts of sausage and eggs – real eggs fresh from the hen-house. Coffee sometimes. Those luxuries became harder and harder to come by as time passed, and you felt guilty every time you sat down at that table and knew that your parents were living on scraps and emergency rations. Not guilty enough to refuse the food though. Never that guilty. You ate with the other girls, listening to their chatting and gossiping. Their laughing. As though nothing was wrong.

The other students never seemed to like you; they avoided sitting next to you. None of them looked like you; they were all pale as lace, their hair long and straight. The way they looked at you made you feel dirty. Dark skin, dark hair. Nobody ever said anything, just looked. Whenever something bad happened, something stolen or broken, the teachers would always ask you about it first. They expected it to be you. There was only one girl who treated you almost like a friend. Her with her messy brown hair and white skin and green eyes. She explained it to you one day, like it was the most obvious thing in the world: you are not as good as we are, you don't deserve to be here with us. She said it with no malice, as though stating an obvious and commonly known fact.

You try picking the weevils out of your bread, but this proves to be impossible. You can feel them wriggling in your mouth as you chew. You start to throw up, but you are so hungry that you swallow it back down. You force yourself to eat every last crumb and dribble. You feel hungrier when you finish eating than you did when you started. You wonder how long it will be before you are fed again.

Fed. That word. _Fed_. Chilling word. You are already starting to think of yourself as an animal, a piece of luggage. You decide to get up and move about the train car. Anything to feel like you are still living. Still thinking for yourself. You wander from seat to seat; there are many empty seats still. The train car is about ten feet wide and fifty feet long, you think. Nobody pays you any attention.

The two old men are talking about likely troop deployments. They seem to think that if the enemy breaks through then they will liberate all of the people on the train. You find this hard to understand. You think: but the enemy will kill us! You've seen the posters, the grotesque faces leering down from every wall. Those are an inhuman people, cruel and savage monsters with pointed teeth and wicked long fingernails and beaded eyes. The enemy will kill us all.

But you are the outsider now. You wonder if there are new posters up already with ugly pictures of people like you, people like your parents. _The \-- will kill us all_ , they might say. That word.

The man Jamil with the broken mouth is speaking to his companion. He tells her to be brave, be strong. He says her name, Mahrukh. He tells her that he loves her.

She sees you. Her face lights up. "The little girl," she says, "the little girl is safe!"

Jamil says, "Are you well, child?"

You tell him that you are hungry.

"Here," the man, "take the rest of my bread. I'm full anyway." The woman gazes at him, her eyes full of love.

You wander away down the car, gnawing on your crust. There are many unfamiliar faces.

You see a man with a thick black beard who stops talking as soon as he see you and says that you would be safer if you were sitting down.

You see a woman with sharp and defiant eyes who has taken off her shawl and stretched it between her knees. She is writing on it with a little pencil. The words are very faint on the cream-colored cloth. You ask her what she is writing, and she says that it is a poem.

"What's it about?" you ask. You knew a few girls at school who wrote poetry. Treacly stuff about getting married to soldiers, mostly. There was one, though, a pale girl named Jocelyn who wrote the most beautiful sonnets. About ivy climbing the stone walls of the empty stables, about a man coming home from the front lines with one of his arms blown off. The teachers called it ghoulish and unpatriotic and forbade Jocelyn from sharing it with anyone. You always wished that you could make something like that.

The woman looks at you. "It's about this train," she says.

"Will you read it to me?"

She hesitates, clutching the shawl to herself. "Ask me again tonight, child. I'll read it when it's done, alright?"

"Okay." But you do not leave.

The woman studies your face. Her fingers curl tight into the shawl. The pencil trembles in her fingers. She puts it in her mouth and it trembles there as well. She takes it out and asks if you would like to hear the first lines of her poem at least.

You tell her that you would like that very much.

She clears her throat and reads. Two lines, the words spare and cold and without love.

You're confused by it. Isn't poetry supposed to rhyme? Isn't it supposed to be beautiful? The woman sees your expression and blushes a little. "Well, I'm still working on it," she says. You tell her that you like it very much and she smiles. She has such a pretty smile. She reminds you of your brother who always smiled such a bright smile.

There comes a ferocious whistling. The train churns back into motion, pulling back down the track and leaving the water-tower behind. You press yourself against the window, your knees up on the seat, and you look back. The tower stands against the sky, all alone like a silver island in oceans of golden grass.

You remember running with your brother in fields like that. The two of you together at your uncle's house in the country, your aunt dead six days past. We have come to help, your mother says. God takes care of me now, your uncle says, smiling a sad smile. Your brother runs through the fields and you laugh and you scream with joy and you catch bugs and butterflies and scatter the heads of dandelions. To be in the virgin world. You collapse together into the golden grass and he takes your hand and says that he loves you. We will be best friends forever, he says. You ask him what it means that auntie is dead and he smiles and shakes his head.

Your uncle says that she is with God now, says it beaten down and broken, held together only by something invisible. Your mother and father do not believe in God. You don't yet know what you believe, but you think that it is a beautiful thing to think of your auntie in the arms of a great shinning figure, a great sexless ageless formless colorless light. The sun above you is burning in the sky so hot and round and vast and warm on your face. You feel so happy that you want to cry. You hug your brother as hard as you can. He laughs. He says the two of us are going to be together forever.

You stayed there three weeks. The war started on the day that you came home. Returning to the city, to that rumbling belching smoking metal din. Everybody was rushing around and shouting and there were cobalt blue army trucks rushing down the streets and policemen on every corner waving their arms and people crying and screaming and it felt like the end of the world. Not the beginning of something, but the end. Your parents were afraid, and you were helpless.

That was two years ago.

Nothing _bad_ ever happened. You heard about people dying in the war, but that seemed normal somehow. That was just war. Wars had happened before, you'd read about them. Nothing bad happened, just a fear living under your skin. You tried not to believe in bad things. But now you are on this train and you don't know where you're going and you think that something terrible is going to happen when you arrive and now you have no choice but to believe.

The train shakes.

The soldier with the drooping face sits down in the seat beside you. You flinch, trying not to look at him. His uniform is rumpled and smoky, his fingers tobacco stained. His whole body seems to sag. He says, "I never wanted to be part of this, not any of it. You understand that, don't you?"

You look at him. He looks too miserable to be frightening. You remember his name. Rudolph Harris. If not for his army uniform, he would look like a postman or a worker at the deli counter. He would look like any aging man drinking out of a paper-bag bottle and scratching at a few days' growth on his chin. His hair is thin across the crown, his beard patchy and itching. He has dirty hands and dirty teeth, but his eyes are soft.

"I never volunteered, is what I'm saying," he says, and he seems to be pleading with you, "I didn't ask for this. We just do what we're told, you understand? Was your father in the army? Your brother, maybe?"

You shake your head.

He sighs and pushes oily hair over his bald spot. "My father owned a bicycle shop when I was a boy." He stops, and seems to think better of going on. "I've never had anything against you people. I mean..." He pinches his nose. It is dripping. "I haven't got... I'm not... My father was a simple man. _I_ am a simple man. I don't concern myself with any of this, I just don't. I follow orders."

"What's going to happen to us?" you ask. It is the only question that seems worth asking, the question which nobody will answer.

Private Harris shakes his head. "I don't know. I don't. I've heard some things. I don't ask. There are places where you'll go. You'll be safe there. Separate. It will be better for us all, you'll see."

"But where are we _going_?"

He frowns deeply. "There's a train station. A big one. I'll get off there. And Private Burton. They'll take you on from there."

"They?" Your voice is very small.

"They'll bring you the rest of the way," he says.

You feel yourself shrinking down into your seat. You know instinctively that "they" must be more of those men in red from the train station. Their hooked noses like hunting raptors, their pale faces and their black-gloved hands. They who had looked at you like you were a dirty thing.

"Will they take me to my parents?" you ask, and immediately wish that you hadn't. You don't want to hear the answer, because you don't know which answer would be worse, a yes or a no.

The man shrugs. He is about the stand up when he stops. It is as though a thought has spontaneously occurred. He looks back down at you. "What's your name?" he asks.

You think of the old woman. You wonder what happened to her daughter. "Ahlem," you answer.

He shakes his head and smiles, as if to say: you people have such strange names. He returns to his post.

You look back out the window. Behind you, in low whispers, there are plans being formed. You wonder how much longer it is before you reach the big train station in the city. One more day? Two?

You stare out the window at the new day. It feels as though you have been on this train for a very long time. Riding on this awful tide.

* * *

The mountains grow larger in the window. Yesterday they seemed so far away. You will be in the city soon; you saw the evening glow of it last night before the blackout curtains went up.

The train rocks, it shakes. It continues, always continues. The smoke smears out behind you in an endless ribbon. Riding on a train is like dreaming, a state of perpetual sleep, of perpetual wakefulness.

Hours pass and nothing happens. The world goes by on and on. They feed you but it is never enough to quiet the ache of hunger. People talk in weary voices. They are all simply waiting for the journey to be over. The terror is being smothered under an expanse of simple boredom.

The old man Tamir is sitting across the aisle. His soft white hair is like tufts of milkweed behind his ears. The old woman has her eyes fixed on him. Grandmother, you call her. She looks at him fondly as his chin slumps to his chest; his hands clutch the armrests, his breath snores softly from his lips.

Grandmother watches him and smiles. She speaks, but she seems to be speaking beyond you. You wonder if she is talking to her daughter.

"I was so young when I fell in love with him. Just a girl! Seventeen years old. Can you believe that I was ever so young? I hardly remember what it was, to be so full of life. I'd never been in love before. I was too busy studying to bother with men. Did I tell you that I'm a teacher? History. I teach history."

_Taught_ history, you think, but do not say. You do not need to say it. You can see from her face that she is thinking the same thing.

The mountains are very close now.

"He showed me one of his radios. He built them, big expensive radio sets. It was all very new back then, I'd never even seen one. It was so beautiful. Not just a machine... Polished cherry-wood, brass dials gleaming." Grandmother smiles. She settles back into her seat. She looks at the old man across the aisle and her face is so soft and loving and kind that you want to cry.

"He turned on the radio. It was such gorgeous music! A waltz. We danced a waltz right there in his tiny little apartment. We danced and danced and looked at each other. Just looked." Her mouth curves happily. Her eyes are shut. She is submerged in the glow of memory.

The train moves under the shadow of the mountains.

* * *

Private Harris leans back against the door at the end of the train car. He looks out the window, and then back at you. He sees you looking at the mountains. "There's a tunnel," he says, "Nearly a mile long of darkness. Don't be frightened."

He has come this way before. You wonder why. Are there other trains like this one? How many people are they taking? How many cargo cars full of coffins? Maybe he was riding the train for another reason. Soldiers ride on trains all the time, you know that.

When they showed the silent filmstrip before the movie you saw dozens of bright-faced young men hanging out of the windows of trains, waving to mothers and sweethearts crying on the platform while the train bore them relentlessly away. Carried off somewhere, never to return. Boys hanging out the windows and smiling, rifles on their backs.

The windows on this train do not open. Private Harris has a pack of cigarettes in his hand, pulled out of his pocket and ready, matchbook between the fingers. He looks at Private Burton. They exchange a nod, then they switch places. Private Harris steps out onto the little platform behind the passenger car. You can see him through the window as he lights the match.

Private Burton is looking at you. His lips are pulled back from his crooked teeth. He seems to come to a decision. He reaches for you. You shrink away, but he wraps his fingers around your wrist so quickly that you cannot avoid him. He drags you up onto your feet in the corridor and presses himself close to you. "Don't scream." He speaks through his teeth. You look back. A few of the passengers on the train are watching you, but their looks are idle and distracted. They don't seem to care. Grandmother is sleeping, her face so peaceful. She doesn't even notice when Burton pulls you away. His grip is so tight that you think your bones might break. Your skin might tear. Your body crushed and spilling open. You wince, you swallow your tears. You want to scream, but you are afraid. Burton killed a girl for making noise, you saw it with your own eyes. You heard the sounds. You sat beside her for hours. You smelled her body decay.

You press your lips together so tight that your whole face trembles.

Burton drags you. "Come on," he says.

You are whimpering. He pulls you out through the door. Pulls you over the gap between the train cars and shuts the door. He shoves you into the little washroom. He is breathing heavily, snorting through his nose. His fingers twitch and his eyes flicker. His whole body is tense and trembling. He locks the door behind him and he stares at you with his nostrils flared.

You shake your head. Your legs are clenched together. You are trembling. Your fear mirrors his eagerness. You shake your head.

He curses you and he hits you across the face. You cry out and he shoves his sweaty fingers between your lips. You gag. He wraps his fingers into your mouth and pushes you against the wall. His hands are tugging and plucking like a child fumbling with a stringed instrument. A cello or a harp, a great bone ivory harp, music twinkling on the strings like falling rain. Your mother used to play the harp, long ago before you were born. She played it in her own vanished youth.

He pushes you down on the toilet. He is panting and hungry. His fingers scrabble at himself. He looks at you. "You dirty fucking –. You deserve this, you –." He says the word. You are nothing but the word. Not like him, not a person. Just the word.

Your throat is closed, as though there is a hand wrapped around it still, choking you silent. You cannot scream, cannot hardly breathe.

Private Burton is leaning towards you when something catches his eye out the tiny window. He raises himself on the tips of his boots and he looks out. "The mountain," he says. And he looks at you. "We're going under the mountain."

The train enters the tunnel, and everything goes away.

* * *

The train is screaming when it comes out of the darkness. Light blazes in through the windows.

There is blood on your hands, slick and hot and wet. Your own blood? Clothing in shreds, limbs twisted, a pain in your belly. You want to be sick.

Asima is crying. When the train comes back into the light and the illumination of the sun covers her she looks like a wailing ghost. Her hands are clenched and furious.

Private Burton's head is caved in, his skull broken against the wall. The hard iron curve. Bits of hair and blood stuck to the corroded metal like a living thing, like a growth. Blood runs black down the surface, dripping onto the back of Burton's pale hand.

Rudolph Harris is breathing hard, his face pale and the expression frozen to his features. Private Burton's blood is on his hands, on the cool blue cuffs of his uniform. He seems surprised. There are red spatters on his face. Grandmother hits him, beating hopelessly with her arms against his body. Her husband Tamir tries to pull her away. She cries out. She spits on the body of Private Burton.

Private Harris pushes them back. He is shoving them all back across to their car. He is shouting at them, brandishing his firearm. There is cigarette ash on his collar.

You sit there, limbs locked, staring at the body across the little washroom. You wonder what has happened.

Maybe Asima waking up in the darkness of the tunnel, peering in that void and seeing that both you and Private Burton had gone. Running back down the length of the train to find Harris. Him standing just outside the train, the red glow, the tip of the cigarette illuminating his features in the rushing blackout beneath the mountain. The horrible sound of the train winding its way beneath those generations of impossible stone.

Or maybe Harris walking back down the length of the train, lazily with his gun slung over the shoulder. Walking there just after the train entered the tunnel. Growing suspicious, coming out across into the next car, feeling his way in the dark as he crosses the narrow gap with Asima and then Tamir driven by their unease to follow.

Maybe Harris and Asima sitting across from each other, looking at each other as prisoner and captive under the dim glow of the electric lights. Hearing, over the roar of the engine and the groaning of the tunnel, your voice.

Maybe they simply sensed it.

They are all here now. Burton is dead or dying but it makes little difference to you now. What has happened has already happened. Irrevocable, a word your father liked to use. You understand at last.

The light pouring into the washroom seems grotesque and exaggerated. The dark of the tunnel went on for so very long, you thought that you would never escape. Now that the mountains are behind you it seems too easy, too simple. Surely this has not truly happened. You are still in that darkness. His breath still hot on your neck. His weight still heavy on your body. His hands still pressing against your skin. You will never get out of the tunnel. Any moment now you will close your eyes and find yourself once again submerged beneath the mountain.

Private Harris is forcing the others back into the passenger car. They are shouting and clamoring. You are sure that this will not end without more blood spilled. It comes to you then: everyone is going to die.

You move as if in a daze, rising to your feet and gathering the tatters of your clothing about you and walking out the door. Everybody ignores you. It is like they cannot see you. You take the first step towards the car beyond. Stepping, then walking, then running, running running, panting and clumsy. Your legs buckling, knees threatening to give out. How long was that tunnel? Already you are beginning to forget. Some things cannot be recalled, if only for fear. There is no past.

You open the door and you see the engine. The hot mouth of the furnace gaping in its hunger for a shoveled morsel. You feel pity for the train. That great and beautiful machine reduced to this. The faces of the engineers damp with sweat and red with exertion. Some of them look up and they see you. They have deep and hopeless eyes that peer out from soot-smeared faces, turned horribly pallid by the darkness which surrounds them, grotesque like undercooked eggs slopping from the shell.

They make no motion towards you. They do not seem to care. Your clothing hangs in rags on your body. Their hands are huge and callused. Their arms bulge hideously.

They make no effort to stop you as you start up the ladder on the side of the car and pull yourself onto the top of the train. The sun is low in the sky. The wind roars. It tears at your hair and your clothing. There is an iron rung atop the train car. You wrap your arms around it and you hold on.

The speed of the train is cleansing, the rush and the fury of it as pure as fire. Your life is in your own hands. You could let go and die anytime you wanted. You take comfort in that. They do not own you. You do not belong to them, or Burton or anybody. No one can touch you up here.

The smoke of the train pours over you. You breathe its heat.

The top of the train is like another world. How strange to think of the people beneath you. Searching for you? The mountains recede behind the train until you can hardly trace the metallic line of the rail back to the black mouth from which you have emerged. You hold on tight and you shut your eyes.

An hour passes and nobody comes for you. Another hour after that. Have they forgotten you? Given you up for dead? Your hands sting and ache, locked to the rung like the bones have fused in place. You uncurl one finger at a time, just to prove you still can.

The sun cools and slips away.

You lay your head down on the trembling roof. You can feel the motion of the train through your jaw. You stare out. The rocks black and shining, the trees cruel and bare. The moon gapes like a bright hole in the sky through which you might crawl free, if only you could get to it, if only you could climb high enough.

The train is slowing down. You feel as though you have become one with the train. The train is slowing down.

You pull yourself up on your knees and turn. A city is spread across the world, a thousand cloaked lights gleaming in distant streets. The great roar of life inaudible over the rumbling of the machine beneath you.

The city lies across the river, a great black river riding starlight. The span of the bridge is cold silver, a web of needles over water. All that water rushing to nowhere. Across the river is an immense rail-yard. The train station.

The train goes very slowly over the bridge. So slow that you feel safe rising to your feet. You stand atop the train and you look out at the great city. It seems poised to swallow, a great predator coiled in wait. You take slow steps against the train's momentum, creeping back along the top of the snaking thing. And now you see how long the train is. The rearmost car is so distant. How _many_ there are! What is in all of those cars? More coffins? More prisoners?

You come to the end of the car and you step across. No more difficult than stepping over a puddle on the sidewalk. You walk further and you wonder if they can hear you below, if their faces are turned up, maybe gazing into those strange dark vents and wondering what it is that lives there.

You look at the river below. It is so far down, so deep. You know that you should jump. That water is freedom. It would wrap its cold arms around you and it would bear you safely on, away from the train, away from the city, away even from the war.

But you cannot jump. It is so far down. You feel dizzy just looking. You kneel and put your face against the skin of the train, eyes shut. Your thoughts swim in that water. You want to vomit but there is nothing in your stomach. You vomit anyway, bitter drool spilling from your lips. You cling to the train and you shiver. The stench of your fear is overwhelming.

The train crosses over the river, crosses into the city, crosses into the rail-yard. There are so many trains there, like bloodhounds with their noses pressed to the silver thread of interlaced rails.

You crawl onto the next train car. The cargo car. You peer over the edge. The train is going very slowly now, coming to a stop. The door opens easily. You dangle down and drop into the car. The coffins are all around you. They were poorly secured; several of them have fallen and broken. The bodies are sprawled out with their arms twisted, stinking warm.

You stand there and you look upon the faces of the dead.

They are not soldiers in the coffins, none of them are soldiers. They look like you. They look like your family, your aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and your brother. They are not soldiers.

You run out of the train car, forgetting that the train is moving, even slowly as it is. You fall hard against the tracks and you roll, you tumble. When you stand you find that your face and hands and knees have been scraped and cut. You touch the little wounds with trembling fingers. You are off the train. You feel as though something has been cut, an invisible cord now severed.

The train rolls away down the tracks.

The rail-yard is dark. A low fog is moving in, woven with the smog of the city, of smoke from so many trains pulled this way and that on the serpentine web.

You make your way towards the immense station.

* * *

He saw the little girl come up from the tracks, her face so dark with filth that she almost looked like one of them. Her clothing was torn and she had a far off look in her eyes. It reminded him of soldier's eyes, which have seen bodies riddled with bullets or torn by mines or mangled in wire, somehow still alive and unable to believe it. He saw that same look in her face.

He saw it in his own face, in his reflection. The war had put it there. No going back. He couldn't go home now. The bombs fell, and it was as though none of it had ever been. His wife, his child, his home. Torn from the world in a single flash of light. As though they had never been. He could not remember ever having lived there. No specific memories; they had all gone up in the fire. He was not that person anymore. He was some new thing, not fully human. The person he had been was like a childhood friend, half-forgotten. He thought of his former self in that wistful, melancholy way that people thought of old pets long dead. The beloved thing, now buried.

The girl was tripping over her own feet in an effort to absorb the immensity of the train station. All that dazzling chaos. He remembered what it had been like for him when he'd first seen it. How amazed he had been, and how proud. This is what I'm fighting for, he told himself. That _we_ could make something like this, so vast and beautiful, this is why _we_ deserve to win. Electric light like crystal blazing brighter than the sun. The ornate tile floor, colored rock formed in dizzying patterns as complex as chaos. The gleaming brass, brass everywhere: the handrails at the edge of the platforms to keep back surging crowds, the hammered plates at the ticket booths upon which were inscribed unchangeable cost of fare, the ornate clock-face like some gargantuan monument to time itself.

All had changed. The rails scuffed and worn by the touch of a hundred thousand filthy refugee hands. The ticket booth plates covered over so that inflated wartime prices could be scrawled on, over and over again rising higher and higher. The clock quiet and broken, its repair a priority to no one. The minute hand still turning resolutely while the hour remains forever unchanged. Six o'clock. The arrow pointing always down as if in protest. He spoke to the clock sometimes. Argued sometimes. Pleaded sometimes, sometimes begged. Most times he just told it to go fuck itself.

And then there were the trains. So _many_ trains! God, he hadn't known there were so many trains in the whole world. Where did they all come from?

The girl was wandering in his direction. She tugged at her tattered sleeves, chewed on her lips with such naked hunger that it would not have surprised him if she were to bite right through the flesh.

And then, as if she could feel his gaze, she turned to look at him.

She flinched when she saw him, but only for a moment. She was not disgusted, not like the others. She did not shy away or cry out in fear. She simply looked at him.

He didn't quite know how to respond. He kept looking, waiting for her to cringe, but she did not. She came towards him. She came almost close enough that he could have reached out and touched her if he had wanted, and then she came another step closer and she sat down in front of him. Nobody came that close anymore, not the other veterans, not the doctors, not the charity workers. Nobody had come as close as the little girl.

"Do you have any food?" she asked.

He almost laughed. "Do I look like I have food, girl?"

She shook her head, rubbed her nose on the back of her hand. Was she crying? No, he didn't think she was.

"You hungry?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Course you are. Everybody is these days."

"Do you know where I can get food?" she asked.

"You got money?"

She shook her head.

"Ration card?"

Another no.

"Guess I don't, then. Nothing free here, girl."

"Oh."

He studied the little girl. She seemed very stern. Her brow was furrowed and her fingers clenched. She worked at them absently, massaging life back to the digits.

"Where you come from, girl?"

"Train," she said.

Laconic little thing. He was starting to like her. "Musta been a hell of a trip. Look like you been riding in the smokestack."

She shrugged, and then said, rather defiantly: "So do you."

He laughed. "Guess I do."

"Where do you live?" she asked.

"This spot here. You in my home right now."

She seemed surprised. "Here?"

"Yeah."

"Why do you live here?"

"Why _not_? Nobody charge me rent, nobody ask me to work. Sometimes I find a crust or a coin or something. Sometimes useful things."

"Like what?"

He shrugged. "Train station kinda things."

"Don't you have a house?"

"Not anymore."

"What happened? Did it get bombed?"

He nodded.

"I'm sorry."

"You ever been in a bombing, girl?"

"No. I knew a girl at school who was. Her parents made her lie down under a table in the basement until it was over. She said it shook the pictures right down off the walls."

He snorted. "Hid under a table? If that's gonna do you any good then you aren't in much real danger, now are you?"

"I guess not."

"Damn right you're not."

She nodded, seeming to accept this.

"It's this war, it..." he said, and didn't know how to finish. He _couldn't_ finish, there were no words for it. He didn't think that a girl, even a filthy spunky thing like her, could possibly have any idea of what it had been like out there. Nobody could who hadn't been there for themselves.

He was still out there in that field, that _fucking_ field. He could not leave it. They told him it was a miracle he was still alive, a miracle they'd found him in time. Bullshit. It would have been a miracle if they'd found him _before_ the fire had burned itself out.

He'd grown up near that field. How he'd loved it then! How strange when war brought you home, and all the landmarks of your childhood are transformed. The mounds where you once played king of the hill now bled over for the same game. The woods you'd climbed in hacked down to set up an artillery emplacement. A few hours after the army arrived, he no longer recognized the field. Torn earth. Swaths of barbed wire. Fire burning everywhere. Memory washed away in blood.

The shell took both his legs and one arm at the point of impact, ripped them away before he even knew what was happening. He remembered the heat of it, the way it seemed as though the earth was heaving beneath him, spitting fire like vomit. He remembered being thrown back. The great crater opening like a mouth to drag him down, an angry earth broiling with flame. He remembered the fire crawling up his body as he'd tried to climb out, clawing with one hand and not understanding why his other arm wasn't working properly, why his legs were not functioning. Dazed by the blast, he thought, and the fire burning across the cobalt blue of his uniform. He felt so weak that he could not even turn his head when the fire reached his hair. He had felt it burning, eating the flesh. So hungry. And he had not the strength to scream. It took a lifetime of effort just to turn over and smother the flame in the hot dirt. He'd felt his skin melt off the bone, sifting liquid beneath his uniform. An oily rain came sometime later and filled the crater. He'd rejoiced at that in some dim part of his consciousness. He had felt a kind of peace. _I will drown now_ , he remembered thinking as the water started to lap at his mouth. But the rain stopped. He remained in that crater, water thick as mud up to his neck until morning. They found him writhing deathlike in the muck while the sunrise bled across the sky. They were cheering, celebrating. _We won_ , they crowed at him, _the bastards are retreating_! They dragged him out and they were still cheering, still smiling. There had been men beneath him, clutching blindly in the fire, in the water, clinging to him in the hope that he might pull them out. He had felt them die in the long night.

The doctors did what they could. Nobody expected him to live very long, but no matter how he pleaded they would not kill him. When the time came to release him from the hospital they had put him on a train. They left him at the station for his family to collect.

That was the day after the bomb fell on his house. Nobody came. And he fell into the paper void, abandoned between two files. Outside the system.

He had crawled, pulling himself arduously across the floor of the train station with his one good hand. That was as far as he could make it, and it was where he'd stayed. People gave him food sometimes. He tried to get rid of it but he could not stop himself from eating. He tried to starve, but whenever the hunger grew too great he dragged himself to the garbage outside the station cafeteria and dug through the raw trash until he'd found enough to go on living. His body would not allow him to die. No matter how strong he thought his will the will of the meat was always stronger. He cursed the charity which allowed him to go on existing.

He had been here in the train station for... eight weeks perhaps? God, it felt more like eight years. If only the fucking clock worked, he could have measured his time somehow, something beyond the rise and fall of the sun. How he hated that foul sun! In darkness he could curl up and imagine that he was dead. Sunlight allowed no such escape. Sunlight _showed_.

How much longer would he have to wait? An infection would take him someday, spoiled food turned to poison. A scrape or cut festering? An old wound broken open? Or perhaps some of the local boys who came to the train-yard to throw rocks at the cripples would finally grow bold enough to fetch a bigger stone and bash his skull in. How ironic that would be, that the source of his worst torment would be the means of his deliverance!

The little girl was watching him with a strange look on her face. He felt a surge of annoyance. "What's your name, girl?"

She didn't answer right away. She licked her lips and seemed to think. Thought too long. "Sally," she said. A lie, of course. He almost laughed. Did she really think he cared what her fucking name was? She must be a runaway. A war-orphan probably. Never mind, what did he care?

"Sally." He smiled. It was not a pleasant sight; he knew that. Half of the face burnt away. The eye socket an empty hole, mouth running down like a streak of paint disrupted when the artist is shoved aside mid-stroke. "That's a nice name."

She sat and the two of them talked for a while.

A woman spat on him. The little girl cowered. A bored boy tossed a despondent rock in his direction. The little girl flinched. An old man dropped a crust of bread. The little girl scrabbled out across the tile floor for it and brought it back clutched in her hands like a prize. She looked down at the bread crust. There wasn't much there to speak of. She held it out to him.

That touched him a little. She'd come from a good family, been raised right, that was obvious. Far more obvious was that she had never known real hunger. Nobody who had ever starved _gave away_ bread. He took it and he thanked her.

He hated himself. _Let the girl eat the bread. You should die. She should live. Let the girl eat this bread_. He ate every crumb and licked his fingertips.

Maybe tonight he would do it. Maybe tonight was the night he would pull himself across the station floor and fall down onto the railroad tracks. Maybe tonight he would await the coming of the train. He was afraid, though, terribly afraid. Not of dying, no; he was afraid, rather, that he might not die, that he could be further reduced and yet struggle on. He couldn't take that chance. He couldn't bear the thought of living in greater pain than that which he now endured. Death was like every other fickle whore, happy enough fucking everybody else and turning her nose up when his turn came. Didn't he deserve this?

He asked the girl where she had come from. He asked her why she had come to the train station. He asked her if she knew where she was going next. He asked her when she was leaving. She did not answer any of his questions.

A pair of soldiers come down the long stairs. Not just any soldiers; their dark red coats reminded him of the overripe cherries he'd picked in the woods as a boy. Their black gloves and their black boots gleamed. She stiffened when she saw them.

So he'd been right. She was on the run. Paranoid too, if she thought these would bother with a runaway orphan. Never mind, let her think she was important.

When she scrambled up to leave, he offered her a final piece of advice. "Remember one thing, Sally. Whatever you do, don't ever trust a –. Keep that in mind, you'll be alright."

She gave him the strangest look before she ran. She did not look back at him. He sank back into the darkness.

Maybe tonight would be the night.

* * *

You are running from the red soldiers.

The train station is enormous. It engulfs you. It is a mouth and the soldiers are its teeth. You do not know which way to turn, you simply run, careless of direction. You lose yourself in the crowd. People press in all around you. You cannot see anything but the great clock and the scattered lights in the ceiling. The sun is high outside. Six o'clock. The clock must be wrong? Nobody sees you. Everything seems turned inside out and upside down.

Trains arrive and depart in a rush of activity which seems never to end. People get on, people get off. Their faces are blurred and indistinct and all look vaguely the same. It is as though they are playing some complex game, the same people boarding and disembarking in a ceaseless loop. You want to vomit. You want to lie down and shut your eyes. You want to die. You want to sleep.

You cannot sleep. You must run. You run until your throat burns and your lungs ache but you cannot find your way out of the train station. Every hall seems to lead back around to the main platform and every staircase eventually returns to the same level. The crush of people is unending and unbearable. If you could be free of them, if you could only for a moment think absent the overwhelming roar of the crowd, you know you would find your way out easily. You feel as though escape is just beyond your grasp, slippery and indistinct, but nonetheless _right there_.

And then you see the door.

Old wood bound by black iron hasps, dark and pitted. It looks as though it has been clawed at by bloody fingers. The handle is heavy brass. You step closer.

You touch the knob. Cast one last look back over your shoulder. There is a long silver train pulling up to the platform, like a knife sliding into a wound. A solider in a red coat is pointing at you, his cries lost in the clamor of the station. And now he is coming for you. He draws his pistol from its glossy black holster.

The door is very heavy, a brush of cold comes up from the darkness beyond when you open it. There is a hideous clanging sound echoing from down that lightless passage, its source alien and obscene.

You plunge into the blackness, down a long stair. The stone steps lead ever downward in a slow coil. You touch one hand lightly against the wall as you run. The heavy wooden door swings shut on its own weight behind you, and all the glittering light of the train station disappears. They are coming for you. They are right behind that door.

As your eyes adjust to the gloom you become aware of a dull orange light at the foot of the stair, the kind of radiant illumination which spills from huge fire-hungry machines. Every step down is a torment of fear, of anticipation. You cannot go back.

The concrete wall is slick with a grimy liquid, something between mold and engine oil. The air is heavy and humid; it clings in your throat.

You come to the foot of the stair and look out into a vast underground chamber. The enormity of it makes you dizzy. Fires burn in the gloom like the twinkling of wind-blown stars. There are so many. Around the fires crouch ragged shapes with crooked backs and crippled hands that flutter out from beneath dirty rags to caress the flames, to pull fistfuls of warmth close. Some turn to look at you up there on the stair. Their eyes are freakishly wide and cold beneath their ragged cowls. They make no sound.

Enormous machines glisten wetly in the subterranean ghetto, great turning gears wheeling in the darkness, slick oiled joints clicking like teeth. Men and women scramble naked over the machines like fat pale spiders. Great pipes run along the ceiling. Steam hisses.

You tell yourself that this is not real. This is an illusion, a trick of the mind. You have not slept – not properly slept – for many days. You are delirious with hunger. You wonder what this place really is beyond the caul of the dream which birthed it. It must be something, it will become familiar soon. Your mind will regain itself. You will see a mechanical room with a great furnace, or perhaps an abandoned storeroom taken over by displaced refugees.

It does not happen.

The door at the distant head of the stair crashes open. You can hear feet pounding on the steps.

Water is lapping at the foot of the stair, dirty black and so thick with grime that it seems more solid than water, as though the floor itself is warped and swaying, rippling like tar and oil. You step down into it. The liquid seeps through your soft brown shoes, through your torn stockings, into the porous white cloth of your skirt. You wade out. It is not so deep. Up to your shins.

There is a light on the other side of the cavern. A rusted iron ladder leading out of the gloom. Across the water, past the fires that burn on the raised islands of warped cobble floor. You move through the water. The splashes of your footfalls echo. You feel like you have been swallowed, like you are down in the stomach of a great beast. You are a microbe, a morsel. Less than human and slowly being digested.

The men in red are at the foot of the stair. Their black gloves wrap around the rail tight enough to make the leather creak and sing. A pistol is drawn, a single shot fired into the dark. The water leaps beside you. Round yellow eyes turn in alarm, and a shrill moan is drawn from the collective throats of the under-dwellers. You stop dead still in your tracks.

A curse from the man on the stair fills the silence of the cavern. You are well away from the lights of the fires, invisible in the blackness. You turn your neck, straining to see. There are more of them now, four or five on the steps. You cannot see their faces.

You begin to move, to creep through the mire with measured and silent steps. You can hear them coming down off the stair. Starting into the water. Their tall black boots squelch in the muck as they fan out to search through the dark. You crawl on between the fires, between the machines, on towards the distant ladder.

You pass between two great devices, iron machines hissing and pounding and grinding. Naked gears crush together like teeth, eager to mangle a wrist or foot. There are three emaciated women sitting atop the machine, pale limbs hanging loose as though stitched on. Their bare bodies unearthly pale and glowing. One of them leans down towards you. She sniffs. She hisses. Her mouth opens and her teeth are sharp and yellow. You walk on, and they do not follow.

You are nearly at the ladder when another shot rings out, and you hear the heavy splash of a body hitting the water. You look back and you see a pale form face-down in the murk. The solider cocks back the hammer of his pistol, mouth twisted with disgust. The fire sputters at his feet. He kicks the life from it, scattering ashes. Sparks hiss on the water. Ash turns his shiny black boots white. You look, your eyes bleary and strained. You cannot believe it: you know his face. The hooked nose, the cruel eyes. It is the man from the school. The Captain.

He is looking right at you.

You stand frozen beside the machine. He raises his pistol and the sound of the turning gears beside you makes it seem as though he is a mechanical being, steam-operated or coursing with electric current. Not human. He is going to kill you.

There is something foul hurled through the under-dark. A handful of flung muck spatters across his blood red uniform. He curses and turns his aim away from you, shooting again into the cluster of pale bodies. A shriek. A rattling of anger like the shaking of old bones, and the masses rise from their fires. The dead have been roused. They are surging towards the island. The Captain shoots again and another body hits the water.

You run. A metallic din fills the ghetto, like the scraping of metal against metal. The earth shakes. A train is passing overhead. You struggle through the swampy darkness. One of the men in red screams. Pale bodies are crawling over him like great insects, tearing at his limbs, sinking their rotted teeth into his flesh. Muzzle flash and fire.

The floor gives out beneath you and you slip neck deep into semi-liquid. One gasp before your head slips under. It smells foul, a wound gone septic, as thick as molasses and dribbling from the ceiling. The ladder is not far. The surface of the water burbles. The machines grind. You begin to swim, struggling to keep your mouth above water so that you can breathe.

The gunfire stops as you grasp the bottom rung. Are the red soldiers all dead? How many pale bodies sinking into the mire? You pull yourself up. You want to cling to the ladder and shiver. You cannot stop. You crawl up to the next rung and then the next, and then your feet are on the lowest rung and you are moving upwards.

You find a heavy iron trapdoor at the top of the ladder. Your heart sinks. It will be locked. You reach up and push against it. It gives. It isn't locked; you push harder. It opens. The earth shakes.

A spark of gunfire cracks against the rung just beneath you. The soldiers are following you toward the ladder. One stands waist deep in the mire with his pistol trained on you. You shove open the door and pull yourself up.

The sunlight explodes upon you, so bright it stings your eyes. You stagger out with your hands over your face. The ground is rough and broken beneath you. Gravel, you think. You lost both your shoes in the clinging muck. Your foot catches on a high metal rail and you stumble. There is a roaring in your ears.

You force your eyes open against the light. You are in the train-yard. The great silver train has left the platform and is coming right at you, gleaming in the sunlight.

You scramble away; the soft soles of your feet are cut at by sharp rock. The train roars past you, shimmering like a mirage as it builds up speed. The first of the guards is crawling up through the door, you can see his black-gloved hands wrapping around the edge of the trapdoor. There is nowhere to hide. You run after the groaning train and throw yourself after to catch the guard-rail as it passes. The force of it almost yanks your arm off, but you manage to pull yourself up onto the rear platform and collapse there in a heap. The great station shrinks in the distance. The soldiers emerge from the dark, their uniforms filthy. One of them raises his gun and squeezes the trigger. The ricochet clangs against the skin of the train like the striking of a bell.

You snatch at the door behind you. The wind rushes around you, groaning hideously and tearing at your clothes. The door swings open and you fall inside, kicking it shut after, panting and weeping.

There is a stillness inside the train. You can hardly feel it moving.

You rise, shaking and holding the wall for support. The floor is carpeted, swirling patterns inscribed with gold thread. Crystal light fixtures shimmer on the walls. Gold plated knobs on the hardwood doors. Paintings on the walls, pristine countrysides, pastoral images rendered in soft watercolor and blurred oils. The frames and latches of the windows are bound in silver.

Black footprints follow you down the hall, sinking into the lush carpeting. You rub your skin, trying to get clean but only feeling more and more dirty. The opulence of the train car is suffocating, crushing in on you. You look at it and feel dirty, feel _less_.

You go back and press your face against the door at the rear of the train. Through the round window you can see the rail-yard disappearing in the distance. You are passing into the city, the glittering war-torn city. The destitute and the maimed and the starving of the world stare after the train – after you – as the great gleaming thing shivers down the rail, gentle as silk drawn along a length of wound cord. They seem unreal seen through the window, less than possible. You decide that they do not exist.

The world must be beautiful and fine, you think, and nothing in it coarse. You would like to remain in this train car forever, cut off from anything ugly. There is only this.

You think back to the fever dream of the basements – and you realize now that it _must_ have been a dream – and you know that such things cannot exist. Not in this silver world.

You trudge down the hallway. The foul marks on the immaculate carpet behind you grow fainter with each step. You are becoming pure, leaving the filth in your past. There is a man at the end of the passage. He is ancient and beautiful. His white whiskers are neatly trimmed and his coat buttons gleaming, looking as though they are polished three times a day at least. He wears soft white gloves and his uniform is stately gray. His cap fits snugly on his white-crowned head. His cheeks are ruddy and warm and his mouth looks quick to smile. His shoes shine and his eyes twinkle beneath brushy gray brows.

In a moment he will turn his head and he will see you. He will come quickly down the hall and you will stand there frozen in your muddy tracks and he will ask sternly after your ticket, and when you have none he will eject you from the train. He will give you to the men in the red coats. In a moment, he will see you.

The train stops, suddenly and violently. A protracted lurching that sends you tumbling to the floor.

You reach blindly for the first door within reach and you twist the handle. It is not locked, the gold-plated knob turns in your hand and you enter the compartment.

There is a man in a silk bathrobe with a pipe clutched in the corner of his mouth, smoke spilling from beneath his waxed mustache. There is a woman wrapped in fur, her face covered in blood. She is holding her nose and sobbing and the blood is dribbling all over the white ermine fur wrapped about her neck. She is hunched on the floor with one hand reaching up towards the seat, as though she is trying to pull herself up. Two small children, a boy and girl, are standing on their seats and screaming. There are sticky sweets in their hands, chocolate smeared around their panicked mouths.

The man looks at you. "For god's sake!" he bellows, "Can't you see she's been injured?" Then he blinks, realizing that you are not the porter, not an attendant, and he frowns, shakes his head. Turns away.

The girl is staring at you, her cries choked in her throat. She cocks her head, and her eyes widen with fear. "Oh Daddy!" she says, all in a panic, "Where did she come from! She's one of _them_ , isn't she!"

The boy snarls, fierce through his tears. "Get out! Get out you!" His chubby face is red and wet. He seems squeezed into his clothing.

The woman looks at you, her eyes fluttering. The blood pours down her face. She sees you and she shudders, clutching to her husband.

You back away, overwhelmed by the force of their fear and anger, their hate. Why do they hate you? What have you done? You trip on the doorframe and fall into the hallway. The children are shouting at you, calling you names, their faces screwed up like those of snarling dogs.

And then there are hands, unseen hands, grabbing at you from behind, dragging you, clawing you, pulling you back. You twist and writhe and squirm. You see a black gloved hand swinging down and a swath of dark red cloth and then nothing.

They have you.

* * *

You are aware of your eyes. Opening and closing. Opening and closing. Closed. You are aware of your eyes.

Hands on your shoulders, rough hands digging into your flesh, forcing you upright. A hand striking your face, slap across the cheek. A hand grasping your chin and jaw. A voice: "Look at me, girl. Look at me now."

You are back in the rail-yard. The black train – the familiar train, the miserable repulsive so-familiar train – is there on the track, smoke billowing from its stacks. The sun is high. The ornate silver train is gone. You wonder if all that was nothing more than a dream, an image lodged in your mind and spat out into the world. Did any of it happen? Are you still sleeping?

Your clothing is gone; it has been replaced with an ill-fitting drab brown outfit. The collar is too tight and the waist too loose. You can feel fleas biting at your skin, parasites crawling all over you. The clothing smells faintly of death, distant now but once very close. You think that you have been given the clothing of a dead girl. The clothes which she wore when she died, you think. You want to tear them off.

You look up.

Harsh eyes, cool blue. Sharp bones beneath the skin, high cheekbones and hooked nose. He holds you so tight in his grip. It is the same man, the man who questioned you at the boarding school, the man who took you away and put you on the train, who chased you through the darkness beneath the station. The Captain. There is no warmth in his blue eyes – as blue, you think, as ice.

"Can you hear me, girl?" his fingers pinch at your skin.

You nod your head.

"You've been very naughty, haven't you? Well, never mind that. It's in your nature, I understand. Never mind past transgressions. All that matters is what happens now. I am Captain Brighton. Tell me your name."

You are not sure which name to use. Your own name? Ahlem? Sally? What name will best serve you now?

Captain Brighton takes your indecision for silence, and he nods. "You have no name anymore. You do not deserve one. No more than a dog, any of the lower species. There are those who would name you. They do not understand, I think, the power of the thing, the responsibility. I am Jack. Jack Brighton. Now we are going back aboard the train. Do you understand?"

You nod, because you do not know what else to do. His grip on you is so tight that you can hardly move. He stands up. He seems satisfied. There are more soldiers in red standing all around you, a half a dozen of them at least. They are at ease in the smoggy rail-yard. They recline, their guns held ready and their postures relaxed. Trains pull and puff across the way, whistles shrieking. There are more soldiers on the little platform further along the track where the great loading arm stands ready and poised. They stand there looking over the edge of the platform. There is a swarm of dogs just out of sight below them, nothing but snapping jaws and thrashing tails.

"Look there," Captain Brighton orders. He points to the great arm. "Do you see that? There at the end of the scaffold?"

A formless silhouette against the sky. A heavy teardrop swaying like rotten fruit about to break free and fall heavy and sweet and bursting to the earth.

"Rudolph Harris. Collaboration with an enemy of the state. Death by hanging. The woman did not deserve to die alongside a soldier, even one such as him."

A horrible knotting in your stomach. A sick fear.

The dogs are convulsing madly. Their savoring jaws gleam red and flickering white. They tear. They devour. You scan the sky for another swaying body and do not find one.

The hook-nosed man puts his hand on your shoulder. The way your father used to hold your shoulder to keep you from getting separated in a crowd, to keep from ever losing you. Now this man is doing the same. He holds you as though he owns you. You want to kill him. You feel as though he is mocking your father.

You wonder if things can ever go back to the way they were. Surely it is not possible to break a thing so far that it cannot be fixed?

The Captain turns his bloodless smile on you. "Come with me," he says. "We must get aboard."

"Where are you taking us?" you ask.

He ignores you. Pushes you towards the train. Rather than wait for you to climb aboard he lifts you and places you on the train. His strong hands clasping you beneath the arms. Again you are reminded of your father and you feel sick. When you find your father at the end of the line will you still love him? Will he love you? Can he feel this betrayal where he is? _It's not my fault, Papa! Where are you, Papa?_

The coal-black train. The strange pipes running along the ceiling. The empty vents like mouths. There are bars on the windows now, hastily and crudely welded there. Familiar faces: The two old men. The poet. Jamil with the broken teeth. The man with the heavy beard. The old man Tamir. And many new faces. You are sure they are new faces. Yes, they must be, previously empty seats are now filled. There is hardly any room left on the train. Everybody is looking at you. There are still no other children among them. Where are all the children?

Tamir looks at you and his composure breaks. His face sinks down into his hands and he weeps. You want to ask him why he is crying, but you already know why. Asima is nowhere to be seen. You search, desperate, sure that she is simply hiding behind somebody, that her face is turned towards the window. You cannot find her. _The woman did not deserve to die alongside a soldier_. The slavering mouths of the dogs.

Captain Brighton forces you down the aisle, placing you in one of the few remaining seats. You can see more soldiers in red stepping onto the train. They look at you and there is nothing in their faces but that blank hatred.

The train starts to move when they are all aboard, rumbling to life like an immense reptile.

The Captain stands at the head of the car. He is speaking, addressing the passengers of the train car. You find your attention sliding away.

The train moves slowly through the rail-yard, slowly past the hanging body of Rudolph Harris, swaying in a weak breeze. Face turned purple, hands twitching with the last impulses of extinguished life. The dogs beneath the platform are writhing like a nest of rats over their meal. You cannot see what is beneath them. Shreds of cloth, shards of bone, the red meat of torn flesh. You cannot be sure.

Captain Brighton has finished his speech. He meets the eyes of each person in turn, holding them locked in his steel gaze until their will breaks and they cast their gaze to the floor. When he has done this he turns on his heel.

The city groans around you. Soon enough, you leave it behind.

* * *

This city of the future. This city will soon fall to ruin. Smoking towers belch fire to the sky. Cripples limp in the streets with shell-shocked faces and thoughts tattered. Soldiers march to forgotten orders, officers call for reinforcements that will not come, for men who no longer draw breath. Women screaming in the road, children trampled at their feet. All lined up in the shadow of the corpse fires. All is decay. All is destruction. This future bleeding closer every day.

* * *

Everyone is silent around you as the train leaves the city. There is a sense, a feeling in the air that they are all passing from something beyond sight or measurement. They are all leaving behind a part of themselves with nothing to take its place. Knowledge ebbs to uncertainty. They seem resigned to this life.

You sit beside the poet. She tells you that her name is Nazmiya. You do not offer your own name and she does not ask for it. Her shawl is wrapped around her head. You can see the faint pencil marks of her lines written there, the poem wreathed about her skull like a halo.

She sits quietly and looks out at the smoking fields, crops burned to prevent them falling into the enemy's hands. Her head is rocking against the window. Her skull goes tap tap tap on the glass. Her eyes stare, unfocused and distant into the unfurling smoke as it slips past unremarked and unrecognized to dissipate high over the world. Her fingers play at the seat, at the armrest, at the window-frame, at the crude new bars. Her mouth moves, shaping unspoken words. The words of her poem, perhaps, formed but not as yet given breath.

Beyond the city a gray-green world. Trees the color of old iron, foliated fingers bristling with dull leaf. Water moves in slow streams over steely rock. A hard wind blows snow down from the mountaintops to melt away on the burning planes like beads of rain.

Captain Brighton is waiting in the next train car. His men are always here, always watching. They patrol up and down between the rows of seats. Anybody who speaks is violently silenced. Food is given twice a day: when the sun comes up and again when it goes down. It is the same food, but there seems to be less of it and it feels somehow even less filling. Hunger is powerful. After these few days you can already see faces turning gaunt and thin, bones pressing against skin, plump bodies slowly reduced. The body eats itself.

An elderly couple sits across the aisle. They do not speak or move but sit as though dead. You think of the pictures you saw of mummies, ancient emperors entombed; those timeless people so assured of their own godhood, silently judging from beyond death. You have always been afraid of the mummy's curse, of the idea that there are foul spirits in the world eager for blood. Something crawling down your spine.

There are two men sitting ahead of you. A stern man with a thick beard and another, a slim soft-featured man who whistles aimless tunes under his breath whenever the guards are too far away to hear him. They whisper to each other in secret conference. You overhear bits and snatches, but you do not understand. They are talking about roads, forests and hills. They are talking about landmarks and topography and major routs of troop movement. They are talking about supplies which they do not have, about how much food and water they will need. For how many people? I don't know yet. We can't expect to get everybody out. Perhaps if we overpower the guards. How? You lost your chance there, should have done it when there were just two of them. It wasn't the right time, we were too far from the border, we'd never have made it. We're getting further from the border every day. But further from the cities, they won't find us out in the country, not if there are just a few of us. Well then, how do you decide who comes and who stays? I don't know.

They speak in staccato bursts, little flurries of hissing conversation snatched between the turns of the guard's patrol.

You feel their eyes turned back towards you. Like the eyes of the old men before them, glimpsed flashing though the gap in the seats.

They turn back to each other and the slim one speaks. "My God, what about the girl?"

"What about her?"

Far quieter, so quiet it is scarcely spoken. You are sure that he is trying to hide the words from you, but you can see them on the movement of his lips. "She'd never make it."

The bearded man: "She's stronger than she looks. She already got away once. Bad luck it was so near the train station."

"Her? She can't be more than thirteen years old!"

"Something like that."

"How did _she_ get out?"

The bearded man licks his lips. His mouth opens. He does not speak. He makes a small sound. A terrible defeated sound. He shakes his head.

"My God, what-"

"Do not ask!" the bearded man hisses. He sighs. He pulls at his beard. "If only I... and not the old woman. I would have killed them both... If only I had..."

The thin man smiles. "Ah, my friend, you forget: had you run off together then, you would never have met me, and think how impoverished your life would be in my absence."

The bearded man laughs softly.

The thin man twists in his seat. He looks at the poet and he smiles. His white teeth flicker. "And you?" he asks, raising his voice a little, "Will you tell me your name, or am I going to have to guess?"

She blushes. You wonder what's wrong with her; she seems flustered. "Nazmiya," she says, and juts out her chin.

The man laughs. "They call me Raheel. God only knows why."

"What else would they call you?"

He shrugs. "Oh all sorts of things, some of them less than suitable for such young ears." He looks at you. "And what about you, girl, will you tell me your name?"

You shake your head. What's he doing? Does he want you all to die? Is he trying to get you killed? You shrink down in your seat and hope that the guards don't notice you.

Raheel looks at the woman. "Is this your daughter?"

She shakes her head. "I don't know who she is. She won't tell me her name."

Raheel looks back at you. "Why the big secret, girl? Come, I'm Raheel, this is Nazmiya, my somber friend here is Daniyal."

The bearded man turns. "Leave the girl alone, Raheel." He looks at you. "Are you well, child?"

You nod. Why won't they be quiet? "Thank you," you say, hoping that it will satisfy them.

Raheel turns his attention back to the poet. "How'd they catch you then?"

Her brow furrows. "What do you mean?"

"Where did they snatch you from? I went into hiding as soon as I heard what was happening. My cousin was going to smuggle me out of the country in a turnip boat, if you can believe that."

"A turnip boat?"

"Some kind of vegetable, anyway. He's the farmer. I did papers."

"What does that mean? You were a...?"

Daniyal leans close. "He was a forger."

Raheel looks offended. " _Please_ , my friend. You wound me."

Nazmiya's eyebrow arches. "You're a criminal?"

"We're _all_ criminals here on this train, don't you remember?"

"But you're a real criminal."

He gives a chiding click of his teeth and shakes his head. "Who's to say? The people who make the laws say that we are less than they. Do we just accept this? Roll over and die? That's where the rule of law will get you. What I do... I only try and survive. Law is of no use to people like us."

"People like us? Do not think that we are alike." Nazmiya pulls self-consciously at her shawl. "I never did anything wrong. I should not be here."

Raheel laughs, but his laughter is laced with iron. "You think that I deserve this? Where is your humanity, Nazmiya? You think I deserve to be on this train?"

Daniyal cuts in before the poet can reply. "Of course she doesn't. Don't start bickering. We have to work together. We are all of us in the same boat now."

"Would that we were. I'd welcome you all aboard my cousin's turnip boat if I could. We'd sail together out to the ocean, eh?" He laughs.

"What happened?" Nazmiya asks.

"Hm?"

"Why _aren't_ you on your turnip boat?"

"My cousin turned me in."

"You're joking!"

"Unfortunately not. I don't really blame him, though. Poor bastard probably thought they'd reward him if he named names. Too bad mine was the only one he had. They might have actually let him go if he'd had more to give them."

"What did they do with him?"

"They shot him."

"I'm sorry..."

"Not half as sorry as I was when the red soldiers came crawling aboard. If I'd know they were going catch me anyway I never would have hidden in the turnips. I can still smell the damn things."

"And they brought you here?"

He shrugs. "That's the whole story, I'm afraid. Are you coming with us when we leave, or would you prefer to suffer under the law?"

Nazmiya blinks.

He laughs. "Do you really think that we're just going to sit here and wait to die? My friend and I are going to get us off this train, don't you worry. You're much too beautiful to leave behind for the jackals."

She blushes again. "If you say so."

"I do." He crosses his legs. They all fall silent and watch the guard stalk past. The silence in his wake has a miserable force to it, an unbearable weight. As soon as the coast is clear Raheel look again to the poet. "Alright then, I'm waiting."

"For?"

"Your story. How did you come to be here with the rest of the criminals?"

She looks away and does not answer.

The world is blurred outside the window, like it is all melting away before your eyes, turning to nothing and dribbling down the windowpane. Soon there will be nothing left but the train and those aboard. The world is shrinking around you.

"I'll tell you some other time," Nazmiya says.

Raheel grins. "That's a promise to which I will hold you."

The silence returns. There are others speaking, a murmur of frightened voices which sinks into the groaning sound of the train and vanishes beneath, like a swimmer slipping below the surface of a stormy sea, never to be seen again.

A choked cry carries down the length of the car and everyone turns, twisting in their seats with some alarm to spot the source of the noise. Everyone but Daniyal, who remains perfectly still, his quiet dark eyes fixed on the door to the next train car.

The patrol passes, dragging with them a pitiful little man. His sorrowful mouth and nose are bleeding quite horribly and he whimpers softly, eyes rolling in his skull. You do not recognize his face. As he is dragged past he catches sight of the men sitting in front of you and he clutches to their seats, his thick stubby fingers clinging desperately to Raheel's armrest. "Please, please." His sobbing voice is thick in his mouth, his tongue swollen, "Please don't let this happen, please. I'm sorry!" They drag him further on. Raheel looks at the man with curious indifference.

They drag him through the door and into the next train car. You cannot look. You do not want to think about what is back there, what Captain Brighton is doing in that car. That horrible train car. Every time you shut your eyes you can see the face of Private Burton swimming up before you.

Nazmiya leans close to Raheel and she whispers. "Do you know that man?"

Raheel's jovial voice has gone flat and colorless. "He is my cousin."

The poet starts. "You told me that he was dead!"

"I told you that he was shot. And he was. Didn't you see the wound in his leg there? Pity they didn't finish him. We'll never be able to bring him along with us when we go."

Daniyal's eyes have drifted closed. He seems to be sleeping, but you can see that his body is tense and alert. He is coiled tight as a spring, compressed and restrained, ready to burst free at any moment.

You hear a screaming from the next train car down. Raheel's cousin, it seems, is receiving his reward after all.

* * *

The three passengers talked well into the dark. The warrior and the thief and the poet. They counted with slow precision the average time elapsed between patrols. They memorized the faces and habits of the guards. They counted the number of guns onboard the train, the exact disposition of every piece of ordnance. They debated fiercely the probable number of men waiting in the next train car, how many times they would stop for water or coal before arriving at their final destination, how best to confront the guards, which way they should strike out once they had escaped. Daniyal favored insurrection en masse while Raheel argued for a more secretive and methodical approach. Nazmiya sided with neither, but took careful note of all they discussed. She marked it all down with inscrutable tiny marks on the inside of her shawl. Soon enough the skeleton of her poem was crowded out by scratched plotting.

And now the night has fallen, and you are no longer listening to their whispers.

The guards turn off all the lights in the train. Even the low level emergency lights are shut down. You cannot bear the darkness, near total now that the moon has begun to wane and the clouds to thicken in the sky.

Illumination is occasional and fleeting, a parting of the clouds, a reflection of far-off fire. You do not like what you see when the light does come. The guards coming towards you with pale faces and dark hands and gleaming weapons. An old man licking condensation off the dirty window to keep back his thirst. Fear-twisted faces writhing in noiseless agony, like their tongues have been torn out. You cannot bear to see these things, and so you begin to shut your eyes whenever some faint light steals into the train car.

Some hours before morning they haul Raheel's cousin back. He hangs limp in their arms, his body bloated and sickly, his mouth hanging open, no light in his eyes, his limbs weak and useless. He cannot walk and so they must carry him. He is deposited at a slump into the nearest empty seat.

You find yourself unable to look away from the window. It is like a movie screen, the world depicted through nothing but fantasy, a memory too young to fade. None of this exists through that glass. You have been on the train so long. You are beginning to realize that, even when you did slip away in the city, you never really left the train. Not really. It has a such a pull, such a hold on you. You are becoming bound up with the machine, inextricably tangled.

You look through the lightlessness of the train car. You can make out the shapes of the windows where they gaze out into the night. You can see the forms of dozing and restless alike, trembling like shades as the train vibrates.

You lie quietly in the darkness and you wait.

* * *

She holds your hand and she whispers in your ear. The world is alive beneath you, all the cars on the street below and the gleaming of the steel and glass towers like spikes of raw iron. The lights have all gone out. The air raid siren is howling. Just a drill, she promises. No one is coming tonight. The wind shrieks out a banshee call and its whispering fingers tug at your hair.

She wraps her arms around you and she laughs. Don't be afraid.

She points up at the distant sky. You see those?

"I see, mama."

All those stars. More than you could ever count. The night is cold. The city is dark beneath you. You stare up, turning until it makes you dizzy. It is more than you can take in all at once. You wonder for one horrible moment if you are falling from the roof. You wonder if you have fallen and what you see as you spin are candles in every window of the city.

She reaches out and she holds you. She lifts you up and rests your weight on her hip. She kisses your cheek.

"Where did they come from?" you ask.

They were just hiding, hiding from the city lights. And now they are all out. That's why they call it a blackout.

"That's not true!"

She laughs and she kisses you again. My precious child.

"There are so many!"

More than you ever guessed, more than you ever thought there could be. Each one of those is a sun in some other child's sky. Every world is staring up at the night sky and they are all looking at each other across the millions of miles. You see? We are not alone. Whenever you feel lonely you go outside and you look up at the stars. You know that I'm looking there too. We're never so far apart. You are never alone. She kisses you again and you can feel the tears on her face.

The next morning she brings you to the train station and presses the ticket into your small hand, packs you off with your luggage dragged behind. To be safe. You'll be safe there. Be good. Make me proud. I love you. I love you.

* * *

You open your eyes. The train is dark. Were you asleep? Your mouth is dry. Your hands are clammy. You are so thirsty. So hungry. There is water on the windows, thin droplets rolling slowly down. You know that it will not satisfy you. Still... to feel the cool glass on your tongue...

There is more water running down the other side of the glass. Rainwater. The rain tap taps on the roof the car. If only you could drink it, if only you could stand out in it and let it lash your skin. If only you could be clean again.

These new guards do not condescend to escort their passengers to the toilet in the next car. They offer a bucket instead. The old man is forced to empty it when becomes full. The smell of waste is so thick and rank, so permeating. It is like a finger pushed down every throat. Soon the stench of vomit lies thick over that of all other expulsions and excrement. You are like an animal here.

The poet is sleeping beside you. Her breath is gentle and soft. Her shawl is bundled up in her hands.

You rub your eyes. You do not think that you were asleep. You can still feel your mother's touch, her hands. You shut your eyes and you stare at the ceiling. You cannot see the stars. Where am I now, mama? How did I get so lost, mama? What did I ever do wrong? You feel a hard lump in your throat. You bunch up your fists and shove them hard against your eyes, hard enough to make you hurt. And then you see them: all those stars. Shifting and dancing and twinkling on the insides of your eyelids.

The stars clear, and you hear a soft noise beneath the sounds of the rain. A shuffling of movement in the dark. A wet breathing.

Your mind runs from fear to fear. What is coming out of all that dark? You picture a huge rat with beady eyes and sharp teeth and a twisting naked tail.

It is coming closer. Very close now. You can hear the soft feet pressing on the hard carpet, the gaping of the mouth which draws breath like water into a wide throat. You shut your eyes and you look for the stars there. You feel your fingers curling, tightening.

There is something touching you. A fluttering wet flesh that feels across the back of your hand. Your breath stops in your throat. You want to scream. You can feel the shout rising.

Lightning breaks the sky and in that moment, that harsh afterglow which lasts only a moment, you see the face. Wide soft face. Blood-running down face. Wet mouth grimace face. Small eye shinning face. An animal face.

You cannot stop the scream this time, it rips out of you.

A meaty hand sweeps in the darkness, claps across your mouth. You feel your eyes shaking in your skull. You are back in the washroom and he is standing over you. He is pushing into your mouth his fingers, he is pushing into your head his thoughts.

You bite down. You can taste him, his fleshy hand like wet metal. His bones against your teeth, his skin breaking and his wetness filling your throat.

The crawling man shrikes and wrenches away his hand. His cry wakes Raheel and Daniyal and they are on him in a moment, stumbling up from their seats to pin him down to the ground. Raheel shoves a wad of cloth into the man's gaping mouth.

You hear the scuffle, the shoes scraping on the floor, the groaning of the men as they wrestle at each other. The damp thwack of flesh on flesh. Then a spitting out and an unfamiliar voice: "Please, please. Raheel, please!"

The lithe forger sits up with a jolt. "Waa'il?"

"It's me, cousin!" the man hisses. "Help me up, quick before the guards come!"

There is another flare of lightening outside. The two men are rising over the third, pulling him slowly to his feet. His face is chalky white and slick with sweat. His hand bleeds. He glares at you, his small eyes baleful with promises of vengeance.

They tug him out of the aisle and into the seat. You press yourself against the window and you listen with your breath held between your teeth.

"You are not looking so good, cousin."

Watery laugh.

"Your leg looks infected, friend."

"Do I know you?"

"My name is Daniyal."

"But do I know you?"

"You do now, cousin. He is a friend."

"If you say so. Raheel... you must forgive me."

"Must I?"

" _Please_ , cousin, do not mock me! I have suffered for my sin. Forgive me, I was never brave, you know that. You remember? You remember the way I ran from the wasps when your brother's foot fell into the nest? The underground nest? The way they rose like a great dark pillar from inside the earth. I thought a demon was coming out of the world. You remember how I ran? I ran away and you ran towards. You pulled him after you to safety and I was not stung once. But I'm not a bad person for that, am I?"

The poet rests a cool hand on the man's brow. "He's running a fever," she says.

"How many times were you stung, Raheel? A hundred? No matter. I've been stung now. Ha. Been paid for my cowardice. Forgive me, please forgive me!"

"He needs antibiotics, Daniyal," the poet says.

" _Please_ , Raheel!"

"Oh for God's sake, cousin! Fine, I forgive you! You're forgiven! But now what are we to do with you, eh?"

"They'll never give us medicine. No chance."

"Can we take him with us?"

"Keep your voice down, for God's sake!"

"Where are the guards? Strange... is the patrol late?"

"Raheel!"

"We're not ready anyway, we need to talk to more people somehow. Get the word around the train car."

"How much longer can we afford to wait?"

"And anyway, how could we talk to any of them? The guards watch us too closely. We can't just wander about."

"I talked to some before you came aboard, Raheel. Many are willing to fight. Most. Few of them will be useful, but..."

"Cousin Raheel, are you there? Why won't you look at me?"

"Shut up, Waa'il! You're forgiven, what more do you want? Let me talk. Now, the problem is that we still have no way to get the word out. To tell the others to prepare for the insurrection."

"Maybe we could pass notes somehow? You know, like we did in school?"

"I never passed notes in school, Daniyal. I was a good girl, remember?"

"I always rewrote the notes when they were passed by my desk. A forger from the first, I suppose."

"Never mind that! Would it work?"

"Never. We've nothing to write with, and anyway it would be too easy for them to intercept a message."

"What then?"

"Maybe we could use the girl?"

"Oh, Daniyal! You can't think-"

"She's clever and small and quiet. She'd be perfect."

"Sharp teeth, too. God, she gave my cousin a good nip!"

"But will she help?"

"She is one of us, Nazmiya. She wants to get out of here just as much as we do."

"More to the point, she already knows it all. I'd lay good odds that she's listening quite closely to us now."

Four faces peering back over the seats. Raheel gives a little wave. "You hear us talking, girl?"

You nod.

Waa'il clutches at Raheel. " _Cousin_!" he moans.

The forger sighs. "I'm beginning to wish the little girl had eaten you, Waa'il. What _is_ it?"

The soft man clutches his cousin's arm. "The reason I came, Raheel! I must speak with you. In private. I must. They are going to make me do it. I'm not strong like you, cousin, you know I'm not. I can't stand the torture, Raheel, I just can't!"

Daniyal's stern voice: "What do you mean? What torture? What's going to happen?"

Nazmiya is looking down the length of the train car. Her voice an urgent hiss, "They're coming."

A flash of lightning. Panicked eyes rolling in a formless face. A mouth gaping with terror. And down the hall you can hear the click of the guard's boots.

* * *

The rain does not stop. The wind shudders. The storm groans. The clouds glow with eerie fury and light falls in shocked forks down its storm-head stair.

The rage of the storm is a comfort to you. The turbulence gives shape to infinity. How long have you been riding on this train? How many years? You wish that you could sleep.

The patrols come by more often now, taking people at random and dragging them into the next car for questioning. Sometimes you think that you hear the sound of voices crying out, buried in the screech of the iron wheels on the track.

The guards shine ferocious lights on their way, shine them in sleeping faces and waking alike. Pupils dilate and hands are raised to block the harsh stare of the bulb. One guard's flashlight is dying. Every time his patrol passes the beam is grown a little weaker, the white heat light dimming to a dull orange glow. You wait, idly curious, wondering if you will see it die.

There is something beautiful about the rain. You watch it stream across the smooth surface of the windows in sideways patterns drawn there like lines on sand. Washed away by the tide as it comes in again and again and again to recreate the world smooth as glass. Glass and sand. A girl at school told you that glass and sand were the same thing, the same stuff in a new form. Like steam and water. She did not know how to explain it and you did not know how to believe her, yet the statement felt somehow right and true. Glass and sand.

The air is cold. You feel your fingertips crackling with a sticky electricity. What will happen if lightning strikes the train? Will it dissipate, be deflected somehow? Maybe it will run hungry along the walls and the frames of the seats and the bright metal buckles and the cold black iron vents in the ceiling. Everyone's hair will stand up for a moment. And then the scent of burning meat.

You saw somebody die of electric shock once. Or maybe you only dreamed it, you cannot remember. Teeth glowing in the mouth, sparking as the tongue cooked and the eyeballs turned soft in their sockets. Maybe it was only a dream. Even as an infant, you had terrible dreams. You remember them, the first sparkings of the conscious. You remember the dreams of the womb.

Night folds over the train. The rain is still falling.

* * *

The poet opens her arms to you and you sink into them. She smells clean, even after so many days in the stinking train. It is as though the scent comes from within her, as though her natural odor were not the human stink but rather a smell as clean and clear as sea air. Maybe she is a ghost, a spirit of water and light. You drink her in.

She cradles you. Like a doll. Her fingers running through your hair. Like nylon strands, like plastic web. Her thumb brushing your cheek. Like porcelain painted flesh and a blur of soft red blush.

Your eyes closing, open like a snake's and looking out narrow and bright and alert. A snake curled in the empty body of the doll. They do not know you, how sharp your teeth and clever your tongue and keen your eyes. How tight your grip when you coil. You are raw and natural and inevitable as a hurricane falling. You cannot be stopped. They do not know you yet.

The poet's body is so soft and so warm and so close. You feel the swell of her breast against your cheek, the warm throb of her heart in your ear. The rise and fall of her chest, her belly, her shoulders. She breathes and you breathe with her.

You ask her, "Will you tell me something?"

"What?"

"I don't care. Anything."

"Should I tell you a story?"

"Not a story. Tell me something about you. A story about you. A true one. About when you were my age."

"How old are you?"

"Little."

"Ah. A story about me when I was a little girl."

You nod.

"What about when I was fourteen? Is that too old?"

You shake your head. "That's alright."

She licks her lips.

She asks, "Have you ever seen the ocean?"

You have not. You dreamed of the ocean when you were younger. You think of all the books that you have read with a sea lapping at their edges, their narrative coasts sparkling like the diamonds clustered in a jewelry store display case. All the picture postcards and grainy black and white photos of a frozen gray expanse that seems to go on forever. The cresting of the waves suspended like a hammer about to fall, about to crash anonymously back into the sum of the water.

This is the vastness of the sea, alien and cold and welcoming. That great water stretching out forever. Cool green and blue. You saw it in a picture show once. Once. Only a few weeks ago. How long it seems now. The man and the woman standing together on the sand. The man in a crisp cream-colored suit with a black tie and a hat with a black band. He wore black shoes that left footprints in the scorched sand. And she in a soft blue dress turned gray by film, gray as the squalling ocean. You stared up at the screen and you forgot about them and their story, forgot that you were watching a show. You gazed upon the sea, the endless sea beyond which does not still itself but moves, always moves. Ceaselessly renewing, ceaselessly erasing. The glass and the sand. Those footprints of theirs – the man's and the woman's – disappearing behind them as they walked. Everything we are eventually fades.

It was in that picture house that you first understood the meaning of death. All those footprints would be washed away. Somebody else will always come after, follow unknown in a path trod a thousand times over, a hidden path. And in that moment you did not fear death. You began to cry, but they were not sad tears. Your schoolmates hovered nervously about, all done up in worry. Why are you crying? But there was a smile beneath your tears and you shook your head and did not answer them. You shook off your tears and when you were walking back down the long road to the school you thought that you could almost feel the weight of a generation's footfalls on that same street. There is always the promise of future travelers.

The poet speaks: "I lived on the shores of the sea once. When I was a little girl. My father's house was there. I hated him. He'd left my mother and me when I was very small. I hated to see him, but I loved the sea. All my memories of those summers with father seem so beautiful and sweet now, but I think I probably hated it there most of the time.

"Every morning I woke before he had roused himself and I went walking along the beach. Maybe just to get away from him. There was one morning; it was very early, I remember that. Earlier than usual. The sun was just coming up across the sea and the light was golden red, a color that makes you remember the sun is made of fire. And that fire was on the water. It looked like you could walk right out on it like it was melted gold.

"I found somebody on the beach. A boy. I thought at first that he was dead. He was lying face down in the sand. His clothes were so wet. And his hair. He seemed half water to me, like a person made of water. He was face down, and the waves were pulling him back out to sea, one wave at a time like they were caressing him, coaxing him in. His feet were bare; they floated when the waves came in.

"I pulled him up onto the sand and turned him over on his back. He had the most beautiful black hair, long and black and soft. I brushed it off his face and held it in my hands. It was so thick and wet and dark, like strands of night sky. I touched his cheek and he was so _cold_. I was sure that he was dead and I think I probably cried over him. He felt like he had been in the water for a long time, years even. Born there and washed up on the edge of the human world for me to find.

"His skin was pale from the cold and his lips were purple. I could see every vein in his body, all running down to the heart. I hit his chest like I'd seen the doctor do once. I don't know if it was because of that, or just getting him out of the water, but he sat right up and he started coughing up buckets of water.

"He looked about sixteen – a few years older than me. I wasn't scared. He was so beautiful, and he seemed so fragile, I couldn't be afraid. I took his hand and he looked at me and he smiled and he said something in a language I didn't know. I just looked back at him.

"He must have thought I was stupid or something, so he spoke again, repeated himself slowly. I told him that I had no idea what he was saying. He didn't understand me at all, just cocked his head, the way a dogs will when they're trying to comprehend. He pointed out at the sea, to the fishing boats drifting on the far edge of the bay. Their white sails like little postcards out there against the sky. They always went out in the dark to catch fish and returned to the harbor by mid-morning with the catch. I guessed that the boy was a fisherman's son and that he'd fallen overboard in the night and been washed ashore. I don't know, because I couldn't ask him.

"We didn't try to talk anymore, not to each other. We spoke and it was like the words were music, without any meaning, just the sounds. I think that's when I first fell in love with poetry, listening to that boy speaking in the foreign language, to the sounds spilling from the tip of his tongue. I didn't care what he was talking about, he could have been trying to teach me how to fish for all I knew. But the sound of it was so wonderful.

"I took his hand in mine. His fingers looked so pale against mine. He stared at me. I don't think he'd ever seen anybody so dark-skinned as me. He seemed fragile, I could see all the veins and flesh underneath. I was afraid for him, that he might burst. I kissed him. On his cheek just here. His skin was still cold from the sea. I felt it all the way down to the sand between my toes and then, before I knew it, he was running off down the beach. I called after him but he didn't come back, only turned and waved and smiled at me.

"I looked for him every single morning on that beach, but I never found him again, never saw him. I used to sit out there on the sand and watch the fishing boats drifting in the wind, feeling the spray of the sea and the rising sun on my face. God, I miss those summers sometimes. My father sold the house eventually. Moved away. We didn't see each other much after that. You know how it can... be."

"What did he do? Your father?"

She looks out the window for a very long time. "He was a poet," she finally says. And then touches your cheek. "What about your father, hm?"

You close your eyes and you pretend that you have fallen asleep.

She makes little cooing sounds and she strokes your hair. She hums. You do not know the song. It is beautiful.

You wonder what it would be like to fall in love. You think back to the boys you have known, ones you noticed in some dim part of yourself, ones whose sight touched something hidden inside you. You watched them, you studied the shapes of their bodies, their lithe black bodies naked to the waist in the summer heat, dappled under the shadow of the trees. Is that what love is like? Is that the start of it? You never _loved_ any of them.

You remember watching the older children, the ones who had started seeing each other. You saw them holding hands, walking aimlessly down quiet paths with nothing in their eyes but each other. You watched them kissing in the back seats of cars, in the rolling fields, in the mouth of the alley.

Will you ever have your turn?

You open your eyes and you see yourself, not from your eyes from outside yourself. You see yourself. Who could ever want _me_? Who will love me?

* * *

The Captain's fingers wrap around each other like knotting flesh. The leather creaks. Blackened cowhide groaning. He grimaces. His teeth are blinding white. His facial hair is shaved clean every morning; he takes great pride in that. In being clean. Still, by the end of the day he's got a bit of bristle about the chin and cheeks. He resists the urge to rub the coarse surface with his gloved palm. He straightens his coat. The wine-red jacket is too thin for this frigid train car. His breath fogs the air before him. He does not shiver, but draws the cold about him like a second skin. His tongue shifts inside his mouth.

The little girl will not speak. Never mind that. She is frightened, and that is all that matters. Fear is everything. Once they are afraid they break easily enough. He has seen it many times. Those people are all the same, all cowards at heart. They will break.

The question is: how to do it? Kill the girl, perhaps, as an example for the others? No, not the girl; that might only inflame them. One of the old ones, maybe? One who already looks to be dying and will be of no use in the camps? The girl would be useful. Healthy child subject. Better not to waste her on this. There are easier ways to break them, he merely needs to find out how much breaking is required.

He does not look at her. Best not to look, he has found. It keeps them on edge. Sometimes they break down and they beg him to just glance in their direction, to please just _speak_ to them. It is amazing what a person can become hungry for when it is deprived them. He licks his lips. The wet surface feels the cold acutely. He feels a coldness down in his chest. Damn this train.

He reaches into his coat and he takes out the cigarette case. Finely inscribed, velvet lined, the cigarettes set inside like cartridges in an ammunition clip. Carefully made, hand-rolled by pale hands. Some said that "they" grew the world's best tobacco, them and not his own people. Bullshit. He'd always preferred the cigars of his countrymen. He took out a single cigarette and he looked at it. Sometimes he did doubt. Could their cigarettes actually be better? Could it be possible? Was he blinded, perhaps, by emotion? Could he be wrong? No. No, he was not wrong. That kind of doubt led to larger doubts. He could not allow it. He _knew_ , he already knew, and there was no point thinking on it further. People could be made to doubt the most obvious and immutable things. He had seen that himself. Lock a man up in a sunless room and tell him every day that the sun is not yellow. Tell him that it green. Tell him every day and eventually he will begin to doubt his memories of the sky.

He must remember not to doubt.

He lights the cigarette and set the match still smoking on the surface of the metal table. The little girl looks at it. Her eyes go wide and her fingers grip the edges of her chair. She watches the smoke winding up to the roof of the train car and her mouth opens and her teeth set.

The Captain tries not to smile. Give the man in the cell just a little rope and he will not try climbing out the window. He will use it to hang himself. Always. Once he is broken. His fear will always come out.

The Captain grinds out the smoldering match-head with his thumb.

He says, "Tell me, child. Who are they?"

She licks her lips.

"Somebody is trying to escape. Somebody wants to kill me. Who is it?"

She shakes her head.

"Give me your hand, child."

She shakes her head.

The smoke is warm down in his chest. He breathes it out his nose. Just like a dragon. Let her be afraid. He waits.

She does not move.

He nods to the guard.

The guard moves very quickly. The guard has been trained for this, the usual impulses hammered out, the humanity reformed. The guard has his sidearm out in a second and pushes it under the little girl's chin. He holds her to the chair, one arm wrapped around her body.

The girl sniffles and whimpers and squirms but she does not cry out. He admires this, to a certain extent, though he knows that he should not. Any animal can be stubborn. They all stop fighting when they're broken. There is nothing to admire in an animal that will not be broken. An animal which will not be tamed must be put down.

He leans back in his chair and enjoys his cigarette. He enjoys the taste of it. "Put out your hand," he says again. "This man will shoot you if you do not. He will blow your head right off, you understand." His smile is polite and inviting and guileless. He has perfected it over the whole course of his life, shaped it. Hours grinning into mirrors, even when he was a boy. He learned young that he could get anything he wanted if he only knew how to look. He was a man and white: there was nothing he could not have.

The girl shifts her right hand off the armrest a fraction. Then shoves out the left.

Right-handed. She is a smart one, knows not to offer her favored hand. She is very afraid. She knows that he is going to hurt her. He feels a kind of relief, a kind of satisfaction. There is very little left to do once they are truly afraid. One must only remember to carry through. Nothing extravagant, just enough to confirm the fear, to help it grow. To stoke the flame. A little effort goes a long way.

He takes out his cigarette and he looks at it for a long while. "Tell me their names," he says, still looking at it and not at her. She is nothing to him, she must know that. She must not think that he is concerned with her. A dog you must stare in the eye to show your dominance. A human is different. A human thinks that it is your friend if you look it in the eye. To control a human you must never look them in the eyes, not until they are broken, not until they will avert their gaze without thought. Until they cannot look back.

She says nothing. He looks at her hand. Trembling. The dark flesh as though smeared with dirt. The color of shit. He feels his stomach churn. Christ, they disgust him. What rottenness is in their blood that comes out so foul? What primeval sin moved god to blight their flesh so?

"Tell me." One must remember not to offer a choice. They must know that there _is no_ choice, no other option.

Still she fights back. "I won't! I don't know!"

He sighs. It is such a delicate business.

"You can't make me!" she spits it out.

He looks at her. That little face. Those almond eyes. That crinkled hair. That repulsive earthen flesh. "Choose a finger," he says.

She shakes her head.

"Choose. Or I will not be able to stop this man. He will shot you. You don't want to die, do you? You are very young. Do you want to die?"

She shakes her head. The tears spill down her face. She bites down on her lip.

"Then choose."

She chooses. One by one the fingers curl back until there is only one left. He burns that finger with the tip of the cigarette.

She wants to stay silent. She tries and fails to keep from screaming. They always scream. It is not the pain, he thinks, but the fear which must out. It is a kind of release, maybe.

He grinds the cigarette in until the flesh is raw and black and red. He regrets it now, just a little. He should have waited, used just the butt. Now he has wasted more than half a cigarette. He cannot smoke it now, not having dirtied it on her. His brand is getting more and more expensive. Wartime sacrifices, he supposes. Everyone must give up something, civilian or private or captain or general. He smiles a bitter smile at that. He doubts that there are any generals going without. But never mind that. The important thing is the task at hand. The important thing is to get rid of _them_. Once they're out of the way then those who remain will be free to flourish. To rule. This war will turn around when they are gone, he knows it.

Let the girl have her pain for a while. She knows as well as he that they are not yet finished.

He gets up out of the chair and walks a little ways down the length of the train car. They're all private compartments in this car. First class. His men are bunked there now. Probably the first time most of them have been in a first class compartment. Everything will get better once _they_ are gone. He goes into one of the compartments.

There is a men slumped by the window. He is holding his gun in his hands and looking darkly out the window. The man snaps to his feet and salutes. "Sir!" he barks.

The Captain waves the man back down. "At ease," he says, and sits across from the man. He looks out the window. "Beautiful, isn't it?"

"Sir?"

He points out the window. "There." The distant snow-capped mountains. The glass-smooth lake filled up to the brim with the reflections of these fat white clouds drifting in a clear blue sky. Soft green grass. A tree spreading its welcoming arms.

The man nods. "Yes sir."

The Captain leans back with a grunt. His stomach is twisted with hunger. Goddamned rations. He opens the cigarette case. He holds it out to the other man. "You smoke?"

The man shakes his head. "No sir."

He turns the case. "Take one."

The man grins, suppressing his gratitude. "Thank you sir."

"What are you thinking about, soldier?" he says. He uses his cigarette to gesture in the smoke, drawing images there to reflect his words.

The man shrugs. His features turn down when he draws on the cigarette, a flicker of distaste swiftly disguised.

"Tell me."

"It's nothing, Captain. I'm only wondering... well. You know how it goes."

The Captain taps the ash. He shakes it off his shoe. Needs a polish. He'll have it polished after the return journey, he supposes. He wishes that he'd brought his shoe polish kit along. He hates these train rides. Damned army regulars. What is it that gets into them? There have been too many incidents. He wonders if he'll have to ride along many more of these. He supposes that he will. Probably be at it until the whole country's been culled. Ah well. He misses his wife. His little daughter. He's doing this for them, he reminds himself. Never forget why you're doing this, he tells himself. For them.

"You know, Captain..."

"Hm?" only half listening. He is still studying his shoes.

"Do you think there's any chance? Forgive me if I'm speaking out of turn..."

"Chance of what?" He scours his memory for the man's name. He should know, shouldn't he? There's been so much restructuring in the past few weeks, ever since the program got started up. Is it Willard? Better not to say and be wrong. Never show ignorance, never admit wrong. That is the only way.

"That we will... well... lose the war, sir."

The Captain looks at the man. He is quite genuinely surprised. He almost laughs. "Lose the war? Don't be thick. What's your name, son?"

"Williams, sir."

He stands. He raps his knuckles on the boy's shoulder. "Don't be paranoid, Williams."

"Yes sir."

He shakes his head as he leaves the compartment. Williams? He must remember to check the boy's service record. Can't have talk like that in the unit. If he's bold enough to say that to his Captain, just think what he's saying to the rest of the men.

He goes back down to the other side of the train car where the little girl is waiting for him. She is cowering in her chair. She squeezes her finger just below the burn. She flinches when she sees him coming. He sits down. He is losing his patience for this. He wants to return to his cabin and get into his dinner ration. He breathes hard.

"We know that you're involved," he starts. "You were seen carrying messages. What I want to know is simple: who sent the messages?"

"I don't know!" Her voice is a rough sob. "They... they never told me their names."

"Describe their faces to me."

"It was too dark. I never saw."

"Tell me about the messages they gave you."

"I don't remember. They were... little things... I didn't understand. They were just personal."

He resists the urge to rub his eyes. He has been awake too long. He wants to strangle this fucking liar girl. Never mind, though. She probably doesn't know anything of value. Chances are there's nothing to any of it. They are cowards at heart. Still... it never hurts to remind them that he is in control.

He waves away the girl. The guard pushes her back out through the door between the train cars.

When she is gone the Captain sighs heavily and rubs his eyelids. The smoke is starting to irritate him. He grinds out his cigarette, fighting back a yawn. He finds his gaze sliding lazily towards the window. The clean blue sky. This country of his is so very beautiful.

The journey is almost at an end. The train will arrive at its destination very soon now.

* * *

Your burn throbs. You feel a fresh thrum of pain with every heartbeat. You lay back in your seat and you screw your eyes shut and you try to go outside of the hurt, to leave behind your body. Tears leak down your cheeks; you wipe them angrily away.

They take Raheel. He looks at you as they drag him up and his eyes are filled with doubt, with suspicion, with fear. His eyes ask: how much you tell them? Am I being taken to my death? Did you give me up? His eyes are an accusation. You think that he may hate you, may want to wrench himself out of the guard's arms and wrap his fingers around your throat and demand to know what you have done. You think he may blame you.

But you didn't give anybody up. You survived and you did not betray them. You bite down hard on your tongue and glower back at him.

And then he is gone.

Nazmiya holds you. Murmurs in your ear. Rubs her hands up and down on your arms. The dirty brown shift in which they've dressed you moves beneath her hands, shuffling like lizard skin.

Daniyal leans close. His thick beard looks wild and untamed in the daylight, his eyes bright with fear. "What did you tell them?" he hisses, "What did they ask?" His teeth bare. Like an animal's teeth, all gleaming.

You wilt from him. You don't want to talk, not to anyone. Nobody can make you talk. You miss your father. You shake off the poet's hands and you hold yourself tight against yourself.

You can feel him, your father. His weight, his breath, his touch. His gentle curving smile, his soft intelligent eyes behind the half-moon lenses of his reading glasses. You regret not having been closer to him. Not touching him, putting your hand in his hand, wrapping your arms around his waist. He was unshakable. Now that he is gone there is nothing at the center of your life. No point of revolution. All those times that you thought you had outgrown his affection, become too worldly to be cradled. You wish that he was here. They could never have hurt you if your papa was with you. He would have kept you safe.

Daniyal and Nazmiya are arguing about you. He wants to press you, to question you. It's important to _know_ , he says, we have to know what they know.

She says they should never have involved her.

He says he never thought they would take her. The girl he calls you. Why would they suspect the girl? Somebody must have said something.

She asks who would do such a thing. Who, Daniyal?

He tells her not to use his name.

She says that none of them would ever give up another. You know that.

He says all he knows is that the Captain will stop at nothing.

The train is traveling through a vast pine forest. The wood is thick and endless. You wonder what is crawling beneath the needles. Your eyes are drifting shut. Only the pain keeps you awake now. How long has it been since you truly slept? Months maybe. Ever since they sent you away from your own bed. The retreating light is dappled through the thick evergreens. You imagine you can see monsters, sun flashing on dripping jaws and long bloodied tongues. The train has traveled beyond the realm of the earth. You have traveled into a dream.

This world is not real.

Time passes. Time is stretched and inexact. The sun dips low and seems to hover there on the horizon like the red pupil of some great eye, bloated and blind and unblinking. You drink in the sight of it. Every time the sun goes down it feels as though it will not likely rise again. That it will not look down for fear.

You want to strip off the clinging brown dress and walk naked in the forest. To be wreathed in flowers and grasses, living things wrapping round your ankles like ivy climbing ivory. You want to be clean and white if it will make them love you. Why do you have to be different? Why were you born this way? You hate your body. You want to die, to peel off your skin and be free. So they will stop looking at you that way. So they will love you.

You know what your mother would say, what your father would say, what any of the people in the train car would say: There is nothing wrong with you. You are perfect how you are, you are beautiful. But you cannot believe them. How could these things happen to you if you were not less than? What God would allow such things if he did not loath you as the soldiers do? There is a god, you are sure of it now, a god male and white. A cruel god with naked colorless hands bleached pure and holy. White face and white hair and blue eyes. You are dirty. God hates you: curl up and go into the earth you foul thing. God will eat you, will swallow you. You darkest girl-thing. He will swallow you in his gleaming white mouth, gums as white as teeth and lips of cotton. He will devour you and he will forget you. He will tear you, crush you with his broad white nails. The blue sky is the eye of god, pure limitless blue staring down, gleaming red with fury at every day and every night. The sun his pupil, and when it turns on you the whole world is red in his anger.

The pain is too much to bear. You want to bite down on your hand, bite down hard enough to drive out the hurt.

You claw at your skin, hating it, hating yourself. They are right to want to kill you. You are disgusting. You are beyond pity. You are beyond redemption. You wish only that you might die in the arms of your father.

* * *

The old man is making a radio.

His weathered hands tug cautiously at bits of wire he has unspooled from a variety of sources, the lining of a brassier, a broken pair of bifocals, wherever he could find it. For an earpiece he has borrowed the electric hearing aid of an old man who no longer desires to listen. A little battery taken from a broken wristwatch missed by the search. The antenna was the most difficult, but he thinks that he has at last figured out something which will work.

He builds the radio in secret, ever fearful that they will find him out and that they will destroy it, smash his creation on the floor and grind it under their gleaming black boot-heels. He hides the crude construction under his coat when the patrols pass and sleeps with it stowed beneath his seat. Every time he wakes he does so with the sinking surety that it has been taken from him in the night and he is always surprised, pleasantly surprised, to find it still present.

He never, not even in his wildest fantasies, allows himself to think that he will actually be able to fashion a functioning radio. He had no tools, no parts, no equipment. The radio is lacking key components, pieces without which it cannot be. He feels that way sometimes. Ever since they took her. When the soldiers in red dragged her out, their guns shoved in his face to keep him from following. He does not think that he will ever see her again. He does not think that she is still living.

Some of his fellow passengers tried to comfort him, but he could not bear that. Could not bear to be touched, to have reassuring arms draped over his shoulder, could not bear to hear the words whispered which might blunt the impact of what has happened. He cannot bear _that_.

He knows that his radio will never work. There is no real point to building the thing, but it is all he knows. All his life he has built radios. To hear something conjured from the air... to him it is a kind of magic, it always has been. The wonder of it has never left him. When he was a child such things were impossible, nothing but the far-flung dreams of hackish pulp writers and feckless day-dreamers. And _he_ grew up to build them! All the dreams of his childhood came true.

Radio, invisible in the air, unheard and unseen and always about. A kind of deity here beneath the heavens, here humming in the wires. He was a sort of priest, reaching out to touch that god. A Promethean figure bearing the fire which gives no warmth and consumes nothing and yet illuminates all.

The world shrinks in the age of radio.

He did not think that such a thing as this could happen in a modern world. Radio will unite us, he said, bring us all together at last. There is nothing stopping us now, he said, we will know everyone, not just our immediate neighbors, _everyone_. We will truly know them, speak to them, learn from them, teach them. We are one people now. Nations mean nothing anymore, political ways of thinking are dead.

He wonders how he could ever have been so hopeful.

He bends his head down and he twists together another wire. The work is slow, painstaking. There are cuts on the tips of his fingers and the tip of his tongue which he bites while he works.

A spark in the ugly machine. A hiss of breath and he puts his shocked finger into his mouth. He frowns. The thinnest thread of smoke rises.

_Useless_!

He sets the mess aside. He lays his head against his shoulder, a bird tucking its bill beneath one wing. He wraps his arms about himself, missing her, missing the child. Twice they have taken from him. Now there is nothing left but his own life, and he finds that it is of no value to him any longer.

What sort of men would do this? It is a thought which has returned to him many times in these last few days. His mantra, his prayer. The question has been with him, burrowed deep inside, ever since the child was allowed to die, sacrificed by doctors who would not treat her because of her heritage.

They never admitted to that, of course. They gave him words, twisted so far beyond their original meaning that he could not fathom their application, their new context. He had not wanted words. They could have saved the child, and they chose to let her die, he understood that. His child.

It has been an ache inside for such a very long time. A dullness. An emptiness. It changed him, and her. Her more than he. She turned angry and protective, refusing to let him speak out when he saw what was happening to his country. To keep him safe in the cloak of silent compliance. And now this. This horror.

It is better that she is dead, he thinks. Better that she died soon and does not have to endure any longer. She is with the child now. He can feel them, hear the distant echo of their voices calling down the wire.

A sound murmurs in his palm. A voice. _Her_ voice. He picks up the earpiece of his half-built radio. The noise issues tinny and distant from inside the re-wired hearing aid. He puts it to his head, and he is sure: it is her, it _must_ be her. He knows that voice.

And yet he cannot understand the words, he does not know what she is saying, what she is trying to tell him. He looks around the train car, a desperate sweat breaking out all over his body. There is a thought, distant in his head, that he has gone crazy. He does not care. What is one more crazy person in an insane world?

He can hear her voice.

* * *

You are watching the old man. Tamir. You think that he has gone insane. He races about the train car, tangled in wires and clutching a haphazard bundle of electronics above his head. Like an explorer carrying precious luggage through the fetid swampland. He thrusts a fleshy little earpiece toward anybody.

"Listen! Listen!" he cries out, near to tears, "Please, please tell me what she is saying!"

You watch as the other passengers take the offered bit of plastic and hold it to their ears, making little shushing gestures to the quivering old man. Their faces each undergo the same transformation. From curious doubt to suspicion to wonder to brokenhearted ecstasy. They turn to one another and say something, gesturing excitedly. You catch a few scratches of whispered excitement:

"Is it him? I know that voice."

"Can you hear the music? Tell me, can you hear the music? My brother used to play that song..."

"Is... I'm sure it is! My mother's voice! Oh, thank God she's safe!"

"The war's over, I'm sure I heard him say that the war is over!"

Slowly, the device and the tottering man and the fleshy little earpiece work their way down the train car, moving through the bustle of sudden excitement. Moving inexorably towards you. You are afraid of the thing, of what you might hear. Your parents? Your brother? Nothing at all? You do not want to find out. The device seems to swell in its repulsive aspect, the coils of wire and the flesh like an arching proboscis seem to you horridly obscene.

You hope that the guards will come soon, that they will restore order. You do not want to fight anymore, you do not want to break the rules. They will not hurt you if you do not rebel in your heart. There is too much movement, too much excitement. Somebody is going to die for this. And the machine is coming closer.

Daniyal listens. His face lights up. He says something about troop movements, that he thinks the radio must be picking up military channels. He mutters to himself about divisions and supply-lines and tanks and invasions. He babbles stupidly, as though the radio has stolen a part of his mind, reduced him to this. His expression turns slowly dark, and he lowers the earpiece. "Channel cut out," he says, "they must be jamming the frequency somehow." If only he could have heard a little _more_. Sorrowfully, he passes the earpiece back.

The old man takes it, cradling the bit of fleshy plastic in his palm. He looks at you. You knew her, he seems to be thinking, maybe _you_ will hear her voice. He holds the earpiece out to you. There are tears in his eyes. "Please," he says, "what is she saying?"

You hold it to your ear. You are afraid.

You hear something. You are not sure what it is. A faint static, a faint electricity, a gentle burble like the sound of an underground river. There seem to be voices there, coming as though from under deep water. Musical notes tinkling in the ether. You think that somebody could hear in that muddle anything they wanted.

You shake your head. The radio dies. Tamir is holding it, his eyes shining. The sun is at the slow peak of its long fall.

* * *

The rebellion begins at sunset and is over by the time the last gray fingers of dusk have gone black.

It starts when they bring Raheel back. He is blind in one eye, blood running from the ocular cavity. He grins and there are teeth cracked and broken in his smile. The guards shove him down into the seat and march away, lockstep down the narrow corridor.

Raheel looks at you. His good eye winks. You are bonded now, you have both been questioned and you have both emerged more or less whole. He reaches out to touch you. You flinch. His hand withdraws, but he is still looking at you, still grinning. He is proud of you.

You look away. You are still afraid of what they will do to you, but your heart swells in your chest. He is proud of you.

Nazmiya is touching him around his broken eye, murmuring softly. Raheel grasps her arms and pulls her close and kisses her on the mouth. His arms slip around her, palms flat on the smooth arch of her back. She melts against him, her limbs twining through his. When they separate they are both breathing hard and looking slightly dazed. She licks her lips, exultant.

"Sorry," Raheel says, the word breathless and reflexive.

She smiles and she touches her lips softly against his. He smiles back.

Daniyal wraps his arms around the both of them. His teeth show white through his thick beard. "I didn't think you'd be coming back to us, brother."

Waa'il comes creeping down to shake his cousin's hand. His whole body is trembling.

Raheel pushes them all away. He is laughing. He is still alive, and he cannot understand it. His voice falls to a harsh whisper, "We have to move tonight," he says.

"What did they ask you?" Daniyal wants to know. "What did you tell them?"

"They didn't ask me anything. Hardly said a word. Just got right to working me over. It was strange... One of them did let slip that the train would be arriving tomorrow. I imagine they thought me beyond listening at that point."

Nazmiya: "Arriving where?"

"I don't know. Wherever they're taking us, I suppose."

"Are we ready?" Waa'il asks, wringing his hands. He stinks of fear. You turn away from him.

Daniyal nods. "We're ready." He looks down the length of the train car. "Come on, everybody back in their seats, the next patrol will be coming soon. We'll make our move at sundown. Be ready."

The group disperses. Everything returns to its former place, its former silence.

You wish that you could remain on this train forever. You cannot remember a time before the train, cannot imagine a time after. You feel safe here, knowing that you are in your place. You cannot move.

You take the poet's hand in your hand. She looks at you, a distracted cast to her features. You shake your head. Don't go. Don't do it. Don't leave me. Don't die.

She smiles. She caresses your face. Like an elder sister. You wish that you could someday grow up to be like her. You do not think you will ever be that brave. You wonder if you are a coward.

But you didn't tell them anything. When the time came you did not betray your friends, that is something you will always have. He is proud of you. She is proud of you too, a woman as brave as she.

"Don't be afraid," she says, "it will be alright."

"It won't." Your voice is a choked whisper, stumbling on thick lips. "It won't. They'll stop you. They'll kill you. Don't do it. You mustn't do it. Stay with me." There are hot and shameful tears spilling down your face when you have finished saying that. You are breathing hard and fast. There is a desperation rising in you.

She touches your hair, your ear, your lips. She touches her mouth against your forehead. "I have to," she says.

You shake your head.

"I have to."

" _Why_?"

She smiles. "You know why."

Mucus is running down your face. You are ashamed of your body. You sniff and wipe at yourself with the back of your hand. You turn away from her. You do not want her to see you like this.

She will not let you look away. "You know why."

You nod.

Nazmiya's face is glowing in the rose light of the sinking sun. She presses her shawl into your hands. The marks which she made there about the escape plan have all be wiped away, smeared to a dirty black haze, and there is only the poem left at the center, luminescent in the midst of that dark. It runs in twisted stanzas along the folds of cloth, a flow of words like water. She points to the last written lines. "I've not finished it, you see?"

You nod. The cloth is warm in your hands. Her warmth. Her scent. You want to wrap it around yourself, to bury your face in the shawl and never come back. Your eyes snatch at some of the words, and they seem to you beautiful.

She gathers the cloth again into her fist and she presses it to your breast. "We will finish it together, alright? After this is all over, the two of us will finish it." She reaches into her pocket and takes out the little pencil. "Will you hold this for me?"

You nod. The sun is bursting outside, so huge and red that you think it must be the end of the world out there.

Daniyal looks back over the top of the seat towards you both. He inclines his chin. "It's time," he says.

* * *

And now things are in motion. Like a ball let go at the top of a hill, something has begun which cannot be stopped.

The sunset is a blood-smeared pink.

You know the plan like breathing. You have carried it in whispers across the whole of the train car. You curl up in your seat and you shut your eyes and you put your hands tight over your ears. You know exactly how it will happen. You do not need to watch.

There are six guards onboard, and Captain Brighton. They are all armed. They will all be killed, and then the engineers will be overpowered. Daniyal and Nazmiya and Raheel will take control of the train, and you will escape into the woods under cover of darkness. You will travel north until you reach the border.

The plan relies on perfect timing. They need darkness and silence and luck. A dozen or so passengers have specific roles to play if the ruse is to be pulled off. Not you. All you have to do is wait.

And so you wait. Your hands over your ears, your eyes screwed shut. Shutting out the world.

You wait.

Cannot hear. Cannot see. Cannot touch.

Cut off from everything.

You cannot see.

How long has it been? Fifteen minutes? If all has gone to plain then the soldiers will all be dead by now. You curl up in your seat, wanting to be so small that nothing in the world can see you.

You feel something. The slowing of the train. The gradual decrease in speed. Is it only in your mind? The train cannot be stopping. This train does not stop.

You cannot be sure how much time has passed. A minute? An hour?

For a moment your eyes open. The sun has set and a blue dusk taken the place of the day. The sky is faintly lit by the last fingers of sunlight, now reaching towards the far side of the world and trailing behind a glow on the horizon like the aftermath of an atomic bomb. You saw a filmstrip about the bomb in school once. A bit of grainy black and white footage. The swelling cloud, bulbous and misshapen, rising over the earth like a living thing. They taught you to hide under your desk, hands on your head while the world came apart.

The train is not moving any longer.

You are pressed up against the window-glass. The forest is dark and deep outside, endlessly deep. The tree fingers shiver in a faint wind, scraping their needle-nails against the side of the train car. There is a little clearing past the trees, awash in moonlight.

You uncover your ears. The silence is horrible. There is nothing, absolutely nothing. You think that you may have gone deaf. The stillness of the train is alien and unnerving in a way which you did not expect.

You look out the window. There are people in the woods, in the small clearing beside the track. You know them, you recognize their faces. They are the passengers of the train, wandering out into the soft grasp of the woods. Their steps are slow and hesitant, like those of infants finding their first feet. It has been a lifetime since they last stood erect. They are like animals returning to the wild world.

You feel a terrible hope rising in your chest, filling your throat. They look almost free.

You glance down the aisle of the train car. The train is empty. Almost empty. One man remains:

A soldier in a red coat, standing over you with his thumbs hooked into his belt. Captain Brighton. He smiles. It is a cold smile. There is a bruise on his cheek and the sleeve of his uniform is torn. Blood is welling up on his swollen lip. He sucks at the blood and swallows to keep it from running down his chin.

"Come along then," he says, "everyone else is outside. Time to stretch your legs, girl."

You cannot resist. Cannot struggle. All you can do is follow, and so you follow, feeling like a made thing.

The night chill is like a knife blade pressed flat against your skin. The Captain steps down behind you, forcing you onward with the weight of his presence, like falling water which stops for nothing.

The passengers shuffle aimlessly on a carpet of fallen needles, animals in a cage. They move as though lost, moving in a daze of confusion and fear, aimless and restless. They are like black ghosts in the darkness. The shadow of the wood erases them, turns them to nothing but the wet gleam of the eye and the tooth and the fluttering of whispered voices.

Five of the guards stand in a loose ring against the train, a half-circle following the tree line.

Behind like a wall is the great vehicle, the beautiful machine standing against the night blue sky, gleaming with a sooty effulgence. It waits, tense and straining like a dog on the leash. Smoke spits upward, wrapping gauzy gray fingers around the treetops as angry sparks sputter out at the dry tinder branches.

The crowd of prisoners is aimlessly amorphous and shambolic. Their faces are gaunt and hopeless, eyes sunken deep. They are sinking inside themselves, withdrawing from the cruel nature of man. They lick their lips with nervous excitement, with fear. They drink in deep the chill air, the free air; air which has not been contained in that train car, polluted with the stench of their waste and breathed again and again until it turned stale and caustic.

They stretch aching limbs, and on some of their faces are the last flickers of a wan joy. The faces, you think, of inmates sitting down for a last meal before their execution.

You search the crowd for Daniyal and Raheel, for Nazmiya, but you cannot find them. Perhaps your gaze slipped by them, glided past their faces without recognition.

The guards are all holding flashlights. Smooth silver metal gleaming in black-gloved hands; their light scorches. The towering pines loom large in false light and the arms of the trees thrash wildly in a fierce animating wind. You look to the train. Captain Brighton stands shrouded at the foot of the stair, his coat torn at by the gusts, his perfectly groomed hair ravaged. His hands are deep in the pockets of his coat. He is not smiling.

There is no hope anymore.

A murmur of low conversation rises from the crowd of passengers. You catch snatches of it but cannot piece it together. The guards say nothing. Their guns are cold across their chests.

You walk to the center of the clearing and you sit there. The cool grass tickles at your bare skin. You reach down and you tug up a fistful of it. How easily it dies in your hands. You let it fall, sprinkle down all the dark blades severed from their shallow roots. There is a single mournful flower there in the grass. You touch it, cup it with your fingers. It seems to arch towards you, aching to be torn from the earth. You cannot bear to do it. The violet blue face pleading, the yellow eye wide and desperate. You cannot do it. You leave the flower in the ground.

Captain Brighton speaks:

"Do you wish to remain here?"

All eyes turn to him. Backs arched with hope. Disbelief and suspicion in their hesitation.

He speaks again: "Make your choice. The train is leaving. Stay if that is what you want."

The sixth guard makes himself known. He stands beside the train holding a cruel black machine gun in his hands, its snout pointed out towards the people in the clearing. He clicks off the safety and wraps his black-leather hands around the handle, first finger resting against the trigger.

Captain Brighton smiles softly. He shrugs, as though the outcome of the next few moments is meaningless to him. His slick blond hair shines. In his red coat and his black gloves and gleaming boots he is like the demented ringmaster of a circus of horrors. He beckons extravagantly towards the open door of the train, his eyes furious as a hypnotist's.

One by one the people in the clearing move towards the train. You think back to the train station, when the young man in the slate gray scarf broke free and ran and was shot dead by the track. You think that you cannot be the only one who remembers this. There is a single expression which crosses the features of the passengers as they come back aboard the train. A shamed look, the look of a child who has been reprimanded for some selfish and petty crime. A look which is all too aware, and melts away to nothing, to a subdued surrender as they return to their seats and wait quietly.

You are still there in the grass. You cannot move. You cannot rise. Your fingers are still wrapped around the throat of the flower, it is like an anchor holding you down.

You look up and your eyes are caught in Captain Brighton's gaze. His expression does not change and he says nothing, but you feel the command all the same, as though spoken directly into your mind. _Come_.

Your finger throbs where he burned you. You stand and the flower is torn from the ground. You walk towards him. He stops you at the foot of the stair. His hand is heavy on your shoulder. "I want the two of you to see this," he says, and you see that there is another person present, a man standing in the shadow of the train, his face streaked with silver tears. Waa'il. The forger's cousin. The man who betrayed Raheel once before, sent the red soldiers to his turnip boat. He weeps for his own weakness.

You look away. Your stomach is dropping, your throat closing. There are three figures still in the clearing, propped up with their hands bound before them.

You cannot see their faces, but you know who they are. Who else could they be? They do not speak. The five guards in red move away, detaching themselves from the shadows and returning one by one to the train.

Captain Brighton studies the three. He cocks his head. He turns to you. "What shall I do with them, child?"

You cannot move, cannot look away. You hear the soft sound of the Captain's pistol sliding free of its holster, just by your ear. You try to speak but the words die in your throat. All you can do is shake your head, and even that is almost more than you can bear.

The Captain laughs. He pulls the trigger. The sound is beyond what you can understand and give shape to. It is only noise, a white heat of noise bursting in your ear. One of the faceless figures crumbles to the ground. Your fingers close, crush the broken flower in your hand.

The second figure falls with a cry to the side of the first. You recognize the voice: Nazmiya. The third one runs, his hands held awkwardly before him. He runs for the tree line. You think it is Daniyal.

The machine gun fires, and it is the most horrible sound imaginable. The trees spark with fire. Nazmiya falls, thrown back as though lifted up and pushed by an invisible hand. In the heat-light of the gunfire you can see Daniyal spasm and jolt as his body is riddled with bullets. And yet he still runs, runs with a desperation beyond life. He reaches the trees before he collapses against the pines. He is held up in their needled arms, embraced as the life shudders from him.

The machine gun stops, but the sound of it remains, a growling and booming that reverberates in your head. Smoke rises from the barrel like a gross parody of the train's smokestack.

The Captain sighs. He seems relived to have set things once again in order. He holsters his gun and guides you back onto the train.

Waa'il, still sniffling, slumps after. The Captain turns, his foot on the top step. He seems surprised. He says nothing, only shakes his head.

Waa'il's eyes find yours, searching in sudden wide-eyed fear for some flicker of sympathy. You cannot bear to look upon him. You feel your lip twist.

His mouth opens, he says, "But... You said... you promised. Remember? I'm Waa'il... you promised me. I'm Waa'il."

The Captain's face is blank. He motions for one of the guards to unhook the long chain which runs beneath the windows. He loops its end into a rough collar. "You have no name," he says.

Waa'il looks at the collar. His throat bobs. "Y-you... you swore I would be free." He looks at you then and there is a desperate apology in his face, a misery.

The Captain cocks his head. "Is this not freedom?"

Quick as anything the guards are behind Waa'il. They hold him. He screams, struggling. He looks like a fish, you think, wriggling on the hook. The Captain wraps the collar around Waa'il's throat. You look. The chain is not long. It is still attached to the train by one great steel hook. The Captain slides a lock through the links of the chain and clicks it shut.

"Go where you will," the Captain says, and pulls himself back up into the train car.

You hurry after, scurrying into your seat. You cover your ears again. You shut your eyes again. You know that when you open them, things will only be worse.

You wonder how long Waa'il will be able to keep up with the train, running on foot as he is, and his leg injured. How long can he keep pace? You wonder if you will be able to feel it when, finally, he cannot.

* * *

You feel nothing.

You sit with your hands over your head, crumpled in your seat. All the bones in your body have turned rubber. The train feels empty now. Thoughts echo in the space they left behind. A recriminating weight.

Outside your window it is so very dark. How much longer now until morning?

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow the journey will be over. You have no concept of ending anymore, only the going on. In your mind you are still standing at that cold station down the long hill from the boarding school. Your teeth still chattering from the cold; you are still standing up on the tips of your toes trying to see over the heads of the crowd. This is not real, you are not this person, not in this skin. You are leaving the station by the door, leaving the train behind on the platform. Nobody tries to stop you, not the headmistress, not Captain Brighton, not the conductor with his clean white gloves, not the soldiers in red, not the other passengers waiting to go to their fate. You pass through them all, like a ghost. Their hands reach out for you and slip away. Your flesh is smoke and ash. You are standing in the dirt at the foot of the long hill. The sky is heavy with bleak cloud. A light rain dribbles out of heaven. You take a step up the hill. You stop. You cannot go that way. It is not for you. You hold out your hand. Rain strikes your skin, and where the rain touches you it leaves pale marks behind. You touch your palm, you rub the spots and they do not come away. The rain falls. The rain is cleansing you. Where the rain falls on you it washes away your stain. You step out of your clothes and leave them rumpled in the dirt road. You are like a snake writhing out of its skin. Your bare feet squish in the mud. You shiver, you hold your nakedness tight. You stare up into the rain. The rain is purification. Every drop is a deliverance.

They will not look at you and see that which is foul and unclean.

They will not point at you and whisper together of your inadequacy.

They will not see ugliness in you, not when you are like them.

You want so dearly to be _like them_.

You start walking up the hill, up the long and winding road. The rain washes you. You stumble and fall into the mud and it clings to your body. The rain washes away the mud and along with it runs your color down your legs like a sheen of filth. The color washes out of your hair and it flows long and yellow and straight about your pale shoulders. The dark washes from your eyes and falls away like scales and you can see the world through clear blue, true and beautiful and new as it was always meant to be. Your skin is white and gleaming. You are beautiful.

You are near the top of the hill. You think that you are dying of the cold. Snow whispers in the autumn air.

The door of the boarding school opens. They are all waiting for you, their hair up in ribbons – bright red bows behind their ears. Their skin is soft pink, creamy smooth and pure. They reach out to touch you. They embrace you. They touch their cheeks against your cheek. They weep for joy that they have found you. They dry you and they clothe you and they love you. You are one of them, you can feel yourself sinking into the crowd, becoming one, becoming a creature of light, an angel out of some primeval misery.

They love you now. You love yourself. You love your beauty. You love everything in the world which is clean and pure and white. The stories have all come true. You are the princess. The fairy tale. There is a tall white man waiting for you. He holds out his hand and he smiles. Your sisters push you towards him; you go blushing, cheeks rosy red. Your lips are strawberries, your skin cream, your hair corn-silk. He takes your hand and kisses it and he holds you, devours you. You float. And you are at last so happy.

* * *

The train does not stop. The train will never stop. You are bound to it. The skin of the train is as heavy and colorless as the blackout curtains they hang in all the windows of the city. You remember sitting there bathed in light looking up at the curtain like a void wall, a doorway into nothing, and wondering what was going on behind it. What are they hiding from you?

You turn in your seat.

There is a woman beside you, watching you. You know her face, she was in the arms of the man with the broken teeth. Jamil. You know that you have heard her name before.

She smiles at you, and it is such a sad smile that you think your heart will break. She pities you. She loves you. How can she love you?

"Are you alright?" she asks, and she shakes her head. "I'm sorry. Of course you aren't. None of us are." She sighs. The heads of the people sitting in their seats, their functional death. "What were you thinking about?"

You shake your head. You are ashamed of yourself, your fantasy.

She touches your arm. Her smile seems born of an endless sorrow. You wonder if she has ever been happy.

"I am Mahrukh."

"Where is your husband?"

"Jamil?" She shakes her head. "No... he is not my husband. We were going to wait until the war ended." She laughs, and the laughter is sadder still than her smile. "We didn't want to do anything we might regret. You never know what will happen in wartime, never know what's coming... He said that he didn't want to break my heart." She shakes her head. "What children we were."

You see him curled up on the floor beside his seat and snoring lightly "Is he alright?" When will he die? Are they planning to kill him too?

She shakes her head. "Poor thing, he sleeps so badly. Such dreams he has. Bad moon dreams."

"You were going to get married?"

"We were. Once. I don't suppose we'll have the chance now." There is a wistful finality in her voice. She has accepted death. Her will is set to it. She wipes at her dry cheek. There are no more tears there to spill. "This was supposed to be our... I don't know. A kind of honeymoon. We'd agreed to be married after the war so... it was a kind of engagement. Our parents... they were very strict, you understand, very old fashioned. We weren't allowed to be alone together." She laughs, "I suppose they were afraid we might get ourselves up to some impropriety. Or that he might... Little chance of that with Jamil, he's a perfect gentleman. We decided to meet each other in town. He said that he wanted to make me a picnic. It was far too cold, of course, but he wanted it anyway. He took me to the old barn on the edge of town, do you know it?"

You shake your head.

She touches you. Her skin is so very dark. A dark as chocolate, as toffee. Something rich and sweet and special. Her hair is crimped and black and full, her eyes bright. She is like some beautiful spirit. She smiles at you and her lips are thick and soft and her cheekbones high and proud. You think that she is beautiful.

"That's where they found us. Together in that barn. They said things to us, called me names. Jamil, he... he wouldn't stand for that. He fought them. Not to stop them from taking him, but because they were saying those things about me. They... well, you know what they did. Foolish of him to fight, but brave. He was so noble. They brought us to the train station. We stood there on the platform and these people were all around us. I saw the old woman and her husband clinging to each other. He held her. She held him. I knew that we had made a mistake... I should have married Jamil. Should have married him sooner. I should have... held him. Now I don't think I ever will..."

Her eyes are wet. She looks at you. "We're alike, child. We're so alike. And we will never know..." She looks back across the aisle. "He means everything to me..."

You reach out and you take her hand in your own. Your skin and her skin are almost the same, almost beautiful. You lay your head on her shoulder. The train is shuddering.

Night is everything.

* * *

The fragile sunrise light shines down on the tatters of Nazmiya's poem. Thick strands of black smoke are rising on the horizon. The pencil is poised in your hand. The world here is barren, the woods left behind in the night and the train now crossing a great brown expanse, churning towards the shadows of a lonely strand of slate-gray mountains.

We will finish it together.

You touch the tip of the pencil to the rumpled cloth. It makes a very faint mark there. You lift the pencil. You want to finish the poem, but you have no feeling for it, no understanding of how Nazmiya's words flow. For so many hours you sit there with the shawl crumpled in your hands, waiting with such keen dread for morning, when you will have light enough to finally read the poem. You mouth it to yourself over and over again by the faint light of dawn, though the words feel awkward and stilted on your tongue. The images are vague, ephemeral and seemingly without meaning. You do not understand.

It seems to you tragic and grand, of such a totality. Power beyond that of its individual fragments. You finish reading it, come to that last hanging line, and you look up at the sunrise, at the smoke billowing, you feel...

Maybe it is a kind of hope.

You do not know how to finish the poem. You do not think that you can do it without her. Her absence is an edge along your spine, an ache in your belly. You wonder how many of the prisoners will come at last to that line of smoke against the mountains, you wonder that you have not all been killed. The train shakes, like to rattle the teeth from your head.

You look around the train car, at those who go with you to this end.

Jamil and Mahrukh are still asleep, their limbs entwined, their foreheads touching. Their mouths are open, lips parted. Her mouth moves with a kind of hunger, the faintest motions of want. His fingers twitch, gathering little folds of her skirt, her shirt. They move together gently, blurred beyond the curtain of sleep, waiting. He shifts in his seat and she nuzzles against him, a slow smile curling on her mouth. They are free in their sleep, not owned. The smoke is very close now. You read the poem again.

She is there in it. She lives. Nazmiya eternal. Burn the shawl and sent her words streaming upwards into the greater conscious. She will never die. She is. She is.

You come again to that last hanging line, waiting for you.

We are but lonesome children.

You look down at the poem in your hands. The pencil moves. You write in a last line. You feel her in you.

* * *

The sun is high and hot and the vast waste shimmers with a hungry heat. The train moves implacably slow, like an old man wandering out into a nameless desert to die. The machine feels crippled, the struggle finally too much. But it will not stop, not until it has come to its final end.

The prison camp stands in the shadow of the mountains, all glittering barbed wire and black chrome smokestacks, strange low buildings huddled together in a cramped slum ringed by high watchtowers. Prison towers. And the huge buildings like great furnaces.

Smoke chokes the sky, rising black with anger towards heaven, spark and ash all clamoring for an explanation which will never come. And their rage burning in the garden for an age.

The guards who work in that factory are every day transformed on their surfaces to the very objects of their hatred. They emerge after the day with skin as black as night, and one would not know them at a quick look from those whose bodies feed the flames. They go back to their barracks and they stare into little shaving mirrors no bigger than postcards, and the faces they see looking back fill them with revulsion. They do not understand their hate; they rub away their shame in sulfurous water, wondering every time if they really are any different from those men and women and children, the _children_. They each night assure themselves that they must be different, they must be better or else how could they do these things? If they are not justified then how could they bear to live? They stop looking each other in the eye and they dream strange and miserable dreams. The most fearful dreams.

And the camp gnaws at them all in the barracks and the slum alike, its teeth shining and pitiless. Its appetite insatiable.

* * *

You can see out the soot-smeared window of the train. The high gates of the camp are coming upon you now. The rings of wire are like coils of tinsel in the sun. There is an emaciated child pressed up against the fence, her fingers wrapped through the links. She stares out across the beige ocean of sand, her brow furrowed and her eyes hard as they search for some sign of life in the waste. She does not seem to see the approaching train. Her gaze passes over it, through it. She is like a mirror image of your former self, waiting at the station to be put on the train. How long has it been? A week? Two weeks? It has been forever and it has been no time at all. Time did not travel with you, but waited, breath drawn, suspended in agony while you crawled over the face of the earth, bound down to those two corroded tracks.

The voices of the remaining passengers onboard the train are rising in fear. They clutch at the windows, their faces pressed to the glass and their fingers curling desperately around the bars. Their questions are ragged and urgent and unanswerable.

"Where is this place?"

"My God, how has it come to this?"

"What's going to happen to us?"

The people of the camp come slowly out, drawn to the train like flies to rotten meat. The guards are all dressed in the familiar red uniforms. They watch the train with loath disinterest, cradling automatic weapons and skulking in whatever shade they can find. The prisoners of the camp seem hardly alive. Their flesh is sallow and tight and close to the bone. Their dry tongues lick uselessly at cracked lips. They come surging in around the train, standing so close that you think they will surely be crushed. They reach up, some of them, grabbing uselessly at the barred windows. Some dark fingers flicker up at the bottom of the windows like the curious feelers of a deep-sea creature. Their clothing hangs on their bodies like rags of peeled away skin.

The passengers on the train look down upon the gathered prisoners and they weep. They look down on brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and they are met with empty desperate eyes which seem now to beg for death in every glance, in every look.

Is this what will become of you?

You stare out at the crowd, the great swelling crowd. There are so many, so many hundreds, so many thousands. You think that you see your brother's face in the crowd and you cry out, you press your hands against the glass. Can it be him? That face is too thin to be him, too drawn and feral, too savage. It is not the familiar face. The loved face. It is the face, perhaps, of your brother's shadow, snarling and hurt. And then it is gone, lost in the crowd.

The train creeps on into the heart of the camp.

The two old men are again speaking:

"We're going to die."

"I think we are."

"I can't... I don't think that I can even be afraid anymore. You understand?"

"Yes. Yes. Yes."

"Just give me a gun and let me do it myself. I swear I would."

"Those three were right to remain. To fight. We should have stayed there."

"Do you think they buried them? Out there in the woods, I mean?"

"They did not. You saw. We left them there."

"Even so. Better than here. Anything."

You look around the train car. Tamir is sitting quietly in his seat. He is holding the shattered pieces of his radio. Every so often he lifts the earpiece up, hoping perhaps to hear a whisper from beyond, to hear her voice once more. And each time his face falls, his hope disappointed. The passengers are paralyzed with a hollow terror, a fear so total and complete that it leaves them empty and staring and unable to resist.

Jamil and Mahrukh have embraced. Their lips touch, brushing together. Hands reach into clothing, beneath and through, pulling off, pulling away. They move with a numbed determination, an instinctual desperation. They cling to one another, hands clasping flesh, fingers digging into skin. Their clothing falls piece by piece to the cold floor of the shuddering train. They come together, emaciated limbs entwined. Their bodies slid together, rubbing softly. They shut their eyes, cheek to cheek and rocking gently to the motion of the train. A kind of calm comes over them, a distance. You want to look away, but you cannot. Two lovers together, the beautiful animal, the beautiful machine.

The train comes to an agonized stop, hissing and wheezing, wearied at last as it approaches the low platform. You look through clouded glass. Captain Brighton is stepping down off the train. He speaks to a man in a black coat, the camp commandant, perhaps, a man whose pale and hairless head seems to float over the void blackness of an ankle-length coat. The Commandant looks at the train and his face is impassive. The Captain seems annoyed with him. The Commandant gestures to the guards and the Captain shrugs and slumps off the platform and towards the low barracks on the far side of the compound. He tugs off his gloves as he goes and he does not look back.

The Commandant walks along the edge of the platform with his hands clasped behind his back. His bare skull shines in the morning light. His eyes are sunken deep and his teeth protrude. The guards are carrying something, a crate spilling tubes and wires out the open top. They move out of sight. You can hear heavy mechanical sounds from the next train car.

Some of the passengers try the doors. They are locked and bolted. The passengers moan with fear, but the truth is that they are somewhat relieved. They feel safer inside the train car. They are glad that they are not being herded out again.

The two old men are sitting back in their seats, gazing out the windows together, their eyes watery and pink with age. "They're going to kill us," says the first man. The second man agrees. They cannot, however, agree as to _why_. The first man thinks that it has all been a sort of cruel joke, a tease. Why not just kill us at the station? These men are sadists, my friend, what more reason do they need? The second man suggests that the camp is overcrowded, and that they are being killed purely out of necessity, that there is no space left for the living, only for the dead. Perhaps you're right. God, what times are these in which we find ourselves?

I am almost happy to be leaving this world. I think that I can bear it no longer, knowing what we are. That this is the species.

But I am glad to have known you. I've not been so close to anyone since my school days.

I cannot imagine you as a schoolboy. God knows, I can scarcely recall my own childhood. It all seems so far away. Those long summers naked in the grass. Playing in the shadows of the trees, watching the girls walk by in flower bright skirts, turning over stones in the little river.

To have been a child, that is the only gift. Now we have grown where do we belong in this world?

The two men kiss. A chaste kiss, you can see their lips just touching.

And then the gas starts seeping in, hissing in through those horrid black vents, through the long pipes running the length of the train and out shapeless black mouths. The passengers on the train do everything they can to escape. They batter at the door, they crack their hands on the barred windows, they scrabble at floor panels hidden under the stained carpet. They struggle. It is useless, of course. Some turn to each other and others turn against. Violence meets resignation, and all around the crowds are pushing in on the train car like the piling of earth over a coffin.

You feel dizzy. The air stings when you breathe, biting at your insides. You feel blood running down your face, from your ears and nostrils and mouth and eyes. Your throat feels as though it is being torn open.

Some of the passengers are spitting pink foam, rolling in the aisles, writhing in their seats. Their eyes roll liquidly in their heads. Some others seem to be sleeping; they are still as statues hewn in ancient rock.

You crawl to the window, your hands fawning at the glass. How strange that it could all come to this.

The guards in their red coats are waiting on the platform outside. The commandant in his black coat is no longer paying attention. The surging crowds of people seem to have lost their faces. They are only bodies.

You see – or are you only dreaming? – the faces of your parents outside the train car. Your mother and your father. Their aching faces twisted with pain. They recognize you; they scrabble desperately, uselessly, at the steel hide of the train. They are crying out, screaming, but you hear nothing. The sound of it is drowned out by the desperation of the others, and then by the roaring of the blood in your ears. Your parents touch the skin of the train. Their faces are an agony of fear.

The gas hisses in through the vents. The passengers try to block them up, with their clothes, with anything. Nothing stops the gas.

Then comes a stillness in the train. No more gas seeps in beyond what already hangs in the air. There is nothing left to struggle against. Those still alive have returned to their seats. They sit with their hands folded on their laps. Is it complacency? Acceptance? A last grasp at dignity? They wait.

Your hand is pressed through the bars and against the glass, fingers splayed.

You blink. It seems a very long and exaggerated motion, the slow flutter of the eyelid down. And opening again, reborn, the world remade. The glass is not glass. It is the surface of the water. You reach through. The faces of your mother and father are at peace, they are calm, they are beautiful. They love you. They reach through the water. Your hands wrap themselves into the hands of your parents and they pull you free, out of the water, out of the train car. Rising, rising. Serene.

The hissing in your ears builds to a static as thick as the roar of a tumbling ocean. Your eyelids are too heavy, you cannot keep them open any longer. You cannot feel your body. You are beautiful. You are content.

Slowly, inch by dreamy inch, you leave yourself, leave everything and rise rise rise. Rising over the smoldering camp through rags of smoke and cloud, rising through nothing, into the heat of stars, rising until that world is shrunken with distance, rising until that world is gone.

### Arrival

### Table of Contents

Departure

Arrival

visit me online at

pwcooper.wordpress.com
