China Mieville - Railsea

“Shut up.”

“You’re already on minus seventeen million.”

“Shut up ,” Dero said. “There was a mouse. Who lived in a hole.” Mostly it was Caldera who told stories as they drove, but not this time.

“Where?” said Caldera. “Between the rails?”

“Stupid. She’d get et up. A hole in a wall. & she could do magic.”

Caldera checked some notes. “What sort of magic?”

“Magic to do with sticks,” Dero decided. “She could make sticks come alive.”

Then the Shroakes gasped. The air outside the train was suddenly hammered by noise. In their nook, an alarm sounded, as if there weren’t enough cacophony already. Above them flew something nothing like a plane. An insecty thing that juddered & dangled from a patch of blurred air.

“What is that?” whispered Dero.

“What’s it doing?” said Caldera.

“Oh my lord,” whispered Caldera. “It’s an angel.”

Not one of the great & terrible driverless heavenly trains, wheeled angels shoring up foundations. A watcher. A getterbird. It scudded above them. Faced its bulbous dark sheen their way, regarded them flatly. They held their breath. It brought its own cloud with it. Venting filth. It was close enough that they could see its carapace. Scabbed with dirt & rust. Scratched & battered. The thing lurched in the air.

At last it turned & dipped its head with the hammering clattering &, faster than any bird or bat, was gone in a burst of soot.

“That,” said Caldera at last, “was a bit of an anticlimax.”

“You disappointed?” Dero said.

“Hardly. Just not used to seeing things that ain’t trying to kill me.”

“Oh,” Dero muttered. “Give it a minute.”

THE SHROAKES WERE DOWN to the last of their equipment. They lived crammed & cramped in the engine room. They took it in turns to sleep, one diagonalwise across the floor while the other drove the train.

Dero rubbed his eyes, drank water, ate a snack from their (dwindling—hush) supplies.

“Why we going so slow ,” Dero said. He sniffed. “We smell,” he said.

“You smell,” Caldera said. “I’m like a flower.”

“We have to go quicker,” Dero said. “We must be nearly there.” He rocked back & forwards, as if he would lend his momentum to the train. He turned & looked from the rear window.

“I’m being careful,” Caldera said. “I thought I heard something. This is as fast as I think’s safe.”

“Well,” Dero said. He spoke very precisely. “Well, I think you should maybe consider that going a bit faster might be a bit safer than not going so quick. See, because there’s a train behind us.”

“What?” It was true. Their scanners must be on the fritz, but there it was, visible to the naked eye. “Where did they come from?” she breathed.

“Behind that little forest,” Dero said, “I think.”

“But there’s nothing there! Pirates again,” said Caldera, but then she gasped. It was getting closer. & it was not what she had thought. It was a Manihiki ferronaval train. Definitely. That was a whole other thing.

The Shroakes looked at each other. “They got us,” Dero whispered. “At last.”

“At last,” said Caldera. “Or maybe—maybe they been behind us for ages. Maybe they been following us all this time.” She swallowed. “They know the way, now. Maybe we showed them the way.”

“Cald,” Dero said firmly. “We still got a chance. Get us out of here. Top speed. Now !”

Caldera didn’t move.

“Now,” Dero said, “would be good.”

“Can’t.” Caldera bit her lip.

“Engine?”

“Engine.”

“Buggered again?”

“Again.”

He stared at her, she stared at him, the Manihiki officers got closer.

“You said you’d been going slow deliberately,” Dero said.

“I was lying.”

“I thought you was lying.”

They knew how to make the Shroake train go when it was in the mood to work, but not to tweak somethings wrong in the strange metal hearts & tubes their parents had built. The vehicle sputtered at pitiful speed.

“So what,” Dero said, “d’you propose we do?”

Caldera leaned out of the window. “You know,” she said at last, with rising excitement. “I don’t know that they’ve actually seen us. Look at how they’re switching. They know we’re round here somewhere, but …”

She steered with renewed energy. Took them over points that veered lines close to a looming cliff. Thickly, richly vegetational. Their long journey had already sprayed their train’s flanks with dirt & dust. “Right,” Caldera said. She slowed them yet slower, & stopped the train in the shadows. “Quick,” she said. Climbed out of the roof hatch, & with hook & hands snatched plant matter from the overhangs. Dero did the same, until they stood under a wodge of richly smelling sappy green stuff. They draped their vehicle in the creepers.

“This is a rubbish plan,” Dero said, as they crawled back inside.

“I await your improvements eagerly. & complaining is awesomely helpful.”

Up close, the Shroake train was an absurd, green-pelted, unconvincing thing. But perhaps, in the stark light contrasts of the railsea, over miles, at motion, their poor battered conveyance might pass for some ignorable viney nothing. Dero & Caldera waited. They watched the incoming train through dirty glass & now, too, from behind a green fringe.

“Always knew Mum & Dads had annoyed them,” Dero said. He & Caldera held hands. They waited. The naval train came closer. It approached, closer, closer, it was abreast of them, only a few rail-widths away.

It passed on again. At last, the Siblings Shroake breathed out.

“This thing is barely even going,” Dero said at last. He kicked the inside of the carriage. “What are we going to do?”

“They’re going to find us again, you know,” Caldera said. “I just don’t think we can get by them. They probably will.”

“Yeah,” said Dero. For just a sad & terrible second, he looked like he would cry. “So what we going to do?”

“What can we do?” Caldera said at last. “Keep trying. Do our best.”

She shrugged. After a minute, her brother shrugged, too.

THE DETAILS ARE DISTINCT, THE SPECIFICS SPECIFIC, but the trend clear. Event, encounter, pushing on, the slow degradation of the Shroake train, an against-the-odds continuation. That is what has been.

The train is such a battered shade of itself. But this is the railsea. A greater surprise is surely that the Shroakes are still here at all.

What Dero would admit to, who can say? But Caldera, certainly, is astonished.

“WELL YOU’VE DONE IT NOW!” Caldera didn’t even know who she was talking to anymore.

It was the purest & most undeserved luck that the Manihiki train had not wheeled round, come back & found them. Someone else, however, was after them.

The Shroake train, coaxed to a last life lease, was hauling rail to rail. There was no hiding now. Nothing in this outermost railsea—not landscape, fauna, flora, the rails themselves—behaved as it ought. They passed bridges from & to nowhere, that doubled back at the apex of their curves; lines that spiralled into sinkholes. Birds much bigger than they should be, perhaps a little too limb-encumbered, flew high enough to tickle the upsky.

“Maybe,” Dero whispered, “out here all the lines are blurry, & maybe birds in the sky & really bad things in the upsky are making babies.”

Caldera & Dero pored over charts & teased their dead parents fondly for their scrawls. They configured plans. They blinked too much & missed food. Dero snapped at Caldera & Caldera said less & less, sometimes nothing for hours.