Shiv Mako pitched backward into the state car and Chandni landed on top of him. She pulled the knife out and stuck it in again and kept on doing that over and over, slamming it down with both hands and all her strength, until she realized that some of the blood that was splattering everywhere was coming from her, not him, and she looked down and saw the hole his gun had made in her and then she dropped the knife and her face turned beige and she toppled sideways off him and clung to one of the state car’s fancy seats.
“Get her into the sick bay! Quickly!” said the Damask Rose, and Threnody, who had just been staring in horror, realized that she had to do something. She ran to Chandni and heaved her through the door the Rose opened into the tiny, white, antiseptic-smelling medical bay. A bed slid out of the wall and she got Chandni onto it and pulled her clothes open. The wound was in the side of her chest, a bruised hole where blood welled redly out each time Threnody tried to wipe it away. The Damask Rose was issuing calm instructions.
Chandni said in a vague, drunk-sounding voice, “I killed him, didn’t I?”
“You had to. If you hadn’t…”
“I’ve never killed anyone before.”
“Not even in that awful underwater place you’re always going on about?”
“I was just trying to impress you. I was in plenty of fights, but I’ve never actually killed a person.”
“He wasn’t a person, Chandni. He was an interface.”
“That’s worse, isn’t it? Killing a Guardian. They’ll put me back in the freezers forever now…” Her face crumpled and she started to cry.
“No,” said Threnody, baring Chandni’s arm so that the Damask Rose could lower a long white arm of her own from the medical bay ceiling and inject her with a dose of something. “They won’t put you back in the freezers; I won’t allow it.”
Chandni’s eyes were clouding over as the drugs took effect. The Rose was readying other arms, with probes and swabs and medical sealant. Chandni sighed and said, “I couldn’t just leave you to look after yourself.”
Then she was asleep, but Threnody still waited there, watching the Rose’s white arms at work until she started to feel sick and dizzy because of all the blood, and the train told her to go and check on Zen. So she stumbled forward — the train was still slowly moving — and found him where she’d left him, sitting with his headset on, staring straight through her.
“Zen?” she said. “Zen?” She wondered if he had to be woken with a kiss, like a sleeping princess in a fairy tale, but immediately thought better of it and slapped his face instead, as hard as she could. It was rather satisfying. He came awake with a shout, her red handprint fading on his cheek.
“What did you do that for? Ow!”
“I thought you were trapped in that place, with the Twins.”
“I wasn’t trapped, I was negotiating.”
“They listened to you?”
“I think so. The same deal we offered them earlier, before all this kicked off. We get to run trains through the new gate, and in return we never tell anyone about what they did to the Railmaker. We’ll let the Guardians spread whatever stories they want about the Web of Worlds and where it all came from.”
“Don’t you think people ought to know the truth? It’s not right if the Guardians can go on acting like loving gods, after what they did to the poor Railmaker…”
Zen shrugged. Lots of things weren’t right, but he had never seen it as any business of his to sort them out. He just wanted to stay alive, and make a little money, and ride the rails with Nova and the Rose.
“Where is Nova?” he asked.
Outside the Rose’s windows, the ash was still falling. She was almost stationary now. She opened a door for Zen and he jumped down and walked a little way from the track so that he could see past her.
The rails ran empty all the way to the new K-gate.
“Where’s the Railbomb?” he shouted.
“It must have gone through,” said Threnody. “I expect it had to. At the speed it was going, I don’t think it could stop.”
He went a little way toward the gate, hoping that Nova had jumped clear and was waiting for him by the line. She wasn’t. The ground trembled, and the ash flurried down. Far away, red rivers of lava were crawling down the flanks of brand-new mountains. Around the gate a few faint Station Angels danced.
“Did it go off?” he asked, but his headset was dead and the Rose couldn’t hear him. He had to trudge back through the ash-drifts to the state car and climb aboard and ask again. “Did the bomb go off, on the other side?”
“There is no way of knowing,” said the train, “but I don’t think so. It was slowing when it hit the gate. I think Nova had disarmed it.”
“We have to go after it.”
“We have to get Chandni to a hospital,” said Threnody. “I need to talk to my uncle and tell him about this deal. We need to make sure Khoorsandi stays a Noon world; we may need to bring in more Noon CoMa from somewhere before the Prells try anything…”
“Nova is more important than any of that!”
“She’ll be fine in the hub! She can wait. She’s only a Moto.”
“Psssscchhhh,” said the Damask Rose. “I will take us all back to the Fire Station. We can drop off Lady Threnody and Miss Hansa and ditch those useless carriages. And then we will go and find Nova.”