LATE EVENING, INTO THE GLOAMING, THROUGH ITS DESCENT into night & that night itself, the Shroakes’ train went. It went untroubled by the darkest of the darkness.
The Shroakes checked expensive maps, used their fine & cutting-edge sensors, which surrounded the vehicle in a fringe of sensitivity. In those lines close enough to shore that Manihiki’s government claimed them as their own, the Shroake train, as much as any train could ever be said to, crept. It whispered along unlit.
The Shroakes wore their best clothes. Though the day was a secret, & though they had packed almost nothing but rugged, ugly items chosen for practicalities, each had made one outfit’s worth of an exception. A few miles beyond the shoreline of Manihiki, where their journey could be said to have started for real, they had changed.
Dero wore a fancy lapelled suit in blue cotton, only very slightly too small for him, & had parted his disobedient hair in the middle. Caldera wore loose burgundy trousers & a froufrou shirt that made her brother raise his eyebrows, & that she was not wildly fond of herself, but that was without question her smartest thing. She & Dero stared at each other with their identically brown eyes.
“There,” Dero said. It was a formal occasion, this, they had decided.
In the distance, the lighthouse of the main harbour shone, its beam rotating, a sweep of glimmering across the miles as the illumination touched thousands of rails in its passing. The train’s engines & equipment, its charts & intentions, were matters of interest, its passengers knew, to the government. So they rode darkly, days before they had claimed, to escape attention.
Eventually, beyond their nation’s immediate purview, they kicked up the levels of their strange engine, accelerated & turned on their lamps. From its front the locomotive was a light-cyclops, its blasting ivory beam flooding the iron tangle before it, sending startled burrowing beasts out of its way. The train went east, north, east, north, north, north. Whole generations, whole civilisations of moths hurtled at this luminously exciting thing &—so cruel a fixation!—were swiftly splatted on the light they loved.
If any had made it past that unforgiving glow, entered, what would they have seen? The foremost carriage shared something of the character of the Shroake House. More compact & cleaner, but its bunks, chairs, table, desk, discreet commode were, too, hemmed in by paperwork, books, tools & salvage.
In the uppermost bunk slept Dero, swaying with the vehicle’s motion. He woke occasionally & abruptly—such had been the shape of his sleep a long time, since two-thirds of his parents had disappeared. When woke he did, he would sit up & stare, as if through the metal ceiling, as if he were the train’s eyes. His gaze was the same as the one his mother had had when she grew tired of salvage, of piecing together & making things, & had looked, instead, beyond. Dero was too young to remember his inherited expression on she who had bequeathed it to him, but when his sister saw it on his face, she gasped, because she was not.
Caldera, tired but wired, watched the screens her mother & fathers had taught her to read. Prodded the controls they had taught her to control. She sat in the middle of a nest of avant-garde tech & salvage combined. A tweak of a mechanism & her chair went roofward, so she could peer through a high ribbon of window; then she took it back down to pore over various camera-feeds on screens around her.
Over the raskaba of the wheels & the whooshing of the fusion engine, Caldera hummed. Did she stare with the same hankering for distance & something-or-other as did her brother & as had her mother? Perhaps. Something like that.
She thought about Sham, with gratitude for his information, for the picture that he had shown them. She tapped keys on Dad Byro’s ordinator. Extracted information. Collated it with their other information, including Sham’s descriptions. Began to build a route.
With distant affection Caldera regretted that Sham had not come. She took bites from a sandwich, sung.
An alarm bleated, glowed red. She checked her clattering information. A change of gauge was coming.
She prodded buttons. How much would this particular technology have excited the burghers, the salvors, the privateers of Manihiki! she thought.
Raskaba-tak, the train slowed but not by very much—a tug or two of levers, a switch set & the engine shuddered exactly like a troubled animal; braces emerged from its underside, took its weight as it rolled, raised it an instant, mechanisms wound, the wheels on the momentarily suspended vehicle slipping closer together to return & to land snikt into these new narrower rails.
There were no hours of complicated rail-&-wheel-side shenanigans, only seconds with the gauge-slip. Caldera inserted words of salutation & praise for her family into her song.
She did not wake Dero when she passed a hunk of metal that she suddenly suspected was one of her parents’ carriages. Discarded by them so early in their trip, for reasons unknown. She said nothing.
When she had to sleep she stopped the train & armed its defences. The ordinator would probably have been able to continue the journey unwatched, but she would rather avoid any risk. It would soon be five, & Dero’s turn.
& on the day that followed, & for days after that, the Shroakes continued their single-minded drive through hostile country. They traced creative routes through the railsea towards its most arcane & neglected places, following their family’s secret route, looking for whatever it was their mother & father had found.