3. Night Wanderings

The rules of the train are very clear. Crew members caught aiding a stowaway will face train justice themselves. "There is no order outside," the Captain always said, in the brief, unemotional talk she would give the crew before each crossing, looking at each crew member in turn, so that they felt she was talking to them, and them alone. "And so we keep our own order within. That is why we have rules. If we follow the rules and maintain the order of the train, we will be safe."

The stowaway has put a crack in the order of the train. Too many cracks and it will shatter. It is too fragile, haven't they all seen that now? "Stop it," Weiwei says to herself. "Just stop it." If the stowaway stays hidden, who is to know? Could one girl really pose a risk to the train? But what if she is found, what if she falls ill, what happens then? Weiwei doesn't like to think of it. If she tells the Captain now, she would be helping Elena. Yes, that's right, she would be helping her—she would make sure the crew did not take justice into their own hands; they wouldn't, not against a girl so young, barely older than Weiwei herself. She would be fed and looked after. Order would be restored.

By evening, she has made up her mind. Through the carriages she goes, squeezing through the Third Class dining car, where they are still queuing to get in, to sit six to a table and join in the clatter and curse the cooks. Through the sleeping cars, where passengers gather in little knots of men and little knots of women, one small child running between them like a ball kicked from one to another. Through the crew carriages, where off-duty crew members have their heads lowered over bowls of noodles, wreathing them in steam. All the way to the Captain's quarters, moving too quickly to think and raising her hand to knock sharply on the door.

She is surprised when a steward opens the door and there are voices and music and the sweet smell of dessert. An orchestra plays on the phonograph, a scratchy, ghostly sound.

"Yes? What is it, Zhang? I need to get back to this, they'll be demanding coffee any moment."

"I…" She stops. "Is she… entertaining?"

He leans on the door. "Unless it's urgent, or in other words, unless there is fire on the line or alternatively a fire on the train, then come back later. No, come back tomorrow, at a decent time to be knocking on someone's door."

"But… I don't understand." Behind the steward she can see into the Captain's dining room. The Cartographer is there, and the passenger she gave the glass marble to, Marya Petrovna, she is smiling at something that someone has said. It must be the Captain, out of sight at the head of the table. The Captain who has been missing this whole time, who has left them all to their own devices, here she is, as if everything is normal, drinking wine with First Class.

"Come back tomorrow, Zhang," says the steward, firmly, closing the door before she can argue. Just before it shuts, she sees Marya Petrovna look up at her then away, with no sign of recognition. Just another servant in a uniform.

Weiwei stands in the empty corridor, staring at the closed door as if her gaze could burn right through it, just as when she was a child, convinced that if she just wanted hard enough, she could bend the world to her will.

She had thought—as far as her thoughts had taken her—that she would knock and knock until the Captain had no choice but to let her in, and she would share the secret of the stowaway, relieve herself of the burden. She would be a good, loyal Company member. But now this. She could wait until morning and try again, but there is an angry little voice in her head that is saying, Why? When the Captain is feasting yet leaving the train to the mercy of the Crows? Why should she be the one to follow the rules?

Once, she asked the Captain why it was that she had allowed an orphaned baby to stay on the train. "Didn't I disrupt the order?" she asked, knowing even then how important order was to the train—for everyone to have their role, for everything to be in its place.

The Captain thought for a moment or two. "There were some who said," she began, "that I only allowed you to stay onboard because I was a woman. I think they were relieved, to know that I was just as they expected, after all. It nearly made me change my mind."

"Then what made you change it back again?"

The Captain tapped her fingers on the iron rail around the lookout tower. "I suppose," she said, "it was the thought that human life could triumph even here, even in the midst of such chaos. You would be a symbol of our success, an act of defiance against the Wastelands."

An act of defiance,thinks Weiwei now. Yes. She sets off, away from the Captain's quarters. The corridors in this part of the train are empty, all the crew are busy with their evening work, she does not need the excuses that are ready to trip off her tongue. An insistent, irresistible urge is rising inside her. She can feel the release, the relief of giving in, like dropping the precious object you have always been so afraid of smashing.

Into the storage carriage and up over the piles of goods, pushing open the trapdoor in the ceiling and squinting into the shadows above.

"Hello?" she whispers. Now that she is here, the thought of climbing into the darkness where the stowaway waits makes her uneasy. "Hello?" again. "Elena?"

But the darkness doesn't answer back. She climbs in further, groping on the floor for the lantern she left. The same musty smell, but the lantern illuminates only an empty space. The stowaway is gone.

A panicked stumble through the roof space, just to be sure, to be absolutely sure that it is true. Why has she gone? Where has she gone? She wants to wail, Why would you take the risk? She, Weiwei, might pass through the train unnoticed, but she is the child of the train and she knows its rhythms and workings; holds it in her head like a complex mechanical puzzle, what times the shifts change, and when the porter is likely to sneak to the kitchen for a sip of wine, and where the under-stewards can be found napping, and when the First Class passengers dress for dinner. The child of the train can slip through it like a ghost, but a stranger will be noticed, the alarm will go up. And what will she say, the stowaway, when she is caught, interrogated? When she is asked if anyone helped her?

Back down into the carriage itself, also empty, then out into the corridor, where she notices the smell, the patches of damp on the carpet, faint footprints, as if someone has just walked barefoot through a muddy puddle. Now where would that person go? The footprints are too faint to follow easily but she keeps catching a glimpse, keeps catching that musty dampness hanging in the air, as her ears stretch and she tenses, expecting at any moment for shouts to ring out—a stranger onboard, an intruder, a thief of space and resources. But all is quiet. The nighttime train is different from the daytime train. You can feel its movement more, somehow, when the corridors have emptied, when the noise of the rails fills in the silence and creeps into your bones. The nighttime train creaks and whispers. It grows bigger, as though it is breathing out all the distances of the day.

She opens the door to the garden carriage. The air feels lighter in here, cleaner. Lettuces and herbs grow in neat tubs, and chickens strut in a fenced-off enclosure. There are cabinets where mushrooms grow in the dark. Weiwei comes here, sometimes, when she feels the walls of the train begin to close in on her. "Elena?" she calls. But the chickens just look at her quizzically, and there is nowhere for a stowaway to hide.

On, then, to the Third Class sleeping carriages. The lights go out at eleven, so the carriage is dark but for the one small light above the doorway that burns all night. There are the sounds of conversation but no hint of a disturbance—the stowaway must have passed through unseen—and Weiwei allows a grudging admiration at her stealthiness. She moves on to the dining cars, convinced that the girl must be looking for food. But the locks on the Third Class kitchen are untouched, and in First the under-cook is baking bread for the next day. Weiwei looks inside, carefully, the smell reminding her that she hasn't eaten this evening, and it takes all of her self-control not to sneak in and try to steal a roll. Luca, one of the kitchen boys, is leaning sleepily against the oven, a brace of utensils in his hand to wake him up with a clatter if he falls asleep. But no trace of the stowaway. Where else would a stowaway go, if not to find food?

And then she thinks—Water.

She creeps on, quickly now, through the empty dining car and into the First Class sleeping carriages, all the way along until she reaches the bathrooms.

The First Class cabins all have sinks and water closets, and when the train was first built they even had their own baths. But this had taken up too much space and had put more pressure on one of the most complicated aspects of the train's engineering—its provision of water—so special bathrooms had been put in, to be shared among the passengers.

On any steam train, water is a constant, pressing need. On the Trans-Siberian Express it is an obsession. The train is always thirsty. It gulps down water in an endless, bottomless greed. It drinks and drinks, and the largest tenders made could not hold enough to see it through the long spaces of the Wastelands, so the surveyors and scientists and engineers of the Company had built a labyrinth of pipes and pumps and tanks, to reuse the water and send it around and around the train itself. Pipes for the engineers to listen to and coax, stores for the drivers and stokers to watch and measure and guard, taps for Weiwei to polish and marvel at. She is always annoyed that the passengers barely seem to notice the gleaming pipes that run along the corridors and into the cabins and kitchens and bathrooms (except when they make clunking noises in the night, when there are complaints that a person can't get a good night's sleep with all this racket). They don't seem to think it miraculous that water pours out at the turn of a tap, or that they can sink into a bath, on a moving train, days from anywhere.

There is water seeping out of the bathroom, staining the carpet around the door a deeper red. She hesitates, then pushes open the door, just a crack, to slip inside.

A cloud of steam surrounds her. You can't move fast, in the steam, it slows you down too much, sticks to your hair and your skin. All she can see is a yellow glow above the mirrors where the one lamp is burning, all she can hear is water running from the taps. Water pools around her feet, soaking her shoes, it runs over the sides of the white porcelain bathtub. Somewhere down the corridor comes the chime of a clock. Midnight.

"Hello?" Slowly, through the water, pushing the clouds of steam aside, to the bath, the black and white tiles of the floor shimmering with each step.

There is a drowned girl beneath the water. Her hair surrounds her like weeds, her skin almost translucent, her lips slightly apart.

Then she opens her eyes.

Without really thinking about what she is doing, Weiwei rolls up her sleeve, and plunges her arm into the bath. She reaches for the stowaway's hand, feels strong fingers close around her own and Elena is pulling her down toward the water, and Weiwei thinks—there are stories like this; stories the passengers tell her on slow evenings, that they bring from their homes and their grandmothers, stories of faces in the depths and of the border places where you should not go. She has time to think all this, even time to think, How strange to think so many things so quickly… And she is close enough to the water to feel its warmth on her face, to feel that they are suspended in time, she and the stowaway, as though they have become reflections of each other, one above the water and one below. If she lets herself be pulled in, she thinks, she will not come back out, or she will be changed, like the people in the stories, who cannot return to the lives they left behind. So she tugs harder, she grips the side of the bath with her other hand and she pulls and pulls and the stowaway rises from the water, breaking the surface and sending a wave sloshing onto the floor as Weiwei staggers backward.

The girl's hair is plastered to her head, her eyes an inky blue. Only her head and shoulders are above the water. She looks like a child, annoyed at being disturbed from her private games.

"What are you doing? Why on earth would you…" Weiwei is at a loss for words, not a state she is familiar with. She waves a hand, frantically, in the direction of the door. "What if someone else came in? What if someone had seen you? You're not… you don't even have decent…" She looks around and spots the blue silk dress in a damp pile on the floor. "What were you thinking?"

Elena tilts her head to one side, as Weiwei has seen birds do, when they are eyeing a juicy meal, calculating distance and speed and probability. "I wanted the water," she says, as if wondering why anyone is making a fuss.

"We need to leave," says Weiwei. How long have they been here? The steam is vanishing, and so too is the way it softened everything around them. Now all the sharp corners are coming back into focus, reality reasserting itself. Now they are just two girls somewhere they shouldn't be, and she listens for footsteps in the corridor, for shouts of surprise at the water staining the carpet outside. The dripping water echoes loud enough to bring the stewards running.

"Here." She picks up the blue dress, turned darker blue by the water.

The girl stands up and takes it, making no move to cover her nakedness, so Weiwei looks away, more shocked than she would want to admit.

She hears the slosh of water as the girl steps out of the bath, and frowns. It should be draining away, not flooding like this. Weiwei crouches down to poke at the drain in the corner of the room, which leads to an underfloor tank, from which in turn the water will be taken and reused, passed into the giant tenders to feed the engine. It is clogged with what looks like soil or mud, a wet earthy smell making her cover her nose and look back at the stowaway, who is wriggling into her dress.

"I should find you some other clothes," says Weiwei, poking at the drain again.

"Why?" Elena tugs the short sleeves over her shoulders, where they fall down again.

"Why? Because if you're going to sneak onto the train illegally it might be a good idea not to be found wandering the corridors at night looking like—"

"Like what?"

Weiwei hesitates. "Like a… a… I don't know, if you're going to do something as wrong, as, as dangerous as this then you have to be careful." She can feel her temper rising at the sheer madness, the sheer stupidity of it, though whether it is the girl's or her own she isn't sure.

The girl gives her that tilting look again. "I'm sorry," she says, and sounds so insincere that Weiwei can't help it, she starts to laugh.

"Most people would just run a bath, you know, not flood the whole room." She imagines Alexei's face if he were here and laughs even harder, and it has been a long time since she has felt a release like this, despite the absurdity of it all, despite the Captain locked away in her quarters, despite the Wastelands and the Crows and the scattered fragments of her memories. It feels like walls breaking.

Their luck holds, the corridors are empty. Where there should be crew members patrolling, there is no one in sight. The part of her that is loyal and good feels a shiver of unease. The part that is conspiring to protect a stowaway lets out a sigh of relief.

Elena pads beside her silently. As they slip through the darkened sleeping carriages Weiwei imagines passengers waking, and, upon seeing two small figures hurry past, convincing themselves that ghosts stalk the train.

They do not speak. Midnight is no time for social niceties. They have reached the vestibule before the store carriage when the stowaway stops abruptly.

"Look," she whispers.

Weiwei looks, but now that night has fallen all she can see is their own ghostly reflection in the glass.

"Not outside, on the inside." Elena points and Weiwei realizes what she's looking at—a moth, on the inside of the window, half the size of her hand, its folded wings patterned in black and gray tracery.

She leans closer and the moth opens its wings to reveal a pair of black eyes, wide like a nighttime bird's. Weiwei steps back in surprise but Elena laughs and with a swift movement catches the moth in her cupped hands. When she opens them a crack Weiwei can see the moth sitting still, unconcerned. Two thin fern-like strands emerge from its head, waving slightly.

"Another stowaway," says Weiwei. It must have traveled with them since Beijing, folding its wings out of sight. "It's beautiful." Though the eyes on its wings are disconcerting, staring back at her.

Wordlessly, Elena raises her hand and places the moth on the side of her head, like a hair ornament. She twists her neck to admire her reflection in the glass.

"All the ladies will want one," says Weiwei. "You will be the toast of Moscow. You may need a new dress, though."

Elena looks down at the damp blue silk then smooths the fabric and inclines her head—like the elegant French lady in First Class, thinks Weiwei.

"I have never had clothes that are new," she says. "I would like them."

The moth opens its wings and settles on her hair and Weiwei feels a sudden flash of desire. She wants it. Not to place on her own hair, but to treasure and keep, to own a thing for itself, for its brightness. For its wide pale-ringed eyes. There is almost nothing she owns that does not belong to the train—her only clothes, the uniform of the train crew; her only possessions, a few books and pictures that she hides from prying eyes. She wants something beautiful, something that is hers alone.

"Here—a gift." As if reading her thoughts, Elena lifts the moth down, letting it crawl over her fingers, the fern-like strands on its head moving up and down, as if trying to taste the moisture on her skin. Weiwei holds out her hand and the moth crawls onto it, so light she can barely feel its feet, the brush of its wings. As it walks across her hand it leaves a trail of what look like scales, silvery and dry.