5. The Not-Quite-Girl

The crew tidy up, as always. They tidy up and try to keep the passengers calm as the train continues its halting way through the tides. Weiwei sees Alexei and another engineer hurrying past, their lips set, their faces pale. The train has been hit by waves before, but never one this powerful.

The train is the strongest ever built.

It is safe, it is safe.

But she is not as sure as she once was. They had all known, even before the last crossing, that the train was being pushed too hard. But they had always believed their own boasts; they had built their own myths of the great armored train. They had been so sure that it would run forever.

"How is the Professor?" Anya Kasharina heaves herself to her feet when Weiwei enters. The kitchens and dining cars are a chaos of smashed crockery, soup spilled on the floor, salt scattered across tables. Weiwei steps gingerly, broken glass crunching underfoot.

"He's with the doctor," says Weiwei.

"Is it—"

"He wasn't physically hurt, but they think that the tides were a strain on his nerves." They don't say Wastelands sickness out loud. It's best not to think of it too much, though all the stewards carry tranquilizer darts, in case any passenger or crew member is overcome by it.

The cook wipes her hands on her apron. She has a soft spot for the Professor, always giving him extra portions and telling him to eat up and get some flesh on his bones. "Well," she says, too brightly, "aren't we always telling him he needs to get his nose out of those books. Over-tired, if you ask me."

The train slows, suddenly, and Weiwei looks out of the window to see another wave go past; the air shimmering, the grass flattened. Anya touches the little iron icon of Saint Mathilda at her neck. "It'll make the butter turn, what's left of it," she mutters. The tides upset the delicate balance of the train. They sour the wine and make the kitchen boys clumsy at their chores. They keep the crew from sleeping and cause even the most placid of the stewards to lose their tempers.

When a semblance of order has been brought back to the dining cars, the cook presses a seed cake into Weiwei's hands, wrapped in muslin. "For the Professor," she says. "His nerves won't get better if he doesn't look after his stomach first."

But Weiwei's feet take her toward the storage car. She will go and see the Professor afterward, she promises herself. It's likely the doctor won't let her in, anyway, and the Professor will need his sleep, no point disturbing him for nothing. She pushes away the twinge of guilt, tries to ignore the weight of the seed cake nestled in her jacket pocket. Rest is what he needs, time to remember what the rails mean to him. Nothing has changed, she tells herself, fiercely. They will keep riding the train forever.

When she nears the Captain's quarters she slows down, as she has become accustomed to on this crossing. If she walks slowly enough, if she times it just right, the door might open. The Captain might emerge. No. She will be in the watchtower, thinks Weiwei. She and the Cartographer will be watching the tracks of the tides, sending orders to the drivers; when to slow, when to wait, when to plunge onward.

Weiwei has just passed the door when she hears it open, and she spins around. But it is Alexei, hair plastered to his forehead, smears of oil up his arms. She feels a wave of disappointment, then the look on his face makes her pause. "What's wrong?" she demands. "Is something damaged? You fixed it, didn't you?"

"For goodness' sake, Zhang…" He looks down the corridor, then gestures for her to follow him. As they reach the door to the vestibule three repairmen hurry past them, nodding to Alexei as they go. Each has the same set expression.

She turns to watch them. "Where are they going?" Weighed down by tools she doesn't recognize. "What's happened?"

He pulls her into a corner of the vestibule and lowers his voice. "You can't tell anyone. We don't want to cause panic."

"I won't." She swallows.

"When the wave hit, it must have dislodged one of the water pipes to the tender, but that's fixable, it should be fine. The problem is that it's knocked the whole system out of joint, somehow; it's caused leaks."

This is the horror of the train crew, the creeping fear that haunts each crossing, that something has shifted, deep in the bowels of the train, amidst the pistons and pipes, that something might rattle loose despite all the care and attention lavished upon it, and might rattle something else loose in turn, and that the tiniest of faults might escalate into something unstoppable.

"Leaks? But… how much water have we lost?"

He doesn't answer, but she can see the answer all too well in his wet hair, in the bottoms of his trousers, soaked a darker blue. "There's a well coming up, further down the line," he says, finally. "We can refill some of it at least, but until then we're going to have to use it carefully."

"But isn't it still days away?" She remembers them having to use a well only once or twice before. The train has to slow down so much in order to lower the water scoop that it is a risk only run if absolutely necessary.

"Yes," he says, unhappily, "and we're going to have to slow down, to conserve what's left."

A shiver of anxiety slips down her back. "So it'll take longer to get to the well."

"There's nothing else we can do. We'll just have to hope it lasts and ration the drinking water. And pray to all the gods of the rail that it will rain."

She doesn't know why her first thought is of the stowaway. Why the image of water leaking from the pipes, drop by precious drop, makes her so afraid, not for the endless thirst of the train but for a girl she barely knows. She thinks of her staring out at the moonlit lake. Thinks of her rising from the water in the bathroom, a drowned girl, coming back to life. She walks unsteadily toward the storage car. The train is already slowing down, but the clatter and thud of the rails seem somehow louder, more insistent, as if to mock them with a reminder of how far there is to go, the well and its life-saving water vanishing into an unreachable distance.

But the stowaway is already an extra mouth to water and feed, already taking what was not hers; now that there will not be enough to use thoughtlessly, now that every drop must be measured, she will be a burden the train cannot carry. Weiwei starts to feel sick. She quickens her steps as she enters the service car and more porters hurry past her, too preoccupied to ask where she is going. Others are still tidying up the mess where cupboards have flown open, scattering their contents across the floor. Through the garden carriage—where all she can see in place of the greenness of the rows of vegetables are the withered stems to come—and into the storage carriage. She hopes Elena has stayed out of sight. She hopes she has not been scared by the erratic movement of the train.

But the stowaway is not hidden away in the roof space. She is out in the open corridor, standing by the window, her attention so fixed on the landscape that she doesn't notice Weiwei's presence, so that Weiwei sees only her reflection in the glass—her lips slightly parted, her hair framing her face, her eyes large and dark—she sees her shimmering, ghostly, against the birches, her fingertips pressed to the window, as if in communion with her double outside. Then the Elena in the glass looks right at her, and for a moment it is as if the outside is looking in, before, almost imperceptibly, she alters the way she stands, mimicking Weiwei's own posture again, changing back into the Elena she knows. But it is too late—Weiwei has seen her, for the first time, as she is, not as she pretends to be, and hasn't she known it all along? Hasn't she been hiding the truth from herself? Not a scared, lost stowaway, in need of protection, but a Wastelands creature, a not-quite-girl.