3. The Game

It is the morning after the tides, and Elena is thirsty.

"We'll reach the well soon," Weiwei says, when she has returned to the storage carriage, her back aching from a morning spent carrying flasks and water buckets. "The rationing is only until then. You just can't have any more midnight baths." She tries to keep the worry out of her tone, forcing herself to hold Elena's gaze, though the stowaway is too close, her attention too vivid. It makes the roof space seem small and enclosed. Does she regret it, leaving the freedom of her home? What will she do, without the water she needs? The questions hover on Weiwei's lips but she can't bring herself to ask them. Elena licks her lips. "When is soon?"

"Three days," says Weiwei. "Only three days."

If the train holds. If there is enough water left for them to reach the well.

"There is a game," Weiwei says, after a while. A game of silence and stealth, of watching and waiting. "You will be good at this. But I must warn you, for all your stalking through the marshes, I am good at it too."

It is a game of distraction, because she does not know what else to do.

It has only one rule. Don't be seen. Weiwei has played it since she was old enough to explore the train alone. Before that, even, if the oldest stewards are to be believed; they claim to have lost her on several occasions, when she took advantage of a moment's distraction to crawl away, and they would find her curled up beneath a bunk in Third or in a nest of blankets in the storage cupboard. Then later, when Alexei joined the train as an apprentice, the game grew into a complex system of points and faults, a competition to prove who was the quickest, the most skilled in squirming out of the way of the stewards, of tricking the passengers into looking elsewhere, of finding the most unexpected spaces to squeeze into. But when Alexei was promoted to Engineer, he had made it clear that such games were beneath him.

"Only because I win more often," Weiwei had said.

Alexei had shrugged. "I let you. You were just a child."

After that, Weiwei played alone.

She finds a change of clothes for Elena from the lost property box—a plain blue dress and pinafore of the kind that some of the younger women in Third wear. Elena holds it up without much enthusiasm, making Weiwei laugh at the expression on her face. "If you're wanting to blend in you can't go around in silk in the middle of the day. Where did you find it, anyway?"

"There were ladies who came to the garrison, who looked like summer flowers. I wanted to touch them, I took their dresses from the floor. They called me a ghost, but the soldiers didn't believe them, so I hid the soldiers' medals and I threw their shoes into the water, and they were more afraid than the ladies had been. They lit candles and left me sweet rice and peaches, and after that I did not steal any more shoes."

The garrison ghost,thinks Weiwei. Would those soldiers have been more afraid to know that it was a Wastelands creature haunting them, not an unquiet spirit? "You scared them," she says. "They tell stories about you."

Elena looks rather smug. "But I didn't scare them as much as the train did," she says. "They were scared every time it arrived from what you call the Wastelands. They kept it trapped, they watched it as if it were a creature with claws and teeth and hunger, come to rip them apart. When it was gone they would wash and wash themselves, they would say, How I fear I will never get clean."

They begin with the crew quarters; creep into the garden carriage then hurry out when the chickens begin to squawk; slip into the storage cabins and the laundry and the linen cupboard. As Weiwei had guessed, the crew are busy with the passengers, and those few they see hurrying through the corridors are easy to avoid. But it is still a foolish risk to take, a mad, sickening risk. She shivers, despite the heat, as she and Elena crouch behind a moving panel in the wall—one of the many that have been used for smuggling—having dived out of sight just before two porters make their way through the carriage. Elena is alert, every muscle poised. As if she is hunting, thinks Weiwei; patient and slow and ready to spring.

Yet she would be lying if she said she didn't feel the thrill of it, the joy of having someone to share the train's secrets. She feels more awake, more alive, than she has done since the last crossing, despite the risk, despite the fear of the loss of water, despite all the rules she is breaking. She feels proud of the train's power, its ingenuity, seeing it anew through Elena's eyes, trying to answer all her questions. She hears her humming to herself, and it is not so much a tune, Weiwei thinks, as an attempt to feel the same pitch of the train; to sing in time with it. But sometimes she sees the stowaway frowning, as if she can't find the right pitch, and she hurries to show her some new wonder, to pull her back.

"The furnace," she says, tugging at Elena's arm. "You wanted to see the furnace."

They get as close as possible; Elena has been desperate to see the furnace, to see how the fiery mouth of the train opens and swallows down coal. She is still puzzled by how so great a thing as the train can move of its own accord and has let Weiwei know that her explanations are inadequate. But it is the one part of the train never left unattended, the stokers always watchful and alert. The best Weiwei can do is to take her through the narrow corridor in the final carriage before the cab—one of the two coal and water tenders—and let her look through the little window in the door, though it is difficult to see through the thick glass to the deep orangey dark, where the stokers, in their goggles and thick protective suits, tend the furnace like acolytes to a god.

The game is more difficult in the passenger carriages, though in Third Class there are enough passengers for one more to go unremarked on.

"It's impossible not to be seen at all," says Weiwei, "so the rule is, if anyone speaks to you, you lose a point."

Elena nods, but it is Weiwei who loses point after point, even though she is practiced at slipping past groups of passengers as they are occupied with food or with arguing.

"No one seems to notice you at all," she grumbles, as they hide in a corner of the Third Class kitchen car.

"Will we go to First Class now?"

Weiwei shakes her head. "They'll know you're not one of them, and the stewards are more careful, they're scared of getting complaints."

"But I want to see it. And no one notices me. They will not complain."

"You don't know what they're like, they complain about everything."

"Not about me," says Elena, and she grabs Weiwei's hand, pulling her out of their hidden corner and down toward First.

"Oh, piss and iron," curses Weiwei, "no, Elena!" But though the stowaway is slight she is strong, unnaturally strong, and she pulls her forward, through the kitchen carriage and into the dining car, mercifully empty, then into the sleeping carriage and straight into Marya Petrovna, throwing open her cabin door.

The widow looks distracted, her hair uncombed. "Weiwei!" she exclaims. "How fortuitous, I had wanted to see you."

Weiwei freezes, aware only of Elena beside her, pressing herself into the carriage wall.

"What is the name of the poor gentleman who was taken ill yesterday?" the widow goes on. "I had hoped to send my best wishes for his recovery."

"His name is Grigori Danilovich Belinsky," Weiwei replies, slowly. "Though most people just call him the Professor."

Marya Petrovna seems to be looking vaguely in Elena's direction, but then rubs her forehead as if she has a headache beginning. "Thank you," she says. "I shall… I shall certainly send him my regards," and she walks off toward the saloon car without a backward glance.

Weiwei watches her go. "She didn't see you," she says, in amazement. "She looked but she didn't see you."

Elena is smiling in a rather self-satisfied way. "I told you so," she says.

Weiwei is torn between jealousy and excitement. The game changes. It is not that Elena is invisible, it is not as simple as that—it is more that she is able to trick the eye into simply not seeing her.

"But how does it work? Do you change something about yourself? About the backdrop? Why can I still see you?" It is Weiwei's turn to ask questions and Elena's to be patient, and a little proud.

"I told you, I am good at being silent and still."

"But I could see you…"

"You know I am there. I can't trick you."

"But how does it work?"

They test it in the saloon car, though Weiwei is tense with nerves as they enter. The beautiful Frenchwoman looks up sharply as Elena flits past, but then the stowaway freezes, and it is as if she vanishes entirely into the background. The Frenchwoman frowns, but goes back to her reading. Weiwei lets out the breath she has been holding.

The husband, of course, notices nothing. A typical Traverser, she thinks; too busy thinking about how he will brag to his friends at home to notice anything.

"Are you quite well, child?"

Weiwei realizes that the Countess is regarding her quizzically.

"Ah, perhaps she will be able to tell us when we may bathe again?" demands the Frenchman, looking up. "It is quite too much to expect us to neglect our health in this way."

"Really, LaFontaine, there is much research to suggest that too much bathing can be equally harmful," says another of the European gentlemen.

"But not for those of us with sensitive noses," says the silk merchant.

"One usually stands with one's mouth closed, my dear," says the Countess.

Weiwei closes her mouth. She tears her gaze away from the wall, where Elena is trying not to laugh.

What power! What possibilities! Beyond anything Weiwei could have ever hoped for—a pair of eyes on the hidden parts of the train; a pair of ears to listen to the stewards' gossip. Secrets to collect and hoard away. Back in the storage car, Elena mimics the Third Class steward's puffed-out chest, Vassily's charming smile. Draped in discarded sacks, she grows into the fearsome Countess; she raises her eyes to the heavens in a perfect imitation of the pious Vera.

But Weiwei has a question that is bothering her. She waits for the right time to ask it, when the train has quietened for the evening and they have returned to the storage carriage, when Elena has sipped the water Weiwei has managed to horde from her own rations.

"There was a man," says Weiwei, "who wrote that he once saw a girl from the window of a train, and the girl haunted him; she haunted his book. Afterward, he never wrote again. It was twenty years ago he wrote it, soon after the railway was built. But do you think the girl could—" she hesitates, "could it have been you?" It seems impossible, but time works differently here, that's what the Cartographer says, though she knows that he has found no pattern to it.

"I remember a man," says Elena, slowly. "Among all the men I watched, there was one who watched me back. He pressed his hands to the window. He opened his mouth as if he would speak to me."

"But how did he see you?" This is the question that has been tapping at her mind ever since she realized what Elena can do. "If you watched for so long, if you can hide yourself so well, how did he manage to see you?"

Elena doesn't answer right away. "I don't know," she says, eventually, and Weiwei lets herself smile at the annoyance in her tone. "Maybe some people look more closely," Elena goes on. "Not many. People like you, who are looking for something. Who are not satisfied with what they have."

Weiwei frowns. "I'm not looking for anything." Everything I need is on this train. It has always been enough for her, and nothing has changed, despite what the Professor might say.

After a while Elena says, "His book is famous?"

"Yes, the most famous book about the… about the train, and the landscape. Rostov, he was called. He wrote a guidebook for passengers on the train, so they would know what they might see. So they could be… careful. But on the journey, he lost his faith. Some people say that he lost his mind." Not satisfied, she thinks. Perhaps that is right. She has read his other books, his Cautious Traveller's Guides to Beijing and to Moscow and to other places she has never been, and in all of them his own certainty is emblazoned on every page. See this, go here; this is the history, the meaning, the truth. But the guide to the Wastelands is different; his certainties fall away; the more he looks, the less he understands. No wonder he could never find his way back to who he was before.

Then in a different tone Elena asks, "What happened to him?"

"To Rostov? Nobody really knows. After he wrote his book, he… well, people say he went mad, he vanished."

"What do you say?"

Weiwei pauses. "I like to think that he decided to try on a different life, to leave caution behind. That he carried on travelling."

"Carried on travelling," echoes Elena, though Weiwei can't help thinking that it was more probable that he fell into the Neva, or ended up unrecognizable in a Petersburg gutter. That's what happens, says the whispery voice in her head, to those who lose themselves to the landscape. To those who aren't satisfied.