2. The Child of the Train

Better to be moving. That's what train folk say. Better to have rail beneath you, wheels to rock you, a far horizon to reach. On Leaving Day most of all, better for the wait to be over. And the wait has been so long, this time. Ten months of enforced stillness, it is enough to send the calmest of minds mad. Zhang Weiwei, sixteen years old, stands at the window in the little vestibule that leads through to the working end of the train. Here, in the carriages closest to the engine—the crew quarters, the garden carriage, the stores—passengers are not allowed; only the porters and stewards rush by, too busy to pay her any attention. She watches the solid stone buildings of the station recede. High walls enclose the track and groups of small children dash sure-footed along them, their faces covered by masks that turn them into yellow-horned, bulbous-cheeked monsters, waving and dancing their ritual of parting or warning or glee. On the other side of the walls, along the alleys and avenues, shutters will be slamming closed, water boiling on stoves will be thrown out as tainted, couplets will be muttered to ward off bad dreams. The city will be listening, and only when it can no longer hear the sound of the rails and the whistle of the train will it let out its breath and go about its business, content to turn its mind away from the nightmares that lie to the north.

She sniffs. How she has missed these acrid smells, the creaking mechanics of her train, the old familiar terror and excitement, the noise—so constant that she ceases to hear it until it is gone. How she has longed, these past months, for movement, for speed; she has craved it like the red-eyed men in Third crave liquor, gasping for the last drops from the jar, maddened to find it empty.

But now that they are moving again the air vibrates with tension. She has heard the whispers among the crew. Too soon. Too soon for the train to ride again, why not wait for winter and the safer passage through the snow, when the land is drowsy with the cold and danger cannot hide amidst the trees? In summer the land is wakeful, hungry. It is too soon to take the risk.

Not soon enough for her. But then again, she is too in love with risk, Alexei always says.

"And who on this train isn't?" she replies, and he has to acknowledge the truth of it; that they are—all of them—half mad with Wastelands sickness already, with a longing and fear that they would struggle to articulate but which beckons them to the Trans-Siberia Company. They are the ones who hear the Wastelands from the safety of their cities and homes, who cannot resist the call of the great train. They present themselves at the grand Company offices in their London headquarters, or on Baiyun Road or Velikaya Street, knock on the famous wood-paneled doors and stand before unsmiling, gray-haired men who regard them sternly and demand to know why they should be thought worthy. Most are turned away. The chosen few are tested and observed for any indications that they may be susceptible to a landscape that disorders the mind, that drives men to throw themselves at the windows of the train, to scratch their fingers bloody at the doors, desperate to reach the outside. Should no such inclination become apparent, they are given the dark-blue uniform of the Trans-Siberian Express, a contract, a handbook and a Bible on which to swear allegiance to the Queen. From that moment onward they are part of the crew—part of the Company that stretches halfway across the world.

But Weiwei is different. Weiwei is the child of the train. Born neither here nor there, in no country, under no emperor's star, she came bawling into the world as her mother left it, at the very mid-point of the Wastelands, on the floor of the Third Class sleeping car, on a night when phosphorescence turned the creatures of the plains into ghosts. She was swaddled in sheets bearing the Company crest, and passed between the porters and the cooks and a wet-nurse found among the passengers in Third. One week later, when the train stopped at the Russian Wall, she screamed, because until then she had only known movement and noise. Company officials in Moscow were at a loss for what to do with her, never having had to deal with an unexpected orphan before. (Her mother had disguised her pregnancy and had professed herself to her fellow travellers as being quite alone in the world.) But while the Company was inclined to frown upon such maternal carelessness, they decided the best course of action would be to return the child to Beijing on board the next train, and to deliver her into the capable hands of the Chinese state.

And so she was carried and fed and changed by her wet-nurse and whatever member of the crew happened to have a free hand at the right moment. But when the train reached Beijing, and the Captain came to take her to the authorities, the stokers said she'd brought them good luck, and that the coals had burned brighter on this journey; the kitchen boys said the butter had turned just right, for the first time, leading a passenger in First Class to compliment the Cook, something which had never been known to happen before. The night porters said they had liked her company, as she had listened solemnly to their bawdy stories and made barely a wail of complaint. And so the Captain said (at least, in the stories Weiwei was told), "If she earns her keep she may stay. But there will be no spare parts on this train—she must make herself useful, like all of us."

Her first job, then, was as a talisman, a good-luck charm. She slept in the warmth of the kitchen or in a nest of canvas sacks in the luggage car or sometimes in the engine box itself, where the stokers would later tell how she would regard the glowing coals gravely, as if she understood even then their importance in keeping her safe. Later, she was put to work carrying messages from one end of the train to the other, and by the time she was six years old she was a rail rat through and through; everyone's child, and no one's. No one's but the train's.

"You loitering, Zhang?"

Here he comes now, Alexei, only a few years older than her but already promoted to First Engineer, swaggering down the corridor with a railman's gait, sleeves rolled up to show the tattoos on his forearms—complex, congratulatory patterns that Company engineers give themselves after each crossing. Marks of brotherhood (she has never seen a female engineer), and of memory. They touch their arms, sometimes, when they talk of journeys past; of cranks that failed and shafts that barely held. Gears and cogs have turned into abstract patterns on their skin; into ways of remembering. She tries to see whether there is a new design, one to mark the last crossing, but he sees her looking and rolls down his sleeves.

She has barely seen him these last couple of weeks, though they have all been quartered onboard while in the station, preparing for departure; the engineers and the stewards and the porters and the cooks; the drivers and the stokers, the countless parts of the clockwork of the train as it grinds slowly back into gear. A little rusty, a little slower than before; there's an odd stuttering to once familiar routines, a new hesitancy, as if they are all afraid to move too fast in case something should break. The few times she has caught a glimpse of him he has been always moving, filled with a restless energy after their long months of inaction.

"First check?" she asks, to fill the silence. She glances at the clock on the wall. Two minutes before the hour.

"First check," he replies. The engineers' days are filled with checks and tests, a relentless schedule that scrutinizes every inch of the train's complex mechanics, the Company's much-vaunted proof of the train's safety measures. "They've doubled them… We're not going to have a moment to ourselves."

They speak in Railhua, the language of the train, a mixture of Russian, Chinese and English that began with the builders of the line, although the Company frowns upon it and tries to insist on the use of English.

"You'd think they didn't trust you," she says without thinking, then sees his expression darken. "I didn't mean—"

"It doesn't matter." He brushes it away with a wave of his hand and she is caught by a sharp pang of regret for an ease that has been lost. Another thing that the last crossing took away.

"Be careful, Zhang." He looks like he wants to say more but the clock has begun to chime the hour and he is too much of a railman to ignore it. "Just be careful," he says again, and she bristles at the implication that she is not.

She sets off in the opposite direction, toward the crew quarters where those workers not currently on watch can usually be found, playing dice or stretched out on their bunks or wolfing down rice and soup in the crew mess. It is as busy and chaotic as the rest of the train, but at the far end of the carriage, set into the wall, is a little shrine containing an icon of Saint Mathilda and a statue of Yuan Guan. A saint and a god to watch over travellers, and over rail people, who, while putting their trust in mechanics, in wheels and gears and oil, are also inclined to think that it can't do any harm to give polite recognition to the numinous, just in case. Which of them, after all, had not seen things in the Wastelands more impossible than these saints who were once said to have done miracles? Weiwei sees one of the stewards bend his head then place something on the shrine, a surreptitiousness to his movements. He straightens up slowly, glancing around him as if afraid of being watched, then brings his hands together and bows his head again, before hurrying off.

When he has gone she looks more closely to see what he left behind. A glint of bluish-green catches the light from the window; it is a small, perfectly round glass bead.