4. Wraiths

Water. Shimmering through the trees. Weiwei can feel the crew holding their breath as it gets closer. Water for the engine, water to tide them over until they get back onto the main line. Yet the risks of using it, even if only for the furnace, are so great… Wastelands water, untested, unknown. Who knows what changes it may bring? Pressing her face to the window, she can see that the ground is soft and damp, grass and soil glistening. Ahead, a birch tree forest seems to emerge from a shallow lake. She realizes she is holding the handrail so tight her fingers ache.

The train is going to stop. For the first time that any of them can remember, it is going to stop. The air in every carriage is thick with tension. The train is going to stop.

When the water was sighted her first thought had been to rush to the stowaway and tell her the news—It is almost over, soon you will be well again—but she had held back. What if the water was deemed too badly tainted, the risk too great? She couldn't bear to think of the look on Elena's face. But there is another sneaking, selfish thought—"I don't know whether they are taunting me or calling me back," Elena had said. If she saw the water, if she felt its pull… Weiwei tries to put it from her mind.

"Who's going out?" she demands, when she sees Alexei in the crew mess. Someone will go to gauge the depth, to bring back a sample for Suzuki to test. "One of the Repairmen?"

"The Captain," he says, a strained look on his face.

"What? But surely, she wouldn't—" It's protocol for the Captain always to stay on the train. She is too important to risk.

"She's insisting on it. Now, of all times, to finally decide to show herself." He shakes his head.

"But…" She feels sick. The train stopping, here on the ghost rails, here where they do not even have Suzuki's maps to guide them. "How can she leave? She's needed here, the passengers are already terrified."

"Hasn't she left already? Did she ever arrive?"

She is taken aback by the venom in his voice.

In Third, as expected, the passengers are frightened and demanding, but the promise of water helps to calm them down. She hopes it is a promise they can keep. She leaves the steward to deal with the passengers and slips away toward First, intending to finally find Marya.

The First Class passengers are being gathered together in the saloon car, the Countess demanding loudly why they are to be treated like children, the stewards wearing expressions of strained patience.

"Have you seen Marya Petrovna?" Weiwei asks.

"I have not seen her since breakfast," says the Countess. "I'm afraid she was suffering from a headache and retired to her cabin."

But Weiwei has already knocked, and the young widow was not there. "Ah," she says, "I will check on her," dropping her eyes under the Countess's scrutiny.

The stewards nod at her. They are closing the curtains. "For your safety, ma'am," they say, before the Countess has time to object. "It is best not to look." Or be looked at.

Weiwei sets off back toward the crew carriages, closing curtains on her way, even though there are no passengers now in the corridors. She doesn't want to see, either. All around them is water, dripping from branches and leaves, pooling on the ground, catching the colors of the sky and the trees but other colors as well, ones which aren't there and which her eyes don't understand.

She is about to close the final set of curtains in the Third Class dining car when she smells it. "Elena…" Weiwei spins around, not sure whether to be worried or relieved.

"Have you seen them?" There is a spiderweb of dark veins blooming on Elena's skin, the whites of her eyes have turned watery green, her pupils huge and black.

Decaying,thinks Weiwei, forcing herself not to recoil. "You're not well," she begins, but Elena interrupts her.

"Look," she says, pointing outside. "They are waiting."

Weiwei looks. There between the trees is just a flicker, at first, something that could have been dust kicked up by the train, before resolving into something more; the outline of a figure—no, not even that; more like the memory of a figure, as though a thousand specks of dust had gathered together into the idea, the echo, of a human, right down to its hair ruffled by an absent wind, its clothes flapping around it. It looks straight at the train. And then—impossibly—it raises its arm. As if in an echo of Elena's.

Weiwei steps backward, she can't help herself. The train is moving so slowly now that she can see other wraiths appearing, like figures emerging from a painting, solid from a distance but close up just a collection of brushstrokes and dots.

She thinks they are beckoning.

"You mustn't look, you told me that yourself." Weiwei takes Elena by the shoulders, feeling bone jutting beneath the skin, feeling flakes of skin dry beneath her touch. "They are just a Wastelands trick. If you don't look they can't hurt you."

But Elena is looking and there is a terrible hunger on her face and Weiwei remembers her words when they saw the foxes—"I can't hear them anymore, I can't feel them"—and she opens her mouth to say, No, it doesn't matter, this is where you belong now, but it is too late, Elena is retreating, closing in on herself.

"Wait—" But the stowaway is fleeing the carriage in a tangle of hair and limbs. "Elena, stop!" But she is gone, and Weiwei stumbles into the doorframe as the carriage jolts and wheezes, as the brakes shriek, as the train heaves itself to a halt.