1. Hauntings

Marya is dreaming of veins growing from the earth. Of her skin turning to birch bark; of everything changing around her, leaves growing and dying and falling and growing again. She wakes with her sheets twisted around her limbs. She touches her hair, sure that there will be dried leaves tangled in it, certain that there will be soil beneath her fingernails.

The clock on the wall says it is three o'clock in the morning. She opens the curtains, against all advice, to a clear night sky. They are travelling still through a region of marshes and pools, turned bright silver by the moon. They stretch away into the distance, scattered across the landscape. The night changes your sense of perspective. They look close enough that she could leap from one to another, as she had done as a child, splashing from puddle to puddle in the lane outside their dacha, watching the sky and the trees shatter beneath her. In St. Petersburg she had always had an adult clutching her hand, forcing her to walk beside them. It was only in the countryside that she had had the freedom to leap and splash, away from watchful eyes.

She glances at the neat package on the table, then looks away. The parcel had been brought to her cabin earlier in the evening, and with it a note from the Cartographer. These were your father's was all it said. She had hesitated, inexplicably afraid of what she might find. When she had finally torn open the brown paper, it had revealed five sketchpads. She had opened the first one, her hand unsteady. A swirl of dark lines coalescing into a rose. Vines weaving their way between the branches of spindly trees. Thin white roots spreading through soil; purple fruit heavy and ripe on green stalks. A moth, its wings spread, revealing two spots like the eyes of an owl. They are different, these drawings, from anything else she has seen of her father's ornamental work. The stained-glass panels which decorate the train are simple and austere, the natural forms they depict reduced to their essence, held solid and immobile in glass. But in these sketchbooks, everything is blooming, growing; so full of life, of ripeness, that it makes her queasy.

So full of life that her father had come to think it was putting them in danger.

On a sudden impulse, she puts her dressing gown on over her nightclothes and pads out into the corridor. She wants more of the sky than her cabin window can give her. All other cabin doors are shut, and a steward sleeps, folded over on his arms, at the end of the corridor. Through the saloon car and the library car, empty and lit by single lamps, into the passage alongside Suzuki's laboratory. She notices that the door to the observation tower is ajar, light spilling out onto the floor, and she speeds her footsteps past it.

No lights in the observation car. Only glass and water and moonlight. She hesitates at the doorway then forces herself to step inside, feeling faintly ridiculous to be standing there in her nightclothes. It is beautiful, the landscape; the pools as still as mirrors, the horizon vanishing in the darkness. She walks further inside, clenching her fists against the feeling of walking under the open sky, all the way to the very end of the carriage, where it feels more like a ship than a train, the rails like a wake they leave behind them in the water. She can almost feel the night air on her face, taste the wetness and salt. Clouds passing across the moon throw the landscape in and out of darkness. There is no one here, she thinks. No one human between me and the Wall, a thousand miles back in the distance.

A sound, just on the edge of her hearing, makes her turn. A smell, earthy and damp. A clammy feeling on her neck.

The carriage is empty. Low tables and armchairs illuminated by pale light. But at the very end, nearest the door, shadows obscure the furthest seats and she thinks, with a prickle of horror, Someone is there. The feeling of exposure—to the sky, the outside, to anyone looking out or in, returns. She can't move. "Who's there?" she tries to say, but no sound comes out, and who would be there, in the darkness, in the middle of the night, hiding in the shadows? No, she has succumbed to the sickness they all talk about, the Professor and the passengers in Third, though those in First choose to ignore it, as if their wealth and their luxurious cabins can protect them.

"Who's there?" Her voice stronger this time. She lets go of the glass and walks toward the door. Surely the shadows will turn out to be cushions; the sound nothing more than the creaks of the train; the smell nothing more than a memory of an old dacha and a country lane. But as she approaches she is sure she sees something move, she is sure that someone is there, hiding, watching.

Marya Antonovna, in her sheltered life, would have run away. She would have run and curled up in a ball and waited for someone to come and tell her that it was alright, because somebody always told her that it was alright. Somebody always looked after her. Her family; a succession of governesses. But Marya Petrovna is different. Marya Petrovna stands her ground. She has nothing to be afraid of because she doesn't really exist. Or does she exist more fully than that other Marya ever had? She isn't sure anymore. Perhaps this really is Wastelands sickness. Or perhaps her mother was right—moonlight is dangerous for young ladies.

"I know you're there," she says. Steps closer.

And a cloud obscures the moon, throwing the carriage into a momentary darkness that carries the stranger away. She hears footsteps and a rustle of cloth, then only silence remains. When the cloud passes away the carriage is empty. She pokes at the cushions a few times, just to be sure, but it leaves her feeling foolish.

Only the smell lingers.

She waits until her heartbeat has slowed, then walks carefully out of the carriage. A child from Third, she thinks; escaping from their parents for a nighttime adventure, keeping a guilty silence. Yes, that is allit was. Now she is out in the well-lit corridor, the solid bulk of the scientific equipment behind the glass beside her, rationality returns.

But surely a child would giggle, or cry. They would give themselves away.Her legs feel suddenly unsteady and she grasps the brass handrail, and just as she is feeling irritated at her own behavior, the light from the door to the Cartographer's tower grows brighter, and Suzuki himself appears at the bottom of the stairs, still buttoning up his shirt.

Their gazes meet through the glass and she feels her cheeks burn. How ridiculous, to be found wandering in the middle of the night in her dressing gown; to be right outside his carriage like an incompetent spy.

He opens the door to the corridor. "Are you quite well? You look—" He stops, as if he is just becoming aware of his own state of undress, his shirt untucked, his sleeves loose at the cuffs.

"I thought I heard a noise," she says, stiffly, "but it was just my imagination playing tricks. I didn't mean to disturb you." Is that true? Hadn't she hoped that he might be as restless as she was, that even as he stared out at the line, part of him was thinking of her?

"Your hands," she says, suddenly. "Those lines…" She had thought at first they were ink stains, but she is sure she sees a pattern in them.

Suzuki steps back, pulling his cuffs further over his hands just as she reaches for his wrist then freezes, shocked at her own boldness. "Let me see," she whispers.

He tenses, but pushes up his sleeve and there, winding around his arm, are lines of ink. Tattoos? She has seen them only at a fair, a tattooed man with fairy tales inked all over his body, twitching his muscles to make tigers move and trees grow. But no, Suzuki is quite still, hardly seeming to breathe, and yet the lines are moving, and they are not simply lines but rivers, contours, thin winding paths. And the railway, a black line like a vein from his wrist, a line mapping their journey onto his skin.

She stares, unable to understand what she is seeing. "You have it, the sickness…"

"No, it is not—"

"Another thing you have hidden."

"Please, you have to understand." At a sound coming from the tower he looks back. "We will be returning to the main line, I must go, but I would speak further of this—"

But she backs away. She needs to be away from him, from the way his body is an etching of the hungry lands outside; from his restless, changing skin.