2. Crossing the Line

"Nearly there," says Vassily.

"I can see it!" shouts Luca, one of the kitchen boys.

"Liar, no one has eyesight that good." One of the porters gives him a shove and sends him toppling from his perch on the table.

"I can, it's up ahead." Luca rights himself.

They're in the Third Class dining car, where the tables have all been pushed to the walls. Since their return to the main line the atmosphere has lifted; there is a sense of almost giddy relief, as the train has picked up speed once more. And now the crossing of the line is in sight.

Weiwei cranes her neck to see, and there it is—a white stone, about the height of a man, nondescript, half-covered by grasses and creeping vines. Another stands on the other side of the rail, two austere markers, all that signifies the crossing of continents.

She remembers being told the story when she was very young. She remembers the Professor holding her up to the window as they passed between the stones and telling her about the builders.

When the line was built, the Company, in their offices in Beijing and Moscow, had wanted black stones from the quarries of Arkhangelsk, and poems inscribed upon them—verses to glorify their great empires. The builders of the rail, however, had wanted them to hold the names of those who had given their lives to lay down the tracks. Neither side could agree, so the stones were left plain, although the builders got the last laugh. They ordered pure white stone, the Chinese color of mourning, and by the time word reached the men who sat snug in their offices, it was too late. And in this way those lost on the rail gained their tomb.

She never fails to feel a shivery sense of time stretched thin as the train passes between the markers. As though the shades of those first builders are lined up to watch them pass, leaning on their shovels, narrowing their eyes as the train thunders over their bones. The crew take off their hats or reach out to touch iron. She glances at the passengers, sees apprehension at the gaining of a new continent, relief at a familiar one. The violin player begins a song both urgent and sad, an insistent, repeating melody that the kitchen boys take up with their spoons and pans, and the crew with unmelodious whistles or hums, and the passengers join in, uncertain at first, then growing in confidence as the sound fills the carriage and the song rises and falls through the octaves, looping and changing and playing them into Europe.

She looks around, at the Portuguese priest closing his eyes and nodding his head in time to the music; at the three brothers from the South, tipping tiny glasses of liquor down their throats; at the couples and families and the lone travellers who have formed friendships because it isn't possible to be alone in Third Class, and the musician's song is weaving them together ever more closely. Her ears pick up an oddness in the melody and she realizes that the violin player is twining together a Chinese folk song with a Russian one, their keys clashing then smoothing out then clashing again. His eyes are closed as he plays, and she wonders what it feels like, to be so lost within the sound. She feels her own feet start to move as the kitchen boys begin their chant, like another line of percussion beneath the music, "We're crossing, we're crossing, we're crossing," and the porters take it up too, and the stewards, and the passengers, they take up the years of superstition, the ritual—boundaries have to be marked, after all, and what is it about a line that brings on the urge to leap over it? The carriage floor is shaking beneath her as they stamp over the line, "We're crossing, we're crossing, we're crossing." Because boundaries are guarded, and boundary guardians always need to be told that those who cross are not afraid.

She takes a deep breath. There is a kind of ecstasy in the faces of the people in the carriage. This is why we have our rituals, she thinks. This is why they are needed—so that we can lose ourselves for a while.

She wishes she could lose herself. Lose the stinging absence where Elena had been; where the Captain, the Professor had once been to keep her safe. Lose the fear of what she has helped bring to the train.

Thief. Traitor.What would they say, these swaying, dancing passengers, if they knew what she had done? If they knew she had let the outside in? She thinks about the scales of lichen, growing in the darkness; the insects waiting in their little cocoons, and she is sure that they are moving, as though they feel the music too. She is sure she can feel them all growing.

The sensation makes her dizzy.

"They're drinking themselves into oblivion in First," says Alexei, appearing beside her. His own skin is flushed, and there is liquor on his breath. He has barely spoken to her since her trip outside. Perhaps he is jealous, she thinks, that she went in his place.

"And there have been rumors of a ghost walking the corridors."

"What?"

"Haunting the First Class bathroom. I'd forgotten how much I hate crossing the line."

"Hey!" She has reached the first of the sleeping cars when a small figure hurtles toward her and she grabs him as he tries to dodge past, holding him fast as he squirms in her grip. She has played this game herself more times than she can count, and is faster than any Beijing ruffian, and has no intention of flattening herself against the wall, which is the aim of the dedicated contestants.

"Tell me about the ghost."

"What?" Jing Tang falls still at this unexpected question.

"I hear you've been telling stories about ghosts in bathrooms." She yanks him closer. "Don't you know it's bad luck to talk about ghosts? They will hear you and think that they're welcome."

The boy tries to pull away. "But it's true. I saw her in the mirror, in there." He points to one of the First Class bathrooms then cries, "You're hurting me!"

She releases the grip on his arm that she had tightened suddenly. "In there?"

He nods, guiltily.

A moment's hesitation, then, before she can think too much, she grabs his shoulder and marches him to the door, pushes it open, her stomach churning in—what? Anticipation? Fear?

A dripping tap can be heard even over the noise of the rails. The room is clear of steam. No one has been bathing at this hour, even now that there is water again for these purposes. The bath is empty, there is no water flowing over its edges, no drowned girl rising. She feels a disappointment so vast, it threatens to drown her too.

"Nothing," she says, her voice too loud. "No ghost."

Jing Tang looks sullen. "She was here. I saw her in the mirror."

"You saw a passenger, that's all."

"No. A ghost."

She appreciates his stubbornness—it is a trait that has served her well—so she merely ruffles his hair in a way she knows he will hate, and steers him out of the bathroom. "You know you're not allowed in this part of the train. Won't your parents be wondering where you are?"

"They won't have noticed I'm gone."

She imagines he's correct, but refrains from comment. "Well, the stewards have noticed, and they'll be press-ganging you to work as a rail rat if you keep scurrying around where you don't belong."

"Really? I could work on the train? Like you?"

"Well—"

But she can see the boy imagining himself in uniform, striding down the corridors of the train. He has begun to hold himself a little straighter.

They reach the Third Class dining carriage, where music and dancers envelop them.

"Come on, we're going through to your sleeping carriage," she says, but Jing Tang exclaims "Look!" and she sees his mother, back to herself again, sitting squashed around one of the tables with his father, in the midst of a lively game of cards and dice. His father looks up and stretches out an arm.

"Come, little gambler, perhaps you will bring us luck!" cries one of the other players, and the boy is enfolded into the group, squeezing onto his father's lap as his mother puts her arm around both of them.

Weiwei turns away. Don't they know the Vigil approaches? The incessant beating of the makeshift drums makes her bones ache. The air feels sticky and cloying. A shriek of high-pitched laughter, a shattering of glass. She sees the Third Class steward arguing with a belligerent farmer, Alexei with a drink in his hand. The lights in Third are fewer and not as bright as in First, and in the dimness she feels the scene dissolving; passengers melting into shadows, the violin player in silhouette, like a faded outline on a temple wall, a point of stillness in the roiling, swaying mass. She slips behind the heavy window curtain and rests her forehead against the glass, glad of its relative coolness. Closes her eyes. Just as it had when she was a child, the world on the other side of the curtain falls away, the sound muffled even by so flimsy a barrier.

She opens her eyes onto the darkness. The stewards used to scold her for staring outside for so long at night. It's not safe, they would say; don't stare so, you don't want to see what's staring back. But she did want to see. She always has. She opens her eyes as wide as she used to, until the indistinct shapes outside resolve themselves into a landscape she can read. There. Movement in the distance. Wings rising from the shadows of the trees. Owls, she thinks; hunting.

And then her eye is caught, not by the landscape outside but by something much closer. There are pale shapes blooming on the other side of the glass; veins of mold, like the lines left behind by saltwater, growing before her eyes. She takes a step backward, and hears a muffled cry of surprise as she collides with someone.

"Just cleaning," she says, reappearing to tipsy applause, as if she has just performed a magic trick—Produce a girl from behind a curtain—and cries of, "Who else is behind there?"

She twitches the other curtains aside, careful not to let the passengers see, and on each of the other windows the same patterns are forming. She touches the glass. It is definitely on the outside, and yet… She pictures the stolen specimens, proliferating; pictures scales on the walls, spores on the air, everything growing. Her fingertips feel it through the glass, the deep hum of life expanding, and she snatches her hand away.

She elbows her way out of Third, through the crew mess, where there is still food being eaten and dice being thrown, and into the crew sleeping car.

The carriage is dark and noiseless but for the ever-present rattle of the rails. She stands in the doorway, revelling in the emptiness, in the relief that comes with being unobserved. But as she enters she thinks—No. Something else is here. She can feel it when she puts her hand to the wall; there, behind the sound of the train and the rails, she feels it again—something growing.

She doesn't stop to look behind the curtains, she makes straight for her own bunk, needing no light to guide her steps, not even to climb the ladder, and when she reaches the top she stretches out her hand to find her lichen fan, but it is not there—

She freezes. As her eyes grow used to the darkness she sees patterns on the wall; not on the outside of the windows anymore, but inside, the lichen spreading scales of silver and blue toward the ceiling. There is movement at the other end of her bunk, a crouched shape—

"Thief," hisses Elena.