It rained through the night and finally eased at sunrise, when the light of dawn broke through the clouds on the horizon. That’s when Mikey shaped one of his hands into a claw, and his index finger into a sharp talon. He inserted the tip of that talon into the lock, and began moving it around.
Picking locks was not a skill he had ever cultivated, but he persisted day after day, turning the tip of his talon into different lock-picking shapes, and trying different ways of approaching the keyhole. He never tired, and he never gave up . . . because if there was any justice in the universe, he wouldn’t be trapped there forever.
In her book Caution: This Means You!, Mary Hightower has this to say about gangs of wild Everlost children:
“It’s true that Everlost has its share of feral children, often banding together in nasty little vapors. These bands of ‘undocumented Afterlights’ must be tamed with both force and love. We must put aside our disgust upon encountering them, and teach these savages all the things we know to be right. Unless of course there are too many of them. In that case, retreat might be a wiser course of action.”
CHAPTER 13
End of the Line
The train tracks heading west were still alive.
That is to say, they were a part of the living world, and as such could not carry the ghost train anywhere but to the center of the earth. There was, however, a single track heading south, which wasn’t ideal, but at least it was there. They took on a southerly heading, rolling at a cautious snail’s pace into Texas, and through Dallas. No dead westbound tracks in Dallas, either.
“I’m sure we’ll be able to pick up a western line once we hit Austin, or San Antonio,” Speedo told Milos, with some confidence. “I think maybe I lived in Austin when I was alive. Or maybe Austin was my name, I can’t really say for sure. I was in New Jersey when I died, though. At least I think I was. Do you think people from New Jersey would name a kid Austin?”
Speedo was always a blabbermouth when Milos came to visit him in the engine cab, since he was usually there alone with no one to talk to while the train was moving. The problem was, once Milos was in there with him, he couldn’t leave and go back to the parlor car until the train stopped, so he was a captive audience, and Speedo knew it.
“If that church didn’t fall off the tracks,” said Speedo, “I would have been able to find enough tracks to build a bypass eventually—I’m the best finder—I used to find so much stuff—and then I’d trade up. I even traded up for the Hindenburg—that was mine, not Mary’s—bet you didn’t know that, did you? But I guess it’s nobody’s now, just floating out there with no one to pilot it. The best thing about a zeppelin is that it doesn’t need tracks. If we coulda gotten it past that lousy wind, we would have been there months ago, wherever ‘there’ is.”
Milos decided it was time to stop the train, give the kids a few hours of playtime, and himself a break from Speedo.
Whenever they stopped—which was still at least twice a day—Milos would wander among the kids as they played, doing his best to “play Mary.” A comforting hand on a shoulder, and such. Usually though, the kids just flinched.
“This place that Mary wants us to go,” they would always ask Milos. “Is it far?”
He tried to answer them the way that Mary might. “Distance and time mean nothing to us; we are Afterlights.”
While this might have worked for Mary, they just stared at Milos like they were waiting for a punch line. It quickly became clear to him that whatever shining points he had earned the day they pushed over the church were losing their luster. Desertions started again—kids would even desert while the train was moving, like rats jumping from a sinking ship.
Each time they stopped for any length of time, Jill would insist they go out reaping. Sometimes Milos allowed it, sometimes he didn’t, but when they went, it was always with strict orders to reap no more than one soul apiece.
“We should bring a few more Afterlightsh with ush,” Moose suggested.
“Right, right,” said Squirrel. “Once we make ‘em dead, it doesn’t take a skinjacker to knock ’em out of the tunnel. Anyone can do it.”
“They’re right,” said Jill. “If we bring ten kids with us, they can carry ten more back!”
Milos didn’t even dignify it with a response. As far as he was concerned he’d be happy if the three of them just left. He would be happy never to see Jill again—and as for Moose and Squirrel, well, their partnership had always been one of convenience—and Milos no longer found them very convenient.
Milos had come to realize how very much alone he was without Mary. The thought of having her back is what kept him going. All he had to do was hold things together until the day she opened her eyes.
There was still no sign of the mysterious western Afterlights who had put the church on the tracks. Perhaps the train had already passed through whatever territory they believed was theirs—or perhaps that church had been on the rails for a hundred years, and they were long gone—either into the light, or into the earth. There was no way to be sure. If Mary were here when they encountered “undocumented Afterlights,” as she called them, she would probably talk them into joining her. Mary had a way of making everyone want to follow her—worship her, even. This was not one of Milos’s skills.
* * *
Jix was also on edge now, because he knew things that Milos didn’t. His Excellency had, many years ago, laid claim to all of the Americas west of the Mississippi. The king’s forces had conquered many hordes of Afterlights, and had brought them all to the great City of Souls—first as prisoners, and then, when their memory of conquest had faded, as full-fledged citizens.
This was why there were so few Afterlights to be found—most of them had been relocated to the City of Souls, and occasional sweeps would catch the newcomers. There were only two reasons why there’d still be Afterlights in these parts. Either they had accidentally been overlooked . . . or they were too mean to mess with.
“Be on your guard,” Jix had secretly told Allie, for he knew she was their best early-warning system. “Keep your eyes open always, and if you see something suspicious, call out to me. Wherever I am on the train, I will hear you.”
“Tell you what,” said Allie, “why don’t we switch places, and you can be the one on upside-down lookout.”
Jix did not take his discussions with Allie lightly. He appreciated the things she told him, because no one else was willing to talk about Mary, providing Jix with crucial information.
“Mary slithered her way into Chicago,” Allie told him one night, while the other skinjackers were out reaping. “She charmed the leader there, then took over. That’s what she does. I’ve never seen anyone so good at manipulating people.”
Jix took note of everything Allie said, but he also knew that this was coming from a girl who despised Mary from the bottom of her soul. Jix could respect that, but he could also respect a spirit who could successfully manipulate thousands. For a moment he considered freeing Allie. No one would see him do it, for none of Mary’s children ever came to the front of the train—they were all too afraid of Allie. No one would know it had been Jix that freed her, so what did he have to lose? Jix looked off to make sure the other skinjackers weren’t coming back from reaping, then he leaned close to Allie.
“If you were freed,” Jix asked her, “what would you do?”
Allie answered without hesitation. “I would stop Mary now, before she wakes up. I’d send her down into the earth, and that would be the end of her. Not even Mary can charm her way back to the surface.” Then Allie got quiet, thinking for a long time before she spoke again. “Then, when I was sure that Mary was gone, I’d find Mikey—a friend of mine—and make him go into the light. He deserves to complete his journey. After that, I’d find my body, skinjack myself, and get back to my own life.”
“Careful,” said Jix. “Skinjacking your own body is not the same as skinjacking someone else’s. Once you skinjack yourself, you’re bound to your body. From the moment you jump inside, you can’t leave it until the day you die.”
“Why would I want to?”
Jix thought about the question. It brought back a memory that was painful to think about. “I had a friend who chose to skinjack himself. But his body had brain damage and a ruined leg. He couldn’t speak, and he could barely walk, and he couldn’t un-skinjack himself. He ended up begging on the streets of Cancun.”
Allie squirmed in her bonds, and looked away. “Maybe it won’t be that way for me . . . but unless you free me, I’ll never have the chance to find out, will I?”
Jix picked up an Everlost stone from between the railroad ties, and tossed it into the living world. Allie had made her intentions very clear, but Jix was still neutral in this war, and his mission was to capture Mary, not to send her down. Perhaps Allie deserved to be freed, but freeing her would cause him nothing but trouble.
“If Mary succeeds,” Jix asked, “and she ends the living world, what do you suppose will happen then?”
“Isn’t the end of the world bad enough, without having to think about what happens afterward?”
So then he asked, “Is it so bad to end one world, when another world still remains?”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Maybe not,” he told her. “Maybe I just wanted to see what you would say.”
She struggled once more against her bonds, but they never got any looser. “So,” she asked again, “are you going to let me go?”
“We’ll talk again,” Jix told her, as he always told her, and left.
Jix was not an insomnoid. He would choose to sleep when it suited him, and that night, he wanted to sleep, if only to keep his mind from pondering heavy things. Yet even though he tried, he could not settle his thoughts enough to sleep. Jix still told himself that he was traveling with the train just to gain information before returning to the City of Souls, and reporting what he had found to the king—but not even he was sure of his own motives anymore. At first he had told himself that he’d leave in Dallas, find a big cat somewhere, and furjack his way back home, but instead he stayed with the train. There was too much about this train of souls that intrigued him: the sleeping witch in the caboose, the train’s destination—which the king himself would like to know about if, indeed, it was real . . . but most of all he stayed because of Jackin’ Jill.
After their last encounter, Jill made a point of ignoring Jix, and yet he often caught her watching him out of the corner of her eye—but whenever he returned the gaze, she would get snappish and say, “What are you looking at?” It always made him smile.
As a skinjacker, he had the privilege of staying in the parlor car, so he and Jill were never too distant from each other, and when Jill got tired of pretending to ignore him, she would ask questions.
“How long have you been at this? Furjacking, I mean?”