Rasmus cursed and scooped her up. “Hold on.”
A song crawled out from a pocket in the mud, flapped its wings until they glowed, and escaped to Lily’s shoulder.
Rasmus carried Lily through a doorway and into one of the train’s game lounges. “Are you hurt?” He set her down on a giant mahjong tile.
“I…I’m sorry I panicked.” The song flew from Lily’s shoulder and settled on top of her head. “We should go back.”
“No. The Lake is lost. We need to decouple it before the rot spreads. I’d do it myself but it’s a two-person job.”
Lily had never witnessed a car being decoupled but imagined that it was going to be a matter of pressing a button or flipping a switch. “Tell me what I need to do.”
“We need to go outside to access the coupler.”
“Outside?But what about the Echoes?”
“That’s why it’s a task for two people. One of us will have to keep the Echoes away while the other decouples the train. The Echoes can’t enter the train, but they can make our task a lot more difficult. We mustn’t let them distract us—or worse, make us fall. The Elsewhere Express may break a lot of rules, but not those that govern blood and bone.”
The train car adjacent to the Lake was one of the few cars where the Elsewhere Express revealed its true form. Glass walls enclosed a vintage train carriage furnished with polished antiques. Plush, emerald-green velvet seats were arranged around low dark wood tables on top of which rested backgammon boards and brass ashtrays. At the far end of the car, tall lit shelves displayed wooden boxes filled with cigars. Stars twinkled above one half of the carriage’s clear ceiling. Daylight, muted by a thick mist, shone through the other. Inside, the train car was split into day and night too.
Lily had never been to this part of the Elsewhere Express. Before tonight, she had come to believe that the train was simply a metaphor, a way to put the impossible into words. But now she saw thatshe was wrong. Silver tracks glowed through the car’s transparent floor, as visible as the glass wheels, gears, axles, and coupling rods that kept the train speeding forward. “I didn’t expect it to look like this.”
“Like what?” Rasmus said. “An actual train? You’re new. You’ve barely seen anything. I’ve been here much longer than you and I’m still discovering places to visit. New train cars are constantly being added. You could live a thousand lifetimes and never see all of them. This one is called the Belvedere. It’s a cigar lounge built from the thoughts people wear plainly on their faces, whether they’re aware of it or not.” He ran his hand over a clear wall. “This panel is made from a wide assortment of guilt.” He looked up at the see-through ceiling. “And the roof is a marriage proposal a young man composed in his head while on his way to meet the love of his life. The Belvedere is one of the most beautiful train cars on the Elsewhere Express. It’s a pity that it hardly ever has any visitors.”
Lily stared through a glass wall. If the Echoes were outside, the mist hid them. “Is it because people are afraid of seeing the Echoes?”
“I’m sure that’s part of it, but even when there weren’t as many Echoes as there are now, and this car enjoyed long stretches of track without them, passengers still didn’t come by here often.”
“Why?”
“No one wants to be reminded about how fragile the Elsewhere—” Rasmus angled an ear toward the floor. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Listen.” Rasmus pressed a finger to his lips.
Lily closed her eyes. A faint cracking sound sent a chill up her spine. “What was that?”
Rasmus peeled back the corner of a Persian rug. A hairline crack crawled across the floor. He balled his large hand into a fist. “It’s started.”
“What’s started?”
“The passengers who escaped from the Lake are telling the others about what happened. Fear is spreading through the train.” Rasmus traced the crack with his finger. “And so are cracks.”
“What? How?”
“Ideas and dreams aren’t broken by hammers. They’re shattered by worries and doubts.”
Rasmus disappeared through the Belvedere’s window and climbed the ladder to the roof.
Lily turned to the song on her shoulder. “Wait for us here.”
The song folded its wings, refusing to leave its perch. Its melody wound its way to Lily’s ears. She shut her eyes, compelled to listen.
The song bore the melancholy of the grayest of days, when people huddled in blankets by their windows, waiting for the excuse of rain to let their tears fall. Lily guessed that the song had been used to repair a leak in the Lake. Sadness clung to most surfaces, making it an excellent sealant. And now it clung to her.
“No. You can’t come. It’s not safe,” Lily pleaded. The song was all that remained of the Lake and she would never forgive herself if it followed her to the roof and got hurt. “Please. You’re the only one left.”
The song flew off to an armchair with heavy wings.
