A spotlight above the conductor’s viewscreen illuminated a meager stretch of track ahead of the carriage, and the conductor idly watched the ties and seams in the rails go shooting past.
I ought to bring him on shift some night after one of the prince’s parties—if anything will make him work harder at the academy, it will be seeing his father cleaning up after drunk rich kids.
Then the conductor remembered about the prince. And he remembered how there would be no more of his parties, not ever again.
He barely had time to feel a flare of sorrow for the loss of the queen’s son, followed so swiftly by the death of her father, for there, just beyond the hedges lining the track, rose a sudden, brilliant column of golden light. Before he had time to fully register what he was seeing, it was gone—and then, flashing in the glare of the carriage light, the figure of a woman stumbled out of the hedge and directly into the path of the carriage.
The conductor shouted a warning as he grabbed frantically at the hand brake. Mouth forming a stumbling string of epithets, he leaned all his weight against the brake, making the whole carriage jerk and stutter with a scream of tortured metal.
The woman’s face, no more than a terrified glimpse of large eyes, vanished beneath the bottom edge of the viewscreen as the conductor shut his eyes, waiting for a sound he’d only heard in his nightmares just before waking, covered in cold sweat, in time for the hated dead man’s shift. A scream, a sickening thump, a crunch that his very bones would remember for the rest of his life …
The sound never came.
The conductor’s heart was still thrashing in his chest as he scrambled for the latch on the door, his hands sweaty and fumbling. By the time he spilled out onto the narrow service walkway between the hedge and the tracks, he was already trying to figure out what he would say to his supervisor, to his councilor, to his queen—to the woman’s family.
He found her crouching there, nothing but a pair of eyes beneath the near-blinding glare of the carriage light. For a moment, the staring eyes were so still his heart lurched and shuddered to a halt as if compelled by its own faulty braking system, and he thought,I’ve killed someone. But then she blinked, and his heart began to beat again.
“Skyfall, lady, you scared me out of my wits—are you all right? Are you hurt?”
The woman blinked again, and then, slowly, her legs shaking and her eyes still round as ball bearings, she straightened and stood. Now the light from the stalled carriage illuminated her, and the conductor stared.
She wore red, a strange, flimsy garment that hid little as she stood there, silhouetted by the sharp glare of the spotlight behind her. She was younger than he’d first thought. Swearing at himself, he kept his eyes on her face. Her hands were raised and slightly trembling, as if ready to ward off some attack, though by what power the conductor could not guess, for she did not look capable of accomplishing much by brute force. She was lovely, if rattled and terrified, and wore makeup that stretched from temple to temple, the way the royal family did in portraits generations ago, imitating the old tradition of wearing sheer gold cloth across the eyes during certain ceremonies of state. Only instead of gold, hers was black. It had an interesting effect in the darkness, making her seem at once tiny and fragile, as well as unseen and dangerous.
Like the rail current, thought the conductor dazedly.Invisible, undetectable, right up until it kills you at a single touch.
“I am … not hurt.” Her voice carried a strange accent, and she spoke haltingly, as if each word came only after exquisite concentration. Something about those eyes … strangely colored, flickering as if lit from within.
“You can’t jump out on the track like that! You’ll kill yourself!” The import of the words hit the conductor only after he spoke them, and he took a halting step toward her. “You—you weren’t …tryingto … ?”
A hiss of air from the carriage made the young woman leap back with a barely muffled shriek, her body tensing into readiness.
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” the conductor hurried to reassure her, baffled by her sudden terror. “It’s just the compressed air in the brake equalizing!”
Her gaze darted from his face to the carriage looming over them, up to the cloudless starry sky above, and back to the conductor, as if assigning each of these things an equal amount of wariness.
When she said nothing, either about the brakes or about why she’d leaped—fallen, really—onto the tracks, the conductor eased another step forward and tried another tactic. “You’re not wearing a chrono or an earring. Do you have anyone you want me to call? Your friends? Your family?”
She shrank back and the conductor cursed himself. She was younger even than his revised estimate—he saidfamily, and she heardparents. She must be no more than a teenager.
The conductor hid a smile. Terrified or no, few kids her agewantedtheir parents called after midnight. She tilted her head, noticing the smile he evidently hadn’t hidden very well, and as the harsh shadows on her face moved, he realized he’d been wrong—she wasn’t anything dangerous, she was just a kid, out past her curfew, her terror split equally between the prospect of being crushed to death by carriage wheels and that of being busted by her parents.
“It’s all right,” the conductor said, trying a gentler version of the amusement that had leaked out earlier. “We won’t call them if you don’t want to. There’s a diner just up the street there to the left, won’t cost you much money either. Get some caffeine and some food in you, and you’ll feel better. They’ll have a com-station you can use once you figure out who you want to call. It’s right across the street from the constables’ station—it’s a very safe neighborhood.”
The girl seemed to change then, her manner softening, her wide eyes relaxing as her brows drew in. “Iamlooking for someone,” she said, her voice somewhat more distinct now. “Perhaps you could help me.”
The conductor fought the urge to look at his chrono—the girl had clearly been traumatized by the near miss, but his supervisor would have something to say about feeble excuses if the conductor didn’t start on toward his next stop.
The girl drew a quivering breath and said haltingly, “Please—I lost the chrono I was wearing, and I have none of the money for the diner. I don’t remember where I should go.”
She must have hit her head. A little flare of panic echoed back up at that thought, as he imagined his supervisor’s reaction if he learned she’d been hurt. The conductor would never work again. But then he looked at her face, her wide eyes, her trembling lips, the way she was starting to shiver in the bite of the night winds unbroken by clouds.
She was so young, after all, and still visibly afraid, the fingers of one of her hands twitching involuntarily in an odd, perpetual dance, as if weaving something out of the air. He could almost see something there, like a shadow condensed out of the night … like mist.
He knew then that he would help her. Hewantedto help her. The urge was growing to do what she needed, and as he decided that he would, it was as if a kind of pressure eased.
He’d tell his supervisor … he’d make something up, some reason the last carriage of the night never finished its rounds, some reason he had to abandon it on the tracks. If his supervisor had a problem with it … drop it all, he’d just quit.
“Who are you looking for?” he asked gently.
