2
“This storm
be damned,” Melvin grunted. “I can’t see a thing.”
A fork of lightning etched across
the sky, and Jordan momentarily saw Melvin as nothing more than a silhouette.
Seconds later, thunder rattled the windows of the carriage and the rain’s
poking at the roof turned into blatant hammering.
Still Melvin squashed his face
against the window, trying to probe the night. He was the personification of
nervous energy, itching to do something, to move. His hands were splayed like
starfish on either side of his head, which was slowly being haloed with the fog
of his breath on the window.
“Sit back down, Melvin,” Jordan
advised. “Get some sleep. We’ve a long few days ahead of us…”
“Not right now… I gotta know…”
“Gotta know what?”
Melvin daubed at the smear of fog on
the window callously with the sleeve of his robe then returned to pressing his
face against the glass to peer outside. “Gotta know… where we are…”
“Judging by the time,” Jordan said,
making movements that would simulate pulling a fob watch from his pocket and
checking it. He did have the watch, and even though its hands were iridescent
and could be read at night, he didn’t particularly want to know exactly how
much longer he had left of this hellacious journey. “Six hours… I’d say we’re
near the town of Wareton.”
“How can you be sure?” Melvin
wondered aloud. “I can’t see a damned thing…”
“Just going by the schedule…”
“…this unscheduled stop. Who would
be getting on the train in a backwater place like Wareton?” Melvin finally
plucked his face away from the window. Even in the darkness, Jordan could see
the pallor of his young charge’s face. Seeing it there brought the hint of a
smile to Jordan’s mouth. Melvin continued: “Is there even a train station in
Wareton?”
That Jordan didn’t know. Nor did he
particularly care. What he knew that his young pupil didn’t was the terrain in
which they travelled. The trail from Tor to Ma’arnar wound through the Ridge
Back Mountains, the very backbone of the continent. On any given jaunt, there
was likely to be any number of rockslides. On a stormy night such as this, the
chances increased nearly exponentially. The locomotive’s engineers would most
likely have been flagged down by one of myriad checkpoint stations along the
journey and acted accordingly. It was an extremely thin chance that they were
anywhere near Wareton, let alone berthed at a train station. Of course, it
didn’t hurt Jordan to stir the pot a little.
“Last I recalled, Wareton has no
station.” Jordan paused for dramatic effect. “That would have been no more
than… three… four years ago.”
Melvin hissed, jerked around to the
window again. There he paused, a dark shadow allowing its imagination to slip
loose of its reins. Jordan wondered briefly what expression Melvin now wore on
his face. Did Melvin chew the inside of his cheek, or was he wearing the silly
pout that he’d carried with him from Tor and his life as a street brat? It was
a mystery that Jordan would never solve, even when the next bolt of lightning
split the sky.
“Someone’s stopped the train,”
Melvin said. So far, his voice remained calm. Jordan figured that if the ante
was upped a wee bit, Melvin’s modulation would waver. There was a brisk rustle
of material, Melvin’s cloak doing a swift spin on the spot. He was moving
towards the door.
“What are you doing?” Jordan asked.
Melvin paused, one arm stretched
out, the hand no doubt inches from the door handle. He waited several seconds
to answer. “I’ve got to find out.”
“Find out what?”
“Find out who stopped the train.”
Jordan smirked. “Why?”
He was only a shadow between the
irregular bursts of lightning. Still, Jordan could make out the shape of his
form, an oily dark shape surrounded by incomplete black. What was most amazing
to Jordan was the fact that Melvin hadn’t asked for the light, or better yet,
shown enough initiative to light it himself. It all returned to the same simple
thing: Melvin was a novice.
“It might be them.”
“Them?”
“You know… them.”
Jordan grinned some more. Go on, he whispered in his mind. Go on, say it. And sure enough, Melvin
said it.
“The… Bounty Hunters.”
That was it. The ante had been met
and Melvin’s voice wavered that slight bit. The kid was scared.
“What are you planning to do?”
“Go and see.”
“See if it is the Bounty Hunters?”
The kid nodded and then, realising
that Jordan couldn’t see him, whispered, “Yes.”
But Jordan didn’t need to actually see him to know what had happened. He
sensed it, the same way his senses detected that moment of hesitation just
before the train was stopped. Melvin’s hand relinquished its place on the door
handle, hovered ineffectively in the air for a brief moment before falling
helplessly to his side.
“What would you do if indeed it was
the Bounty Hunters who’ve stopped the train?”
Another pause stretched over a few
long heartbeats. A flash of lightning danced across the sky, followed by a
languid roll of thunder.
“What would you do?” Jordan
demanded, not savagely, though. He wasn’t yet ready to browbeat the boy.
“I—I don’t know.”
“What could you do if by whatever
insane chance, they saw you and recognised you for what you are? Do you know where you are?”
“We’re in… we’re near Wareton…
aren’t we?”
“We are?” Jordan let the question
hang heavily in the air for a few seconds.
“You said…”
“…I might have said… but how likely
am I to be correct? I made a guess, son. Would you risk your life on a guess?”
“No.”
“Sit back down.”
“But…”
Jordan fetched a sigh; the sort that
patient teachers would fetch when dealing with that one student who wanted to
split that final hair… the one that had been split so fine that it was nearly
transparent. With Melvin still rooted to the spot near the door, Jordan stood
up, reached above his bench for the little nook where he’d stashed the lamp.
Once alight, he hung it on the hook on the wall and sat back down. All this he
did without a single glance at Melvin. That was all right, though. Melvin had
his back turned to him anyway.
“Even if it is the Bounty Hunters
they won’t find us,” Jordan said, keeping his voice calm.
“How can you be so sure?” Melvin
replied. He turned his head slightly, talked over his right shoulder. He had
had the sense to pluck the hood of his cloak over his head so if he had went
outside nobody would have got a clear look at him. At least he had that much
sense.
“Because… we changed our tickets.”
“What?”
“We changed our tickets. We changed
from Economy to Third.”
“That makes no sense,” Melvin
growled. “Those tickets still had our names on them…”
Jordan had to hide a fresh grin
behind his hand. In his mind, a voice tittered, stupid son of a bitch. Aloud, he said, “well… strictly speaking,
they had names on them… but, uh, not our
names.”
He watched Melvin flinch at the
news, jerking as if stung by a bee. He turned around slowly, his pallid
features now looking waxy in the yellow lantern light. His eyebrows were
knitted into a frown that ever so gradually melted. Finally, Jordan thought, the
illiterate boy realises… but does he understand?
“Clever,” the kid conceded, affecting
nonchalance that only went as far as that one word response. He all but sighed
when he returned to his bench seat and flipped the hood away from his face.
It was all bullshit, of course. What
Jordan had pointed out to the street urchin as being their names was really the
serial number of the ticket. There was no way of ascertaining whether certain
individuals had boarded the locomotive, or in which carriage those individuals
had been sequestered. The tickets were, with the exception of those given to
the upper classes, sold strictly on capacity basis. In other words, all you
represented to the ticket retailers was a bum on a seat, or in the case of
Jordan and Melvin, heads on bunk-cabin pillows. Hell, there was room still in
this carriage for another two souls: it was only luck that saw this particular
carriage half booked for the novelty of the cross-continental locomotive jaunt
was yet to wear off. The kid, however, would know none of this and Jordan
wasn’t going to tell him.
“We’re safe, then?” Melvin said,
trying his very hardest to school his features.
“Certainly,” Jordan replied,
secretly chuckling to himself deep within his mind.
And with Jordan’s luck falling the
right way, both men heard the lead engineer blow his whistle over the roar of
the wind and the hammering of the rain. The look of relief that washed over the
kid’s face was almost comical; when that look transmogrified into rapture as
the locomotive took those first few stuttering pushes forward, Jordan had to
almost physically bite his tongue to avoid bursting out into peals of laughter.
The kid beamed and the locomotive
began to pick up to a steady pace.
Then there was a loud knock at the
door.
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