Railsea

BURROWING TORTOISE

(Magnigopherus polyphemus)

Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 3.1)

TWENTY-EIGHT

SO THIS WAS THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD.

Sham did his best not to gaze like a greenhorn. Manihiki didn’t make it easy, though: the spectacle started before they’d even pulled into the sidings in the largest harbour in the known world.

They came through an endless chaotic catalogue of vehicles. Past crews that ignored them, crews that stared at them, crews in outfits that marked them out as Streggeye’s neighbours, & those dressed like illustrations or dreams. & the engines. Or, to be more precise—because not all the trains were engined—the means of locomotion.

Here a small train, three carriages only, manoeuvring the rails of the harbour at the end of great thrumming cables, tugged by two great birds. Well: a buzzard-train, emissary from the Teekhee archipelago. Wooden trains decorated with masks; trains coated in die-cast tin shapes; trains flanked with bone ornaments; double- & triple-decker trains; plastic-pelted trains stained in acrylic colours. The Medes passed the clatter & clank of diesel vehicles like their own. Past the shrill fussy shenanigans of steam trains that spat & whistled & burped dirty clouds, like irritating godly babies. & others.

The railsea: a vast & various train ecosystem. They passed under wires, for the few juiced-up miles of coastal rails. Here a stubby vehicle of scrubbed steel, its few windows tinted, & turning its wheels were back-curved pistons jutting from its sides. What were these grim faces from Fremlo, from all Sham’s crew? This controlled disgust Captain Naphi showed?

Oh. That was a galleytrain. In its hot bowels scores of slaves were strapped in rows, hauling on the handles to turn the wheels, encouraged by whips.

“How can they allow it?” Sham breathed.

“Manihiki calls itself civilised,” Fremlo said. “No slavery ashore. But you know how port-peace works. On each harboured train the laws of home.” There were as many laws among the railsea lands as there were lands. In some were slaves.

Sham imagined kicking down doors & racing through the train corridors, shooting dastardly guards. His impotence embarrassed him.

& solar trains from Gul Fofkal; lunar ones from who-knew-where?; pedal trains from Mendana; a rococo clockwork train that made Zhed smile & salute as its crews sang the songs of winding & twisted their great key; treadmill trains from Clarion, their crews jogging to keep them moving; little trains tugged by trackside ungulate herds able to fight off the burrowing predators of shallow railsea; one-person traincycles; hulking invisibly powered wartrains; electric trains with the snaps & sparks of their passing.

Manihiki.

SHAM’S FIRST TASK at port was not, as he’d expected, to wind bandages, nor to clear up Fremlo’s cabin, nor even to go shopping for whatever doctorly bits & pieces were needed. Instead, to Fremlo’s narrow-eyed fascination, the captain herself ordered Sham to accompany her on what she called “her errands” in Manihiki town.

“You’ve never been here before,” she said, pulling on her gloves, the left one altered to fit her inorganic hand, checking the buttons & fastenings of her dress coat, sweeping dust from her stiff pantaloons.

“No, Captain.” Sham wished he had good clothes into which to squeeze.

By the jollycart, with the putter & grind of displaced earth, the curious snub faces of local moles & baby-sized earthrats, semi-tame & well-fed on thrown scraps & organic rubbish, poked their heads up. Blind or not, they seemed to meet Sham’s gaze. Daybe gripped his shoulder all the way to the harbour. Until they disembarked.

Into a city that, Sham’s limited experience with alcohol suggested, was as giddying as being drunk. Raucous docks, a tight-packed, polyglot crowd. Catcalls, laughter, the shouting of wares. Sham saw people in clothes of all designs & colour & every tradition, beggarly rags through rubberized jumpsuits to the top hats of priests of That Apt Ohm, mimicking the dandy dress of their god. &—Sham stared—the rugged crazy costumes & makeshift uniforms of salvors.

Scholars from Rockvane watched Tharp conjurors; Cabigo emissaries swept their robes out of Manihiki puddles; hunters in Pittman overalls swapped maps & banter with updivers from Colony Cocos. The quaysides were haunts of pickers of pockets, players of rigged games, shake-lurks, fake survivors of fake train wrecks, asking for alms. Sham had no money to protect.

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered. This building was grandly new, with steel in its plaster. This next was older by hundreds of years, & shabby. A mongrel place. Animal-tugged landcars, rickshaws, combustion engines growled past street furniture in endlessly different styles, houses made from what looked nothing like building materials. As if they’d been used as part of a bet.

Manihiki naval officers lounged in uniform, half on duty, half on display, half flirting with passersby. Yes, the maths was correct: such swagger could only be made up of three halves. They might bellow an instruction to a passing kid, or intervene in some minor altercation with tough, sanctioned panache. Imagine them at rail, Sham thought. A ferronaval train grinding down on pirates, guns going, rescue missions & defence-for-hire.

Off went Daybe into the low sky, investigating eaves, carvings, the gargoyles cobbled, Sham realised, out of salvage. “Careful,” he called to the bat. Maybe there were arm-sized flying scorpions above Manihiki. He’d no clue.

He followed the captain, squeezing through the throng. By shops, stalls & hawkers selling bottles & magnets. Flowers & cameras. Illustrations of beasts & angels punishing the hubristic, sneaking out at night & fixing rails, of swirling-winged birds from beyond the world.

Into a region of bookshops, with, Sham realised, a broad view of what made a book a book. Dark rooms full of paper & leather, disks for ordinators & spools of film. Captain Naphi was greeted with courteous recognition. At more than one stand, she said her name & the seller would check a ledger or pull up a file on a glowing screen.

“The Unknown,” they would murmur. “Is that correct? General theories. Also Floating Signifiers, Asymptotic Telos, Evasive Purpose. Loss. That’s what we have you for.” They cross-referenced her on-record tags with texts newly acquired. “Sulayman’s On Hunting Philosophies has a new edition. & there was an article, let me see, ‘Catching Quarries’ in the last-but-three issue of Captain-Philosopher’s Quarterly, but you’ve probably seen it.” & so on.

What am I doing here? thought Sham. If she needed a dogsbody, why ain’t she brought Shossunder?

As if she heard that thought the captain muttered, “Come now, Soorap, eyes up. Your suggestion brought us to Manihiki. Well done. Would you waste these sights?”

She considered the merits of various offerings. Those texts she bought she passed wordlessly to Sham. His bag grew heavy.

At an enormous, shabby & tumbledown warehouse, from within which came raucous bickering, Daybe investigated roofs. Naphi watched it go. “Tell me again,” she said, “the places your friend thought the tracker might be found.”

“Scabbling Street,” Sham said. “The market. She said that’s where the best salvage is.”

She pointed at a sign on the wall. Scabbling Street Market. Sham gaped. Naphi knew, no question, what sort of artefacts it was he hankered to see. After schlepping through all the bookshops, was this a reward for telling her about the tech?

“So,” Naphi said. She indicated, with a sudden lovely sweep of her hands, that he should enter before her. “I am going salvage shopping.”

TWENTY-NINE

YOU HAVE THE BOOKS?” THE CAPTAIN SAID. “YOUR JOB is to get them back to the train. I won’t need you, Soorap, for a while.”

“I’ve to go back?” You only just brought me in here, he thought.

“Indeed. I want my books by nightfall.”

“By …?” That was hours away. He had hours. She was giving him hours! Hours to find his way through the streets of Manihiki. Through this market. Naphi was holding out a note. Money, too? “Lunch. Consider it from your share.” He stammered a thanks, but Naphi was gone.

Well here I am, Sham thought languidly. Amid the salvage.

The market was in an arcade. Above, levels of busy walkways reachable by spiral stairs. Around Sham, stall after stall of startling found detritus. Absolutely ringing with the noise of attempted sales, arguments, singing, the declaration of wares. A little band accompanying all the business with guitar & oboe, a woman overseeing strange sounds emerging from what looked like a bone box.

People smart & scruffy, businesswomen & -men, tough-dressed mercenaries & buyable thugs. Trainsfolk. Bookish types. Dignitaries & explorers in the sumptuous or strange or barbarian clothes of their homelands. & everywhere salvors.

I know, I know, Sham thought in answer to the correctives & the warnings levelled by Troose & Voam. I know they’re showoffs. Still though!

The salvors yelled at each other in slang. Slid layered visors into use & out of it again, pressed studs & extrusions on their protective overalls, their leather butchers’-style aprons & many-pocketed trousers. They prodded & finger-tinkered with odd boxes, with bits & pieces of salvage that threw colours & images into the air, that sung & dimmed local lights & made dogs lie down.

His curiosity overcame Sham’s awe. “What’s that?” He pointed at a rust-deformed wedge of iron. The salesman looked wryly at him.

“A wrench,” the man said.

“& that?” Some rot-mottled square in various colours, stamped on by tiny statues.

“A children’s game. So scholars say. Or a divination kit.”

“That?” A filigreed arachnid nub of what looked like glass, leg-things drumming in complicated articulation.

“No one knows.” The man handed Sham a bit of wood. “Hit it.”

“Eh?”

“Give it a whack.” The man grinned. Sham walloped the salvage. It did not break as it looked like it should. Instead the stick itself coiled in on itself like an injured tentacle. Sham held it up. It was a tight spiral, now, though it still felt hard in his hand.

“That’s offterran, duh,” the man said. “That’s alt-salvage, that curlbug. From one of the celestial stopoffs.”

“How much are they?” Sham said. The man looked at him gently & said a price that made Sham clamp his mouth shut & turn away. Then he turned back.

“Oh, can I ask you …” He glanced around to make sure Naphi wasn’t in sight or earshot. “Do you know some, some kids? A family? They have an arch, that looks like made of some old salvage.”

The man stared at him. “What are you after, boy?” he said at last. “No. I don’t. I have no idea who they might be & I suggest that you don’t either.” He ignored Sham’s consternation & started up again with his barking, singsonging announcements that he was selling tools & curlbugs & fine cheap salvage.

Sham tried a woman haggling with an ill-tempered buyer over antique ordinator circuitry; to a pair of men who specialised in offterran alt-salvage, their cubbyhole full of thoroughly discomfiting nuggets of strangeness; to a purveyor not of salvage but of equipment for its extraction: lodestones, gauges, telegoggles, shovels, corkscrew drillboots, air pumps & masks for total earth-submersion. A group of young men & women about his age watched Sham. They snickered & whispered to each other, picked their fingernails with foolish little knives. They dispersed as a sharp-faced ferronaval officer glared at them, gathered again when he passed on.

A table of dolls. Old dolls, salvaged dolls. No matter how cleaned they had been, the dust in which they had lain for so many lifetimes had permanently coloured them: whatever tone their skin had been supposed to be, it looked ensepiaed, as if seen through dirty glass. Mostly they were shaped like people, mostly like women or girls, though of deeply questionable physical proportions, with thickety knotted & scrambled hair where it remained at all. A few were grotesques, monsters. Many were limbless. They needed the ministrations of a dollmaker.

Everywhere Sham went the responses to his question, his description of the arch & the two children, were either sincere-seeming ignorance, or guarded recognition followed by lies &/or suggestions that he leave it alone. Mostly it was the salvors who displayed the former, the local merchants the latter.

What did he know of this family? Older sister, younger brother. Messy house. With vigorous & far-travelling parents. Who, the bones said, had died.

Which thoughts, inevitably, took Sham to thinking of his own family. He did not often ruminate on his mother & father, lost by him to heartbreak & accident. It was not that he did not care: certainly he cared. It was not that he did not suspect their not-there-ness was important. He was not stupid. It was, rather, all but unremembering their ministrations, cared for as he had been throughout his life by Troose & Voam—who were his parents, really, no two ways about it. The care Sham felt for his mum & dad was care for lost strangers, dwelling on whom might feel disloyal to those who had raised him.

But he was abruptly aware that he seemed to share with these two children in the image the fact that he was, technically, to be exact about it, an orphan. Well there was a word to sit in the throat. So. Were this girl & this boy also doctors’ assistants, dissatisfied, salvage-pining, missing something? Sham doubted it.

There were clocks all over the hall in a thousand designs. Some were modern, others obviously salvage, proudly rejigged to work again, extruding little birds at set moments. Some were blue-screened, glowing with digits. All showed Sham how fast time was going.

“How did you become a salvor?” The tough-looking woman to whom Sham spoke looked up in surprise. She was sipping tarry coffee, had been exchanging dig-anecdotes with colleagues. She laughed at Sham, not unkindly. She flipped a coin at a baker at her stall & indicated that Sham should take a pastry.

“Dig,” she said. “Find a piece. Take it to a salvage train. Dig more. Find another piece. Don’t be a …” She looked him up & down. “A dogsbody? A cabin boy? A steward? A trainee moler?”

“Doctor’s assistant,” he said.

“Ah. Well yes, that, too. Don’t be that.”

“I found a bat,” Sham said through a mouthful of his sticky bread present. “I suppose that ain’t salvage, though. It’s my mate.”

He was still watched, he realised, by the little gang. & they, he saw, were watched by another young man, a wiry & quick-moving lad Sham wondered if he’d seen before.

The salvor rummaged below her table. “I need more Smearing Widgets,” she said.

“Thank you very much for the cake,” Sham said. The woman was splendid-looking. He blinked & tried to concentrate. “I don’t suppose—have you ever seen two children? They live near a …”

“An arch,” she said. Sham blinked. “A salvage arch. I heard someone was looking for them.”

“What?” said Sham. “Since I came in you heard that?”

“Word travels. Who are you, lad?” She tilted her head. “What do I know about you? Nothing yet. You know I’m not from here. But these salvage-surrounded siblings, they ring a bell.”

“You must come here all the time,” Sham said. “Maybe you heard of them once.”

“Of course. This is Manihiki. It sticks in the mind, that sort of architectural detail you describe, don’t it? I was here, it would be a couple of journeys ago, which would be a few months, I suppose? Selling direct. Anyway.” She nodded slowly at the memory. “There were two here like the ones you’re describing. Young! Young young, but calm as you like.” She raised an eyebrow. “Prodding, picking, asking questions. & they knew their salvage.”

“You think it was the ones I’m looking for?”

“I could hear this lot whispering.” She twirled her hand to indicate the stallholders: not salvors, but local agents, the merchants. “Talking trash about them. & trash is my business.” She smiled. “They bought a load of stuff from me.” She clicked her fingers. “Talking of which, I really must get on.”

She lifted up a little box of alt-salvage things. Thumb-sized, each shaped unlike any of the others, each a green-glass shard, each hairy with wires. & each slid side to side as if alive on the tabletop & spread behind it a snailtrail of what looked like black ink, that disappeared after a few seconds.

“Smearing Widgets,” she said. “I’d give you one,” she said, “except that I’m not going to.”

“I need to find those children,” Sham said, staring acquisitively at the offterran refuse.

“I can help you. They bought too much to carry, arranged for delivery.”

“To where?” Sham’s voice came quick. “Their house?”

“It was in Subzi. You know where that is?” She drew a map in the air with her fingers. “North of the old city.”

“Do you remember the street? The house number?”

“No. But don’t worry about that. Just ask for the arch. It’ll do you. It’s been a pleasure chatting.” She held out her hand. “Sirocco. Travisande Sirocco.”

“Sham ap Soorap.” He started at the expression his name provoked. “What?”

“Nothing. Only—I think perhaps someone mentioned you, Soorap.” She cocked her head again. “Chap about your age, on the lookout for certain things. The Medes, is it? Isn’t that your train?”

“Yes,” Sham said. “How did you know?”

“It’s my job to pick through things thrown out there, & that might include things said. The Medes. Made an unexpected stop in Bollons.” Sham’s gasp was awfully eloquent. “Ah, it’s not so much of a thing,” Sirocco said. “I can tell you the same sort of snippets of likely wholly boring such stuff about plenty of recent arrivals.” She smiled.

“If you say so,” he muttered.

“Still wishing things had gone another way?” She inclined her head. “I’d stick with your crew if I were you.” She did not say it unkindly.

“Well … thank you.”

“I think your friends are waiting for you.” Sirocco nodded at the still-watching gang.

“They ain’t my friends,” Sham said.

“Hm.” The woman frowned a little. “Watch yourself, then, won’t you?”

He would. Sham was already ready.

There were occasions he’d been accused of being a bit dozy, had Sham ap Soorap, but not this time. He hefted the bag of books onto his shoulder, thanked Sirocco again, left the building. & it really did not come as a huge surprise to him, when he emerged into the afternoon light of Manihiki, that the ganglet bundled out of the hall after him & rushed him, grabbing for his bag, his money, came with their fists swinging.

THIRTY

A FIGHT, THEN.

What kind?

Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives.

Some bemoan this fact: “Why does everything have to be put into boxes?” they say. & fair enough, up to a point. But this vigorous drive to divide, subdivide & label has been rather maligned. Such conceptual shuffling is inevitable, & a reasonable defence against what would otherwise face us as thoroughgoing chaos. The germane issue is not whether, but how, to divide.

Certain types of events are particularly carefully delineated. Such as fights.

What ran towards Sham, announcing its presence with throaty jeers, was incipient fightness, carried in the vectors of eight or nine aggressive young men & women. But what kind of fight?

Let fight equal x. Was this, then a play x? An x to the death? An x for honour? A drunken x?

Sham focused. Hands & boots were incoming. One of those hands, in fact, was grasping for his bag, & in doing so answering that question.

What this was was a mugging.

THIRTY-ONE

TWO BIG LADS COMING FOR HIM. SHAM DUCKED—HE moved quick for a heavy young man. He was ringed, his attackers shouting, & here they came again & now he was kicking, & he could be proud of that one, but there were too many of them & something hit his face & wow hurt & he tried to pull hair but someone hit his eye & he was all rocked for a second—

Something interrupted. A sound high-pitched & not even distantly human. Enraged vespertilian lungs! Oh, Sham thought, you beauty. From his undesired vantage point, flat on his back, hands up to block a blow, what he saw framed in backlit clouds with wings spread & wingskin taut, descending like a small furry avenging ghost, was Daybe.

& there came another voice. A boy. “Oy, bastard!” Behind the tallest & heaviest of the muggers was the young man Sham had seen watching his own watchers. Here he came, shoving hard & hands up. A gust of blows from the newcomer & a skirr of bony-&-leathery wings from Daybe. The boy’s attacks were, to Sham’s bruised eyes, more enthusiastic than effective, but the muggers scurried out of his way. & they were genuinely terrified by Daybe, small but so demoniac in chattery-toothed appearance.

It was a mad gush rush. Sham was struggling shaky to his feet, the attackers were suddenly scarpering away fast, the boy who’d come to his aid was yelling imprecations as they went, & Daybe—brave & splendid mouse-sized bodyguard, Stone-faced gods of Streggeye bless & keep it—still chased them as if it would catch them & eat them, as if they were flies.

“You alright?” His rescuer turned & helped Sham brush himself down. “You’re bleeding a bit.”

“Yeah,” said Sham. Dabbed at his face with his finger & checked the flow. Not too bad. “Thanks. Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

The boy shook his head. “Sure you’re okay?”

Was Sham sure he was okay? What scraps of doctorliness he had bobbed to the top of his brain. He was mildly surprised to find them there at all. Teeth? All present, only slightly bloodied. Nose? Not loosened, though sore. Face abraded, but that was all.

“Yeah. Thank you.”

The boy shrugged. “Bullies,” he said. “They’re all cowards.”

“People do say that,” Sham said. “I think there must be a few brave bullies out there & everyone’s going to be in a bit of a shock when they meet them.” He checked his pockets. Still had his coin. “How did you know they were going to attack me?”

“Oh.” The boy waved vaguely & grinned. “Well.” He laughed a bit sheepishly. “I’ve done enough ambushing in my time to know when I can see someone else about to have a go.”

“So why’d you stop them?”

“Because eight against one ain’t fair!” The boy blushed & looked away a moment. “I’m Robalson. Where’s your bat gone?”

“Oh, it’s always off. It’ll be back.”

“We should go,” Robalson said. “The navy’ll be here soon.”

“Isn’t that good?” Sham said.

“No!” Robalson began to tug at him. “They ain’t going to help. & you don’t want to get mixed up with that sort of so-&-so.”

Sham went with him a way, confused, then abruptly raised his hands & squeezed shut his eyes. “They got my bag,” he said. “My captain’s stuff. I’m bloody for it.”

He looked vaguely about him. He wanted the bag back, he wanted to punish those muggers, he wanted to track down the children of the wreck, but, lungs full of dust & defeat, he felt suddenly quite deflated. Come on! he tried to think. He tried to think himself into energy. It didn’t go well. “I better go,” he muttered.

“Is that it, then?” Robalson said, to Sham’s back. “Come on, mate!” Sham didn’t answer. Didn’t look back. Began the miserable trudge back to the harbour.

He slowed as he went. Began to feel the ache & scrape of all those injuries. Down the hill he went, through streets & by landmarks he’d not known he’d noticed on the way. Sham dragged out the journey. He more than took his time. He was thinking about the books. He’d clocked how expensive & rare some were.

A figure emerged from an alley ahead, cutting off his morose descent. He stopped. It was Robalson. “Books?” Robalson said. Meeting Sham’s eye, holding out the bag in which was every one of the texts he thought he’d lost.

“HOW DID YOU FIND THEM?” Sham’s question came after a flurry of gratitude & astonishment.

“I know Manihiki better than you. I’ve been here a few times. Second of all I thought I saw your bat circling over something, so I went to check it out. Well, it was: it was over this. That lot who went for you ain’t interested in stuff like this.”

“But these are precious.”

“They ain’t master criminals, they’re just out for a quick dollar. They slung them.”

“& you found me again.”

“I know where the harbour is. It was obvious you were having a bad day, figured you’d head home. So.” Robalson raised his eyebrows. They stared at each other. “Anyway, so,” Robalson said. He nodded. “Glad you got them back,” he said at last. He turned to go.

“Wait!” said Sham. He jiggled the coin in his pocket. “I owe you big-time. Let me … I’d like to say thanks. Do you know any good pubs or whatever?”

“Sure,” said Robalson. He grinned. “Yeah, I know all the best Manihiki places. Near the harbour? We’ve both got trains to get back to.”

Sham thought. “Maybe eight o’clock tomorrow? I have to do something now.”

“The Dustmaid. On Protocol Abyss Street. Eight o’clock. I’ll be there.”

“& what’s your train?” Sham said. “Mine’s the Medes. Just in case there’s a problem I can find you.”

“Oh,” said Robalson. “My train’s—something I’ll tell you later. You ain’t the only one with secrets.”

“What?” Sham said. “What is it? Is it a moler? A trader? Railnavy? Fighter? Salvor? What are you?”

“What is it?” Robalson walked backwards & met Sham’s eye. “What am I? Why’d you think I want to get away from the navy?” He put his hands to the sides of his mouth.

“I’m a pirate,” he said, in an exaggerated whisper, grinned, turned, was gone.

THIRTY-TWO

DAYBE CAME BACK. IT LOOKED PLEASED WITH ITSELF, lazily snapping at local beetles more on principle than out of hunger.

“You’re such a good bat,” Sham cooed. “Such a good bat.” It nipped his nose & drew a blood bead, but he knew it was in affection.

Sham followed the salvor’s directions. “Why’d you want to go there?” the locals asked, but they pointed the way. Through noisy machine- & navy-filled streets, into grubbier areas full of rubbish & quivering dogs eyeing Sham & making him nervous.

“He says he’s a pirate,” whispered Sham to Daybe. Images came to Sham—how could they not?—of pirate trains. Devilish, smoke-spewing, weapon-studded, thronging with dashing, deadly men & women swinging cutlasses, snarling under crossed-spanner pendants, bearing down on other trains.

“ ’Scuse me,” he asked stoop-sitters, hawkers, builders & loungers-by-roadsides. “Where’s the arch?” He could feel the streets descending. They were nearing railsea level. “Can you tell me where the arch is?” he asked a street-sweeper who leaned amiably on his shuddering cleaning machine & pointed him on.

This was a region of building sites, rubbish sites, drosscapes. & right there in among them—“How’d I miss that, Daybe?” Sham whispered—was the entrance to a lot. & over it, announcing it, was that arch.

Eighteen yards tall, triumphal & oddly blocky as if it were pixelated, it looked as if it had been cut, hewn as the captain might have had it, from cold white stone. But those weren’t stone slabs Sham was looking at. They were metal. They were salvage.

The arch was salvage. Arche-salvage, too—but not of mysteries. The nature of this had been long-established by scholars. The arch was mostly made of washing machines.

He’d seen a demonstration of one once. At a fair on Streggeye, a show of restored findings. Hooked up to chuggering generators, a whining thing like a needy animal prince issuing stupid orders: a fax machine. An ancient screen on which enthusiastic badly drawn figures hit each other: a vijogame. & one of these white things, used to clean ancients’ clothes.

Why would you use arche-salvage for something it clearly wasn’t for? When there were much bloody easier things to build an arch out of?

“Hello?” Sham knocked on it. His knuckles made the hollow machines boom.

Beyond the arch was a bony-looking leafless tree, a big garden, if he could call the tangles of bramble & wire that, if a scrubland free of plants but for exuberant weeds was gardeny. What the land seemed really to be was a resting place for endless bits of salvage, odd-shaped metal, plastic, rubber, rotted wood, festooned with sludgy ruins of old advertisements. There was a patch of scratched-up plastic telephones. Their wires jutted up, stiffened. At the end of each was a coloured receiver like a recurved plastic flower.

“Hello?” A path led to a big old brick house, with extra rooms constructed, Sham saw, of more washing machines, of the old ice makers called fridges, of antique ordinators, of black-rubber wheels & the hulking fish-body of a car. Sham shook his head.

“Hello?”

“Leave it at the end of the path,” someone said. Sham jumped. Daybe jumped, too, from his shoulder, & kept going, circled a tree. Watching Sham from a branch, a security camera winked. “What have you brought? Leave it at the end of the path. We’re in credit,” said a crackling voice from a speaker, that had been crooked so long in the V where a bough met the trunk that the tree had grown around it, embedded it in its skin, so it protruded like a bubo.

“I …” Sham stepped closer & talked into it. “I think you’ve got me mixed up. I’m not a delivery man. I’m looking for—I don’t know their names. I’m looking for a girl & a boy. About … well I don’t know how old the pictures are. One’s about three or four years older than the other, I think.”

Sham could hear distant bickering from the speaker, voices muttering at each other, disguised by static. “Go away,” he heard; then in a different voice, “No, wait.” Then more murmurs. & at last, to him, the question, “Who are you?” Sham could hear the suspicion. He ran his fingers through his hair & gazed into the clouds & the discoloured upsky above.

“I’m from Streggeye Land,” he said. “I’ve got some information. From a lost train.”

WHAT OPENED the door to him was a stamping figure covered completely in a dark leather costume, eyes obscured behind flinty glass, uniform strapped all over with charcoal filters & water bottles, bits of equipment, tubes & nozzles, shaggy & swaying like a fruit tree. Sham didn’t blink. The figure raised an arm & ushered him ponderously in.

The house didn’t even surprise him. After that arch & the garden he fully expected it to be the mix of sumptuous decay, jury-rigged half-fixes, splendour & grubby salvage it was. Past all kinds of strange stuff, salvage stuff, the silent guide took him into a kitchen. Also crammed, every surface covered, in bits of everything. Junk covered the huge table like unappetising hors-d’oeuvres. Trash sat under dust on windowsills.

Behind the huge table, looking at Sham with his arms folded over his denim overalls, was the boy from the flatograph. Sham exhaled.

The boy was perhaps two years older than in the picture. Maybe ten? Dark skin, short dark hair jutting straight up like hedgehog bristles. Brown eyes full of suspicion. He was stocky, compact, his chest broad like a tough older boy’s. He stuck out his chin & his lower lip as if pointing at Sham with them, & waited.

The person who had led Sham in peeled off the strange outer clothes. From the helmet fell shoulder-length dark coils of hair. It was a girl who shook them from her face, the other child from the lost picture. She was close to Sham’s age. Her skin was as dark & grey as her brother’s, though dotted with rust-coloured freckles, her face as fierce & furrow-browed as his, her lips as set, but her expression not quite so forbidding. She wiped a sweat-wet fringe of hair out of her eyes & looked at Sham levelly. Under the outerwear now puddled at her feet she wore a grubby jumper & longjohns.

“Had to test it,” she said. “So.”

“So,” the boy said. Sham nodded at them & soothed Daybe, wriggling on his shoulder.

“So,” the girl said, “you have something to tell us.”

& SLOWLY, stopping & starting, not very coherently but as thoroughly as he could, Sham went over it all. The ruin of the strange train, the debris. The attack of the mole rats.

He did not mention skeleton nor skull, but, looking away, he said that there’d been evidence that someone had died there. When he looked up, the siblings were staring at each other. They made no sounds. Both of them kept their bodies still; neither of them said a word. Both of them were blinking through tears.

Sham was appalled. He looked urgently from one to the other, desperate for them to stop. They did not sob, they made very little noise. They only blinked & their lips trembled.

“What are you, can you, I didn’t,” Sham blurted. Desperate to make them say something. They ignored him. The girl hugged her brother, quickly & hard, held him at arm’s length & examined him. Whatever it was that needed to pass between them did so. They turned at last to Sham.

“I’m Caldera,” said the girl. She cleared her throat. “This is Caldero.” Sham repeated the names, keeping his eyes on her.

“Call me Dero,” the boy said. He did not sniff, but he wiped tears from his cheeks. “Dero’s easier. Otherwise it sounds too much like her name, which can be confusing.”

“Shroake,” his sister said. “We’re the Shroakes.”

“I’m Sham ap Soorap. So,” he added eventually, when they showed no inclination to speak. “It was your father’s train?”

“Our mother’s,” said Caldera.

“But she took our dad with her,” said Dero.

“What was she doing?” Sham said. “What were they doing?” Perhaps, he thought, he should not ask, but his curiosity was too strong to resist. “Way out there?” The Shroakes glanced at each other.

“Our mum,” Dero said, “was Ethel Shroake.” As if that was an answer. As if Sham should recognise the name. Which he did not.

“Why did you come, Sham ap Soorap?” said Caldera. “& how did you know where to find us?”

“Well,” Sham said. He was still troubled, far more than he understood, at the sight of the Shroakes’ grief. He thought of that side-slid train, the dust & bones & rags that filled it. Of travellers & families & adventures gone wrong, & trains turned into sarcophagi, with bones within them.

“See, there was a time I saw something that I don’t think I was maybe supposed to see.” He was talking quickly, & his breath came in a shudder. “Something from that train. A memory card from a camera. It was like … they knew everything was going to get stripped, but they found a way to hide that one thing.”

The Shroakes were staring. “That would be dad,” Caldera said quietly. “He did like that camera.”

“There were pictures on it,” Sham said. “I … saw you. He took one of you two.”

“He did,” said Caldera. Dero was nodding. Caldera looked up at the ceiling. “It’s been a long time,” she said. “We always knew they might … & as it went on, it got more & more likely.” She spoke Railcreole with a lovely strange accent. “Truth is, I thought, if anything happened, we’d never know. That we’d just wait & wait. & now, you come here with these stories.”

“Well,” Sham said. “I think if someone in my family never came back … Which actually, sort of …” He took another breath. “I think I’d like it if someone told me if they found them. Later.” Caldera & Dero stared levelly at him. He thought of the pictures, & his heart sped up with excitement; he couldn’t help it. “& also,” he said, “because of what else was on them pictures. That’s why I wanted to find you. What were they looking for?”

“Why?” said Dero.

“Why?” said Caldera, her eyes narrowing.

This is something, Sham thought, & excitement filled him right up. He took out his camera. He told them, one by one, about the images he had seen. He thumbed on the tiny screen that showed his own, scrolled through one by rubbish useless one of rails & penguins & raildwellers & weather & the Medes crew & not much at all, until he reached that picture. The picture of the last shot Caldera’s parents had taken.

His camera was cheap, his focus was off, he had taken it as he fell. It was a poor effort. But it was just clear enough, if you knew what you were looking at. An empty plain & a single line. Rails stretching out to nowhere. Alone.

“Because,” he said, “they were coming back from this.”

THIRTY-THREE

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN WE DID NOT FORM ALL words as now we do, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word “&” was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.

Humanity learnt to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

What word better could there be to symbolise the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than “&” itself? Where else does the railsea take us but to this place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than “&”?

An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs’ widths from where we began.

& tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it’s going, as we all must do.

THIRTY-FOUR

I CAN’T HELP WONDERING,” SHAM SAID, “WHAT THEY WERE doing.”

“You’re a moler?” said Dero. Sham blinked.

“Yeah.”

“You hunt moles?”

“Well, me, no. I help a doctor. & sometimes I clean floors & pick up ropes. But I do that on a train that hunts moles, yeah.”

“You don’t,” said Dero, “sound happy.”

“About moling? Or doctoring?”

“What would you rather be doing?” Caldera said. She glanced at him, & something in her look rather took his breath away.

“I’m fine,” Sham said. “Anyway, look. This isn’t why I came here, to talk about this.”

“No indeed,” agreed Caldera. Dero shook his head, then nodded, then shook it again, stern-faced as a little general. “Still though. What would you like?”

“Well,” Sham said. “I mean …” He was shy to say it. “It would be good to do what your family does. To be a salvor.”

Dero & Caldera regarded him. “You think we’re salvors?” said Dero.

“I mean, well, yeah,” said Sham. “I mean—” He shrugged & indicated the house, so full to brimming with found technology & reconstructed bits & pieces. “Yeah. & where they were going.” He shook the camera. “That was salvage hunting. Far off. Weren’t it?”

“What do your family do?” Dero said.

“Well,” Sham said. “My, it’s my cousins, sort of, they do bits & pieces, nothing like this. &, but my mum & dad were—well, my dad was on the trains. Neither of them were salvors anyway. Not like yours.”

Caldera raised an eyebrow. “We’ve been salvors, of sorts,” she said. “I suppose. Mum was. Dad was. Once. But is that what you think would get you up in the mornings?”

“We are not salvors,” Dero said. Sham kept looking at Caldera.

“I said we were,” she said. “Not we are. What we are is salvage-adjacent.”

“I mean, all the searching, though,” Sham said, his voice coming quicker the more he spoke. “That’s got to be exciting, ain’t it? Finding things no one’s found before, digging down, finding more, uncovering the past, making new things, all the time, learning & that.”

“You’re contradicting yourself,” Caldera said. “You can’t find things no one’s found before by uncovering the past, can you? Searching for something. I see the appeal.” She stared at him. “But you don’t uncover the past if you’re a salvor: you pick up rubbish. The last thing I think you should think about’s the past. That’s what they do wrong here.”

“Here?”

“Here Manihiki.” She shrugged a big shrug, to indicate the island beyond her walls.

“Why you here?” Dero said.

“Yeah, why are you? In Manihiki?” Caldera said. “Your crew. No moles here.”

Sham waved his hand. “Everyone always ends up in Manihiki at some point. Supplies & whatnot.”

“Really,” Caldera said.

“Salvage,” Dero said. “You here for salvage?”

“No,” Sham said. “Supplies. Whatnot.”

He walked with Caldera & Dero through their house. It was so rambling & tumbledown he called it, in his head, rambledown. Up stairs, down again via elevator, escalator up, ladder down, past all sorts of odd spaces like sheds indoors.

“It was good of you to come tell us,” Caldera said.

“Yeah,” said Dero.

“I’m very sorry about your dad & your mum,” Sham said.

“Thank you,” Caldera said.

“Thank you,” Dero said solemnly.

“We’re sorry about yours,” Caldera said.

“Oh.” Sham was vague. “That was ages ago.”

“It must’ve been a massive effort to get here,” Caldera said. “To tell us.”

“We were coming anyway,” Sham said.

“Of course.” She stopped at a door. Put her hand on the handle. Looked at her brother, who looked back at her. They seemed to draw strength from each other. She breathed deep. Dero nodded, she nodded back, & led them into what had once been a bedroom, now had two walls removed so it opened onto the low sky of the garden. Daybe chirruped at the smell of fresh air. The space contained as much mould, ivy, old rain stains & outside air as it did furniture & floor. Caldera ran her fingers over damp dust.

Sitting at a desk, facing out into the hole, was a man. He was writing, skipping between pen & paper & an ordinator. He was writing almost alarmingly quickly.

“Dad,” said Caldera.

Sham’s eyes widened.

The man looked around & gave them a smile. Sham stayed at the door. The man’s eyes looked not quite focused. His pleasure at seeing them was a little desperate.

“Hello there,” the man said. “A guest? Please please do come in.”

“This is Sham,” Caldera said.

“He came to do us a favour,” Dero said.

“Dad,” said Caldera. “We’ve got some bad news.”

She came closer, & trepidation went across the man’s face. Sham backed quietly out & closed the door. He tried to move a good distance away, but after a minute or two, he did think he could hear crying.

& a minute or two after that, the sombre-faced Shroake children came back out.

“I thought, you said that was your dad who … that that was who I found,” Sham whispered.

“It was,” said Dero. “That’s our other one.”

There were almost as many kinds of families as there were rock islands in the railsea—that, of course, Sham knew. There were many disinclined to take the shape that their homes would rather they did. & in those nations where the norms were not policed by law, if they were willing to put up with disapproval—as, it was clear, the Shroakes were—they could take their own shapes. Hence the Shroakes’ strange household.

“There were three of them,” Caldera said. “But Dad Byro …” She glanced in the direction of the room. “He didn’t have the same want to go gallivanting that Dad Evan & our mum did.”

“Gallivanting,” Sham said, hopeful for more.

“He keeps house,” Dero said. Behind him, unseen by him, his sister met Sham’s eye &, silently, mouthed the word kept. “He writes.” Caldera mouthed Wrote. “He’s … forgetful. He looks after us, though.” Caldera mouthed, We look after him.

Sham blinked. “There’s no one else here?” he said. How could they be looking after that lost man & themselves, all alone? A thought struck him.

“You know what I heard,” he said. “I heard there was ways of building artificial people. Out of this stuff.” He indicated the salvage. “That could walk around & think & do things …” He looked around as if expecting such a trash-coagulation, a junk nanny powered on strange energies, to appear, cooing at her charges.

“A salvagebot?” Dero said. He made a rude noise.

“Myths,” Caldera said. “No such thing.” The metal-rubber-glass-stone figure in Sham’s head disappeared in a puff of reality, leaving Caldera & Dero looking after themselves, & their lamenting second father.

THIRTY-FIVE

DESPITE THE ODD TUG OF COMMUNITY HE FELT TO the Shroakes in their newly certain two-thirds orphanhood—a bond he had not expected—& despite his frustration at not understanding more of the elder Shroakes’ story, Sham could not stay. Time was doing what time always does, going faster & faster as if downhill. & in truth, Sham admitted to himself, he was not sure the Shroakes did not want him gone. Did not want to be alone with their remaining parent.

Dero ushered him from the house as Caldera checked again on Dad Byro. As he retraced his steps out of the garden, under the arch of washing machines & back into the streets of Manihiki, Sham thought about the duty roster, about Dr. Fremlo & whoever else might be around, about whose instruction he could & whose he could not evade, in his eagerness to slip away, revisit the Shroakes. Perhaps it was because he was thinking about authority & unwanted attentions that he noticed the man outside the Shroake house.

He stood leaning against a wall, swaddled in a long grey coat larger than the temperature would seem to warrant. From under the wide brim of his hat, it was impossible to see his face. Sham frowned. The man might be staring right at him. He certainly seemed to be looking in the general direction of the Shroakes’ house. & as passersby passed by & the light continued to leak from the sky, Sham was certain the man’s presence was not coincidence.

The watcher, as Sham anxiously gazed, began to saunter across the street. Sham played for time. Knelt for a moment & fiddled with his shoes. The man was approaching him. As casually as he could manage, Sham started to walk away. He willed himself not to look over his shoulder, but the two eye-sized spots on his back where he imagined the man’s gaze landing itched, & he could not help a quick glance. The man was closing on him. Sham sped up. Still looking backwards, he walked straight into someone.

He was gabbling an apology before he even saw who he had hit. It was a woman, tall & broad enough that despite Sham being a heavy boy, impact with him had moved her not at all. She was staring at him with concern. She put her hands on his arms.

“Hey,” she said. “You alright?” She saw his backwards glance. “Is that man giving you trouble?”

“No, I, yes, no, I don’t know,” Sham said. “I don’t know what he wants, he was watching—”

“Watching?” said the woman. The man had stopped. Appeared suddenly interested in a wall. The woman narrowed her eyes. “You came from in there?” she said, indicating the Shroakes’. Sham nodded.

“Don’t worry, son,” she said. She put an arm around his shoulder. “Whatever it is he wants, we’ll keep you out of his hands.”

“Thanks,” Sham muttered.

“Don’t you worry. We take care of visitors in Manihiki.” She led him away, towards better-lit parts of town. “As, I’m sure, did the Shroakes. What was it you were talking to them about?” The question came out of her mouth without the slightest change of tone. Still, though, it made Sham look up. To see that she was staring, in that instant, not at him, but at the man behind them, & that she was looking at him not in suspicion but unspoken communication.

Sham’s very throat began to pulse, so fast did his heart slam at that sight. His rescuer who was not his rescuer looked at him, her face hardened & her hand closed tight on Sham’s shoulder. Options for subtlety & subterfuge removed from him, Sham took the only other path he could see. He stamped on the woman’s foot.

She howled & swore & hopped & bellowed, & the dark, shadow-faced man behind them started sprinting after Sham. He was fast. His coat gusted around him.

Sham ran. Opened his shirt & released Daybe. The bat dive-bombed the man, but unlike the young bullies, this enemy was not so easily cowed. He swatted at Daybe & continued running, closing in on Sham.

“Up!” shouted Sham. “Get away!” He flapped his arms & the bat rose.

Had it been decided on speed alone, Sham would have been in custody within seconds. But he felt possessed by the souls of generations of young people chased through neighbourhoods by adults for reasons unclear or unfair. He channelled their techniques of righteous evasion. None-too-fast as he was, still he veered with the zigzags of justice, scrambled low walls with the vigour & rigour of unfairness-avoidance, reached a street still full of catcalls & the noise of late-afternoon commerce & traffic & rolled in the waning light below low-chassised vehicles with valorous discretion. To lie very still. He held his breath.

Daybe, he thought, ferociously attempting to project his mind, stay away.

Among the percussion of urban footfall, the disembodied steps tramping by him, the grind of wheels & the curious noses of cats & dogs, Sham saw two black leather boots pound down the middle of the street. Stop. Turn. Run a few steps in this direction, a few in that, take off finally in a third. When they were out of sight, Sham burst out, wheezing, hauled himself out from under the cart.

Muddied, shaking & bloodied. He looked up, raised his arms & here came Daybe, out of the sky & back into his shirt. Sham swayed. Stood mostly ignored by Manihiki locals, until he croaked a question to one of them, got directions back to the docks & skulked, by as roundabout routes as he could manage, back to the Medes.

THE WAY TO THE DOCKS took Sham under disorganised streetlamps, electricity, gas, glowing sepia. Through places where those lights were salvage from humanity’s past, bright, historically misplaced colours; & even some alt-salvage, for show, turning footprint-like shapes, or unfolding swirls within containment fields.

His bruises were puffing up. A jollycart, its lamp swaying, shedding shadows as it rolled between snoozing trains, took him to the Medes.

“Late night, was it?” shouted Kiragabo. Sham cringed & stumbled over deck stuff.

“I’m late,” he said. “Captain’ll flay me.”

“She will not. She’s got other stuff on her mind.”

& indeed, when he made his way belowdecks, he didn’t just creep his way to Naphi’s cabin to drop the texts into her lockbox, but was distracted by & went to investigate the noises he heard from the officers’ mess. Oohs, ahs, goshes of impressedness.

The captain & her officers were crowded around something. “Sham,” someone said. “Get on in here, look at this.” Even the captain beckoned him. The officers made space around the table. On which were artefacts.

Sham thought his appearance, the muck & fight-residue on him, would necessitate an explanation. But no one cared. Sham had never heard the captain so voluble. Clickety-glimmer went her arm, the lights on it, the tripping of her fingers faster than flesh fingers could go.

“& look, this. You see here.” She was fiddling with a receiver. It winked & made henlike sounds. It showed lights in combinations. So she’d found the receiver-seller, then.

“Range of—well, miles, they tell me. Perhaps as many as a hundred. & it can pass through feet of earth.”

“They go deeper’n that, Captain,” someone said.

“Yes & they come up again. No one’s suggested it’ll take us to the moldywarpe’s door, Mr. Quex. No one claims the receiver will let us in & make us tea. We will still have a job to do. You’ll still be a hunter. We still even have to learn how to read this thing. But.” She looked around. “Get this—” She held up a little transmitter. “Get this in its skin—it will change things.”

Bozlateen Quex shifted his dandy clothes &, with Naphi’s permission, picked up the receiver. It was cobbled together. More cobbled than together, really—a mess poised at the point of collapse. Made from arche-salvage & alt-salvage. It whispered like a live thing. Odd little circuit. Antiquity & alien expertise mashed into one ugly astonishing machinelette.

Sham moved for a better look. Quex twirled dials & the lights changed. Changed colour, position, velocity. Sham stopped moving a moment, then continued, & as he did so, so did those lights. Everyone looked at him. He blinked & moved again. The lights’ shenanigans continued with his motion.

“What the hell?” said Quex. He prodded a button, the glow grew in his hand. The instrument was paying attention to Sham. Daybe poked its head up from his shirt.

“Ah. It’s the animal,” said the captain. “It has the thing still on its leg. This one is picking up something from that, some backwash signal. Quex, you’ll have to adjust it. Make sure it’s looking for these ones, instead.” She shook her handful of receivers. As they rattled, the receiver barked like a duck & its light changed again.

“As I say,” the captain said, “there is some learning to do. But still. This changes things, does it not? So so so.” She rubbed her hands. She looked at Sham, the source of this idea, to seek out this mechanism. She did not smile—she was Captain Naphi!—but nod at him she did. Which was enough to fluster him. “Check what details we have, work out where last there was sign. Where we might find good molegrounds. That is where we’re heading.”

THIRTY-SIX

I KNOW, BUT WE CAN’T JUST LEAVE HIM,” DERO SAID.

“We ain’t just leaving him,” Caldera said. “It ain’t like we haven’t got people coming to take care of him. You think I won’t miss him, too? You know he’d want us to go.”

“I know, but I don’t want us to go. Not with him here. He needs us.”

The siblings Shroake had retired to another room to have this argument, but if they’d thought it removed them from Sham’s earshot they were mistaken.

“Dero.” Caldera’s voice was subdued. “He’ll forget we’re gone.”

“I know but then he’ll remember & be sad again.”

“& then forget again.”

“… I know.”

When the Shroakes came out, into the corridor where he waited, Dero, red-eyed, stared at Sham as if in challenge. Caldera stood a fraction behind her brother, hand on his shoulder. They met Sham’s gaze.

“He’s why we haven’t gone looking for them,” Caldera said. “It’s been a while. It’s not like what you told us was a big surprise. But him.”

“He’s been waiting,” her brother said.

“Byro’s been waiting to hear,” Caldera said. “That’s what he’s been writing. Letters to them. Are you a letter-writer, Sham?”

“Not as much as I should be. With Troose & Voam—” Sham stopped, aware, suddenly, of how long it had been since he’d sent them word. “Last night,” Sham said. “When I was here before. When I came out, I saw something. Someone. Your house.” He looked grim. “It’s being watched.” The Shroakes stared at him.

“Well, yeah,” said Dero. He shrugged.

“Oh,” said Sham. “Well. As long as you know.”

“Of course,” said Caldera.

“Well, obviously of course,” Sham said. “But, you know, I just wanted to make sure. So, why? Why is it of course?”

“Why’s it watched?” said Caldera.

“ ’Cause we’re the Shroakes,” said Dero. He jerked his right thumb at himself as he made the announcement, used his left one to snap his braces. Raised one eyebrow. Sham could not help laughing. Even Dero, after a moment of glowering, laughed a bit, too.

“They were sort of salvors, like I said,” Caldera told Sham. “& sort of makers. & investigators. They went places & did things this lot would love to be able to do. They want to know where they went, & why.”

“Who does?” Sham said. “Which lot? Manihiki?”

“Manihiki,” said Caldera. “So of course, when they didn’t come back, Byro couldn’t go to the navy. Search & rescue ain’t their priority. Oh, they came offering to search, asking what maps we had, where they’d been going.”

“As if we’d tell them,” Dero said. “As if we knew.”

“They didn’t keep logs of their route on the train,” Caldera said. “That’s why they hid that memory. Even wounded, one of them made sure to bury it in the ground. They must’ve realised there were hints on it about where they’d been.”

“They took windabout ways where they were going & windabout back again,” Dero said.

“Dad Byro might have been getting a little …” Caldera’s voice petered out & picked up again. “But he wasn’t so gone as to trust the navy. Nor tell them what he knew of the route.”

“So there was a chart?” Sham said.

“Not on the train. & none that you or they could read. Manihiki wanted to find them, but for their reasons, not ours. The Shroakes never gave them what they wanted.” She sounded proud. “All manner of engines & machines made that no one else could make. What they wanted wasn’t Mum & Other Dad back—it was whatever they might have with them. What they might have made or found.”

“They’ll have been looking for them for ages,” Dero said. “Since they were gone.”

“But now you’re here,” Caldera said, “they’ll be whispering for the first time in years, ‘We have a lead!’ ”

“They had me hiding in a gutter,” Sham said. “Takes more than a bit of whatever-they-are to get hold of a Streggeye boy.”

“Wanted to know who you are,” Caldera said. “& what you know. About where the Shroakes are.” Sham remembered the caution with which Caldera & Dero had greeted him, when first he had arrived. No wonder they had been suspicious. No wonder they had no friends: even had they not been looking so carefully after Dad Byro, & pining for the return of their other parents, they had to assume everyone who visited was a potential spy.

“Till you came,” Dero mumbled to Sham, “I still always thought they might come back.”

“It was the longest time they’d been away, but you don’t stop wondering,” Caldera said. She inclined her head in the direction of the room where Dad Byro confusedly grieved. “& how could we leave him when we weren’t sure? Go off in one direction, have them come back in the other?”

“We’re sure now though?” Dero said. It sounded like a statement until the very end, when it tweaked suddenly up into a question, a moment’s hope for uncertainty, that twanged on Sham’s heart.

“We’re sure now,” Caldera gently said. “So we have to do right by them. Finish what they started. It’s what Mum & Other Dad would’ve wanted. & it’s what he’d want, too,” She looked at the door again.

“Maybe,” Dero said.

“He might be writing to them again,” Caldera said.

“If he’s going to forget,” Sham asked, “why did you tell him they were gone?”

“Well he loves them, don’t he?” Caldera said. She led him to the kitchen, brought Sham a cup of some oily-looking tea. “Doesn’t he deserve to mourn?”

Sham stirred the drink dubiously. “Whenever I mention this place to anyone,” he said, “I get looks. It’s obvious people talk about your family. & I saw the wreck. I ain’t never seen a train like that. & then there’s that picture.” He looked up at her. “Will you tell me? What were they doing? Do you know?”

“Do we know what they’d been up to?” said Caldera. “Where they were going, & why? Oh, yes.”

“We do,” said Dero.

“But then, you do, too,” Caldera said. She glanced at her brother. After a second, he shrugged. “It’s not very complicated,” Caldera said. “Like you say, you’ve seen the picture.”

“They were looking for something,” Sham said.

“Found,” said Caldera, after a moment. “They were looking for something & they found something. Which was …?” She waited like a schoolteacher.

“A way out of the railsea,” Sham said at last. “Something beyond the rails.”

Well of course. Sham had seen that one line. So he had sort of known that. Still, to hear it! He had a delight in the blasphemy. Spouting heresy, it turned out, was invigorating as well as nerve-wracking.

“There is nothing beyond the rails,” he squawked. Annoyed by his own voice.

“Looks like we’ve got work to do, Dero,” Caldera said. An edge of seriousness, an effort, had come into her voice. When her brother spoke, it was in his, too.

“There’s some stuff in Dad Byro’s room,” Dero said. “I’ll bring it down when I get him his supper.”

“There is nothing beyond the rails,” Sham said again.

“Can we seriously leave him?” Dero said. He glanced back at the door where their remaining father waited.

“We aren’t going to leave him,” Caldera said gently. “You know that. We’ll take care of him.” She came closer to Dero. “All that we’ve been putting away for the nurses—you know they’ll look after him. You know if he could he’d go himself. He can’t. But we can. For him. For all of us.”

“I know,” Dero said. He shook his head.

Sham started to give it one more try. “There is …”

“Oh, will you stop it?” Caldera said to him. “Obviously there is. You saw the picture.”

“But everybody knows—” Sham said, then stopped. He exhaled. “Alright,” he said. There were no certainties. He itemised what he knew. “No one knows where the railsea came from.”

“Well, no one knows,” Caldera said, “but they’ve got a sense of the possibilities. What do they say where you come from? Streggeye, you said? What do you think? Were the rails put down by gods?” Her questions came faster. Were they extruded from the ground? Were they writing in heavenly script, that people unknowingly recited as they travelled? Were the rails produced by as-yet-not-understood natural processes? Some radicals said there were no gods at all. Were the rails spit up by the interactions of rock, heat, cold, pressure & dirt? Did humans, big-brained monkeys, think up ways to use them when the rails emerged, to stay safe from the deadly dirt? Was that how trains got thought up? Was the world an infinity of rails down as well as around, seams of them through layers of earth & salvage, down to the core? Down to hell? Sometimes storms gusted off topsoil & uncovered iron below. The most excavation-gung-ho salvors claimed to have found some tracks yards underground. What about Heaven? What was in Heaven? Where was it?

“I think—what we were told—you know,” said Sham. He tutted at his own incoherence. “It all comes from That Apt Ohm.”

“Ah, right,” Caldera said. Of all the gods worshipped, feared, scorned, placated & bickered with, his influence was the most widespread. Great chimney-headed controller in dark robes. He protected & controlled the railsea, its nations, its passengers. “There might have been one sometimes,” Caldera said. “Years & years ago. A boss. Where do they go? The rails? What’s at the edge of the railsea?”

Sham twisted in discomfort.

“Sham,” Caldera said. “What’s the upsky? Don’t say it’s where the gods put poison. Where do the rails come from? What’s the godsquabble?”

“It’s when at the start of the world all the gods were fighting to make the earth, & That Apt Ohm was the strongest, & in their fighting the railsea rose out of the earth.”

“It was a fight between different railroad companies,” Caldera said.

Sham had heard that theory, too, he conceded, nervously.

“It was after everything went bad, & they were trying to make money again. With public works. People paid for passage, & rulers paid for every mile of build. So it went crazy. They were competing, all putting down new routes all over the place. Ruthless, because the more they built the more they made.

“They burnt off years of noxious stuff—that’s where the upsky comes from—& ended up chugging stuff into the ground, too, changing things. They could jury-rig the whole world. It was a company war. They laid traps for each other’s trains, so there’s trap-switches, trap-lines, out there.

“They made the lines,” Caldera said. “They destroyed each other. But they couldn’t stave off ruin. & all they left were the rails. We live in the aftermath of business bickering.” She smiled.

“Our mum & dad were looking for something,” Dero said. “They knew the history. Stories about dead treasure, history, angels, a vale of tears.”

“I’ve heard all that!” Sham said. “ ‘The ghost of all the riches ever born & yet unborn live in Heaven!’ ” He recited words from old stories. “ ‘Oh, shun the vale of tears!’ You telling me they was chasing myths?”

“What if it isn’t?” said Caldera. “Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth. It don’t mean the ghosts of all the riches ain’t there, either.”

With an abrupt digital blare, one of the wall clocks demanded Sham’s attention. Not now! he thought. He wanted to hear these salvage stories, to rummage through this house.

“I … have to go,” he said. “Got to meet someone.”

“That’s a shame,” said Dero politely. “We have to go, too.”

“What? Where? Who?”

“Not quite now,” Caldera said. She closed her eyes.

“Soon though,” Dero said.

“Not quite now,” Caldera said. “But now we know what happened, now you told us, we have a job to finish. Don’t look surprised, Sham. You heard what we’d been saying. You knew we’d have to. I think that’s why you came to show us the picture.

“You didn’t think we’d leave Mum & Dad’s work unfinished, did you?”

THIRTY-SEVEN

THE DUSTMAID WAS AS CROWDED AS MOST DOCKSIDE drinkeries, loud with the electronic chirps of games. Sham watched the salvors gathered by the bar. They weren’t wearing their salvaging clothes, but even their downtime outfits marked them out—reconstructed finery from ages of high fashion up to which humanity had long since failed to live. He got close enough to hear them spouting their Salvage Slang—they called each other Fren & Bluv, they talked about Diggiters & Spinecandy & Noshells. Sham mouthed the words.

“So,” Robalson said. “Your captain like her books, then?” He swigged from the drink Sham had bought him. It was called Trainoil—a concoction of sweet whiskey & stout & molasses that was simultaneously disgusting & rather nice.

“Yeah,” Sham said. “Thanks again for, you know, yesterday.”

“So, what’s your story, Sham? How long you been at rail?”

“This is my second trip.”

“There you go, then. People like that, they can sniff noobs. I don’t mean no offence, it’s just how it is.”

“So,” said Sham. “Are any of your crew here?”

“This ain’t the sort of place they drink.”

“They go to special pirate bars?”

“Yeah,” said Robalson at last. He said it quite deadpan. Raised an eyebrow. “Special pirate bars.”

MUCH LATER than he had intended, when the frenetic drumming of the song “Jump Up All You Train Ruffians” came on the jukebox, Sham shouted with pleasure & joined in the rumbustious chorus. Robalson sang, too. Other customers watched them with combined disapproval & amusement.

“Disapprovesalment,” Robalson suggested, when Sham pointed this out.

“Amduseapproval,” said Sham.

“Sham,” Robalson said. “If you keep up like this you’ll get us kicked out. What is it with those salvors, anyway? Ever since you come in you been eyeing them like they’re worm meat & you’re a badger.”

“I just, you know,” Sham said. He wriggled in his chair. “The way they dress, the way they talk. What they do. It’s—Well, it’s cool, ain’t it? I wish …”

“You was talking to one in that hall, weren’t you? That woman.”

“Yeah. Something Sirocco. She was lovely. Bought me a cake.” Sham grinned.

“Don’t you think,” Robalson said, “there’s someone out there on the railsea on a salvagetrain, & all the time when they pass moletrains they’re like, ‘They do such more exciting stuff than me.’ ”

“Don’t know,” Sham said.

“They’re like, ‘Oh, imagine being a doctor’s assistant on that train.’ ”

“Give me their address, I’ll call them to swap.”

“Plus, didn’t I hear that your captain has a philosophy?” Robalson said.

“So?”

“So ain’t that something to aspire to? I bet salvors are probably a boring bunch.”

A man & a woman in the corner of the bar were watching the two young men. Sham eyed them. Not salvors, he thought. They saw him see them, looked away. His whole body froze up, stiff with a sudden memory of hiding under the cart.

“I met a couple of people who I think might be,” he said. “Salvors. Sort of salvors.” He narrowed his eyes. “They weren’t boring. Believe me. A brother & sister.”

“Oh, that rings a trainbell,” Robalson said. “The Shoots? The Shrikes? Soaks?”

“How d’you know?”

Robalson shrugged. “I listen to stories. There’s enough of them about. There’s one about an oddball brother & sister heading out on some hunt to the land of bleeding Green Cheese or whatever, Engineday next. Whispers are that someone wants after them. On the lookout for imaginary treasure.”

Sham had crept away from the Shroakes, this time, by routes they had suggested, that took him away & back into the town without drawing the attention of the watchers that were undoubtedly there. He blinked at what Robalson was saying. Robalson himself seemed uninterested in the rumours of state attention he was, unthinkingly, recounting.

“I just don’t see it,” he said. “About you, I mean. You think you want to be a salvor, but I’m not even sure you do.”

“Funny,” said Sham. “That’s what they said. & what about you, then? What do you even do, Robalson?”

“What do I do? Depends on the day. Some days I wash decks. Some days I clean the heads & oh my oily hell I’d rather get smacked into the godsquabble. Some days I do better things. Know what I saw today? Something from the upsky fell, about a month ago. Onto a beach in the north. They keep it in a jar, charge a few coppers to see it.”

“It’s alive?”

“Sham. It fell out of the upsky. No it’s not alive. But they keep it in vinegar or something.”

“But anyway you know that ain’t what I meant,” Sham said. “Which is your train?”

“Oh,” said Robalson. “Never you mind.”

“Yeah,” Sham said. “Whatever.” Fine. Let him play his mystery-boy games. “The upsky,” Sham said distractedly. “The grundnorm. The horizon. All these edges. What stories d’you know about, y’know, the edge of the whole world?”

Robalson blinked. “Stories?” he said. “You mean, like, Heaven? Same as you, probably. Why?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know if they was true?” Sham said, with sudden fervour, an intensity that took him quite by surprise.

“Not really,” said Robalson. “For a start, they ain’t, they’re just stories. For a second, if they are true, some of them you don’t want to be. What if it’s true that you should shun it? What is it they say’s there? A universe of sobbing, is it? Or, a crying treasure?” He shook his head. “It don’t have to make much sense to know it ain’t good. Angry ghosts? Crying forever?”

THIRTY-EIGHT

THE OWNERS OF THE MEDES WANTED THE COIN & credit that molemeat & fur & oils would bring. They didn’t care whether or not Naphi caught this, that, or the other particular mole. Except just perhaps that certain events would mean an increase in the power of her name, & that kind of brand recognition might mean income for them.

They were passing rare, captains who not only had their ultimate quarries, their nemeses, but who actually snared them. Like all Streggeye youth, Sham had been to the Museum of Completion, seen the famous flatographs of women & men standing on the mountainous carcases of philosophies: Haberstam on his beetle; ap Mograve on her mole; Ptarmeen on the sinuous mutant badger Brock the Nihil, beaming like a schoolchild with his dead nothing-symbol under his foot.

The Medes crew had three days to turn a middling moletrain into a travelling fortress of philosophy-hunting. Hammers hammered, spanners spanned. The trainsfolk ran tests on the engines & the backup engines. Sharpened harpoons, stocked up on gunpowder. They patched up leaks in the cladding. The Medes hadn’t looked so good for years. It hadn’t looked this good when it was first made.

“You know what the stakes of this are,” Naphi said. She wasn’t much of a one for speechifying, but she couldn’t not. As her officers had told her, the crew needed to hear something. “We may be at railsea a long time,” the captain said, voice cracking through the tubes. “Months. Years. This hunt will take us far. I am prepared. Will you come with me?” Ooh, nice touch, Sham thought.

“There are no trainspeople I’d rather have with me. We hunt for the glory of Streggeye, for the owners of this fine train.” A few knowing smirks at that. “For knowledge. & if you will, you hunt for me. & I won’t forget it. We go south—& then we go where knowledge takes us. Gentlemen & ladies of the rails—shall we?”

The crew cheered. They raised raucous support for the hunt, for the end of the uncertainty. “For the captain’s philosophy!” The shout was taken up across the decks, from every carriage of the train. Really? Sham thought.

“Sham,” said Dr. Fremlo as the crew went to their tasks. “The harbourmaster delivered this.” The doctor handed over a sealed letter, at which Sham stared in consternation. He muttered thanks—not every crewmember would have handed it over, certainly not so honourably refusing to read it first. Sam Saroop, the letter said. Close enough, he supposed. Honourable or not, the doctor was not uncurious, & waited while Sham split the seal.

SPECIAL OFFER! Sham read. TO THE VISITOR TO THE SHROAKES. GOOD RATES PAID FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR PLANS! VISIT HARBOURMASTER TO FIND OUT MORE. ACT NOW TO RECEIVE FREE GIFTS!

“What is it?” Dr. Fremlo said, as Sham scrunched the paper up & curled his lip.

“Nothing,” Sham said. “Junk mail. Rubbish.”

“I DON’T KNOW WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME,” Sham said, “that I just don’t feel it.” He’d been telling the Shroakes of Naphi’s rhetoric, her galvanising the crew.

Caldera shrugged. “Neither do I,” she said. “But maybe you’re lucky.”

“Lucky?”

“Not to want to throw your hat in the air.” Caldera was counting what looked like pins or screws or something on the kitchen table. Dero was packing tins into suitcases.

Sham was getting better at sneaking away from the Medes. When he had turned up at the Shroake House, the siblings had greeted him without surprise.

“Come in.” Caldera smiled. “We’re just at the end of lessons.”

“Lessons” turned out to be Dero & Caldera sitting opposite each other in the library, amid a scree of books, ordinator tablets & printouts. On the shelves around them were as many bones & bizarreries as books. Dero was sorting & stashing the materials of learning, according to some incomprehensible system. “What are your lessons like in Streggeye?” Caldera said. “What’s your school like?” She blinked under Sham’s gaze. “Don’t know that many people your age here, let alone elsewhere,” she said. “I’m curious.” Was she blushing? Well, no. But she was a bit bashful.

“We went to Streggeye,” Dero said. “Didn’t we?”

“Oh, they took us all over,” said Caldera. “But I can’t remember. I can’t say we know anywhere.”

So Sham told her a little about Streggeye Land. He was blushing, even if she was not. He stumblingly turned an anecdote or two from his quite ordinary childhood into stories of an exotic land, while Dero finished putting away the bits & pieces.

Sham continued, & Caldera listened without looking at him, & Dero left the room. Sham heard the door to Byro’s room open & close. & he kept talking, & after a minute it opened again, & Dero returned. His face was set & his eyes red. Dero stood between Sham & Caldera. Sham’s stories faltered at last. The young man from Streggeye & the quasisalvors’ daughter turned away from each other.

“My turn,” said Caldera, & slipped out of the room.

“Turn for what?” said Sham. He did not expect Dero to explain, & Dero did not. He just stood with his lip out as if ready for a fight, in increasingly lengthy & uncomfortable silence, until Caldera came back. She carried a picture of Dad Byro, a scarf, a battered old foldable ordinator from his desk.

Her face was as stricken as her brother’s, but when she spoke, she made her voice sound normal. “Where’s your bat?” she said.

“Hunting somewhere.” Sham steepled his fingers thoughtfully. “Someone sent me a message,” he said. “Offering me stuff if I’d tell things about you.”

“What did you say?” Caldera said.

“What do you think? I threw it away. & I came here the back ways you told me. But seems like there’s more & more rumours about you. & I know there’s rumours about the Medes.”

Caldera put a fingertip thoughtfully to her lips. “There are lots of rumours about your train, yes,” she said. “Rails & rumours. How you got here, where you’re going, what you’ve found on the way.”

“I been asking people what they think of when they hear about this end-of-the-world stuff,” Sham said, “& I have to tell you, it don’t sound pretty.”

“Are you coming with us, Sham ap Soorap?” Dero said.

“Wh-What?” Sham said.

“Not now, Dero,” Caldera said.

“Wait, what does he mean?” Sham said.

“Not now,” Caldera said again. “What is it you were saying about your captain’s speech, Sham?”

“Oh, well. Just that it didn’t … work on me. I really don’t think I want to get on another moletrain.” Sham looked around the house, at all the salvage.

“There are people,” Caldera said, “who say all of us have a Task—they’d say it like that, they wouldn’t say task, they’d say Task—& you’ll know what it is when you hear it. That it’s out there, waiting for you.”

“Maybe,” Sham said thoughtfully.

“I think that’s rubbish myself,” Caldera said. Dero giggled. Sham blinked.

“So none of us have tasks,” Sham said.

“I didn’t say that. Did I say that? I said maybe you don’t have a task. My task right now is to carry stuff.” She lifted various bits of luggage. “No, Dero, your task right now is to stay here & sort through this all. What do you think yours is, Sham?”

Dero tutted & grumbled as Sham followed Caldera, past boxes tied with string & strapped into place, past trunks distended from within like glutted snakes, out into the drossland garden. In sight of the landmark white metal arch, she placed a key in a coffee tin, under a polished tortoise-shell, under a bucket.

“I’m glad it was so important to you to find us & tell us,” Caldera said. “What was it happened to your parents?”

Sham looked up at her. “What?” he said. “Why?” She looked at him until he slumped. Sham pushed after her through the salvagey garden, & muttered a brief version of the story of his father’s disappearance & mother’s grief. “Voam & Troose look after me, though,” he said.

“I believe you,” Caldera said.

“They’re well pleased I got to work on a moler,” he said. “Get to see the world.”

“Some of it,” she said. “I knew what you were going to tell us the moment I opened the door, you know. I mean about our parents. & I hadn’t known until then how much I’d been waiting. I wish someone could’ve found your dad’s wreck. Or where your mum is. Told you. Done that for you, like you done for us.”

She smiled at him. Very quickly & kindly. It was gone almost immediately. Caldera held the ragged weed aside for him. “The world’s fine,” she said. “But you got to wonder what comes after it.”

They were, Sham realised with a start, on the shore. The earth a few yards off became flat & dusty & abruptly less fertile, crammed with intertwined rails. A wooden walkway extended some yards over the rails, at its end a jollycart. Big slabby rock teeth shielded the garden from sight.

“You have a private beach?” Sham said.

Caldera walked onto the jetty. The slats were old, & through their gaps Sham could see paint flakes falling onto earth churned by ferocious little mammals.

“Out there,” she said, “there’s so many things. There are people miles out who roll with the wind, you know, on trains that ain’t changed for centuries. Our parents found their hunt-grounds, & found them. They went with them, learned from them. How to travel without engines. All their stories about the railsea & Heaven & how to get there & the weeping. Everything. Everyone knows something worth learning.”

“Not everyone,” Sham said.

“Alright, not everyone. Most people, though.”

Clouds momentarily parted, & Sham glimpsed the yellow upsky. He heard a plane.

“Do you believe there’s all them riches?” Sham said. “Is that what you’re looking for?”

Caldera shrugged. “I don’t know if I believe it or not. But it ain’t why we’re going.”

“You’re exploring,” said Sham. “You just want to know.”

She nodded. “We were waiting for them,” she said. “& as much as you could, you brought them back. What else would we do but go where they went? & it ain’t just duty. I promise you that. You showed me a picture. Well, I’ll show you a picture back.”

Caldera took a print from her pocket. Rock weathered into snarls, hillocks supporting scraggy hardland animals, cactus & ivy. Railsea miles. & a staircase.

A staircase. It emerged from the ground, as high as a house, jutting at 45 degrees, ending in the air. A salvage overhang! Sham stared.

“It’s an escalator,” Caldera said. “Way out there.” She pointed to railsea. Below the apex of the stairs’ rise was a cone of dirt & rubbish. What fell from it was not even salvage, but true useless rubbish, rejectamenta beyond reclamation, hauled up out of the innards of the world.

THIRTY-NINE

OH MY STONEFACES,” SHAM SAID. “WHERE IS that?”

Caldera glanced back at the house. “Dero’ll be going spare, me leaving him there like that. I just needed a moment.” She looked at Sham. “Just listen. Let me tell you about what’s under there.” She cleared her throat. Caldera told him:

THE STAIRS KEEP GRINDING. They move up, all the time. So when you land on them—& the rails don’t go that close, you have to jump!—you have to race down against the motion so the old escalator powered by who knows what current down there doesn’t deposit you with the garbage—

“How DO YOU KNOW?” Sham said. Caldera blinked.

“They took me once,” she said. “My parents. They were changing their plans. They knew how to use salvage, they just … took me there when they didn’t love doing it anymore. To tell me why. Shhh.”

Caldera continued:

—WITH THE GARBAGE.

So down you run against it carrying your pack, down the metal stairs, into the darkness under the railsea. I know what you’re thinking: that’s where the animals live, & why would you ever do that? But mostly they don’t come into these tunnels & no I don’t know why. So don’t think about burrowing predators, toxic earth, rockfalls, grizzly chthonic deaths.

There are electric lights down there. In the salvage mine.

Don’t think about burrowers. Don’t think about seeing a bulge in that garbage wall, as you walk hunched to get under the beams of the supports, past the trolleys & wagons & discarded tools; don’t think about that bulge roaring into a split into the shadows under the world & onto a snuffling, blind, toothed face.

Just look at this passage. Between layers of pressure-hardened earth & shaley rock, an archaeology of discards, centuries layered. Extruded edges of junk, shards, glass, bits & pieces, faint stretching fronds of ripped-up plastic bags. A greening layer: tiny cogs from a clockwork epoch; crushed plastic; the scintilla from an era of glass; rag-seams of degraded video tape; a gallimaufryan coagulum of mixed-up oddness.

There are places where the pressures of ages & the jostling of continents against each other like slow uncomfortable bedfellows shoves such motherlodes airward, & the railsea is broken by the dangerous jags of salvage reefs, full of trash treasure. & there are these tunnels. Just like there are tunnels where trains can go. You know there are.

What the scholars want to do is work out what these things were. Salvors want to know what they were if & only if it helps sell them. & if it doesn’t, they don’t care. People who want to use them want to know what they were if it means they can be used. Although they’ll work out something to do with them one way or another. They’ll take some reclaimed thing & hit nails with it & call it a hammer if it comes to that.

“WHAT’S WRONG with doing that?” Sham said.

“Wrong?”

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG with that. There isn’t anything right with it either. There’s only one thing that everyone agrees on about salvage. Whether you’re digging it out of the ground or selling it or buying it, or studying it, or bribing someone with it, or wearing it, or looking for it, it catches the eye. Like foil for magpies.

Salvors don’t have to dress like they do. They want to. Those are their peacock feathers. That’s the one thing you can always say for salvage. It looks cool.

& really, who cares?

Who cares? Say you’re a salvor, or a pair of salvors, who doesn’t or don’t love salvage anymore. Maybe you don’t have to cast about to find out what it is you want instead. It’s enough, maybe, to know you don’t want what you thought you did. That’s enough to be getting on with.

“THE QUESTION IS,” said Caldera, “is this—” She shook the picture. “—the stuff you want to chase? Buried rubbish? Maybe there’s something better than that. Or maybe there’s something just else. Think about it. You’ve got an hour or two.”

“Till what?” Sham said. “What happens then?”

“Then we go. So by then you have to decide if you’re coming with us.”

FORTY

DAYBE FELL FROM NOWHERE ONTO SHAM’S SHOULDER. Caldera jumped. Sham didn’t even glance at the animal, humming & whickering in his ear.

“The key you left,” he said.

“For the nurses,” Caldera said. She headed back for the house. “They’re good people. We looked a long time. There’s money. Dad Byro’ll be taken to the sanatorium.” She closed her eyes. “Because we’ve got stuff to do. So.”

“You don’t even know where they went!”

“Byro did,” she said. “However confused he got, that he never told. We have his machine. It’s got secrets. & there’s what you told us.”

The Shroakes bustled from room to salvage-filled room, from room to open-to-the-sky-&-wall-less room, from room to whirring-clockwork-&-diesel-instrument-mazed room. They gathered things, pulled them on carts, lined them up in the kitchen. They pulled clothes from closets, tugged them to test for strength, fingered them to test for warmth, sniffed them to test for mildew.

“But wait,” Sham said. “I heard, someone told me, you’re going on Engineday. That’s not for ages!”

“That worked, then,” Dero said.

“Engineday,” said Caldera, “is when we put it about that we’d be going. Should give us a little while before anyone thinks to look, or comes after us.”

“Comes after you?” Sham said. “You really think …?”

“Indubitably,” Dero said.

“Yes,” Caldera said. “They will. Too many rumours about what our parents were looking for.” She rubbed her finger & thumb in a money motion.

“You said that weren’t it,” said Sham.

“It weren’t it. But rumours don’t care what was it or not. So—” She put her finger to her lips.

Sham’s mind was going like train wheels at their fastest. “Why do you want to go?” he said.

“Don’t you?” Caldera said.

“I don’t know!” Exploring. Finding something new. All that way. “But what about my, my family,” Sham said, then stopped. Hold on. Would Troose & Voam mind if he went?

Yes, they would mind. But not as much as if he were a miserable bad doctor for years.

“I think,” Sham said slowly, trying to think it through, “they wanted me to do well, maybe even get my own philosophy.”

“I thought it was just captains did that,” Dero said.

“You could be a captain from being a doctor. Although I don’t know if they thought it through that much.” What Troose & Voam knew well was that he’d had a space to be filled, Sham thought with a little ache for them.

“Dero,” said Caldera. “Go get it. Do you want to philosophise?” she said to Sham when her brother left. “Get obsessed with an animal? Give it a meaning? Make that your life?” There was nothing snide in her tone. She staggered under the load she carried. “There are places,” she said, “where rails go up off the beach into uplands.”

“Railrivers, yeah,” he said.

“Yes. Some go up the mountains. Right into the uplands.”

“& loop down again somewhere else. They all merge back into the railsea.”

“Some of them go into old dead cities up there.”

“& out again,” Sham said. Caldera looked at him.

“This is heavy,” she said. Her burden, not the story. Sham took it from her, carried it to the jetty. Where he stopped, & stared.

Something was approaching from between knolls in the railsea. The earth around it breaking with curious moles’ snouts. Here came Dero, in—well. In a train.

The engine was a snubby, tough-looking thing with a few small carriages behind it. There were glass portholes in its flanks. Daybe raced through the intervening air to investigate. The engine was armoured & chimneyless. There was no telltale exhaust at all, that Sham could see or smell. & these were not electrified rails. “How does it run?” he whispered.

Dero leaned out of the oncoming vehicle. He looked up at Daybe, who dipped in his turning & angled his wings. “Caldera,” Dero shouted.

She stood by Sham. “We’re off, then,” she said to him. She looked through gaps in the surrounding rocks, into the railsea. A complicated tangle of gauges, here, a tricksy piece of switching, there. “So. Would you like to come, Sham?”

& Daybe cawed, an uncharacteristic crowlike sound, just as if it had heard the idea & got excited. & Dero shouted, “Caldera, come on.”

“What if it’s terrible?” Sham blurted out. “What if it all ends in tears? It ain’t like there’s no warning. You were the one reminded me we’re supposed to shun it!”

Caldera did not reply. She & her brother turned, in the same moment, & stared at the house. Sham knew they were thinking of Dad Byro. Tears came up in Caldera’s eyes. They stayed there a moment. Then without a word, she pushed them down again.

Sham could be with them. & while he wouldn’t be a salvor, nor would he be a train doctor nor a moler either. He’d be something else.

But he wasn’t saying anything, & then it was a moment later & still he wasn’t saying anything. He heard himself saying nothing. Caldera looked at him, a long, a long moment. Then at last gave a sad shrug. The train approached. The switches on its route switched. Caldera turned away from Sham towards it.

The train accelerated faster than Sham would have imagined. It turned more tightly, too. He, contrariwise, was still.

“Wait,” he shouted. He ran at last forward. But he was slow, & the train was fast, & here it was at the jetty’s end, opening a door, & Caldera was jumping on & getting in, not looking at him, determinedly not looking at him, & the train was moving again. How did that happen so quick? What crazy cutting edge & salvage-cobbled equipment were they driving?

“Wait!” Sham shouted again, reaching the edge of the wood, jumping in the glints off the tracks below, but time had moved on & the Shroakes were receding.

Sham sat. Just collapsed on his bum. Watched the rear end of a train move at an amazing rate.

The light was going. When the sun went down it went down fast. As if giving up all the effort with a flop of relief. The Shroakes’ train was away in the dusk.

Leaving Sham to pick himself up when all sight of it was gone. He looked into the shallow coastal rails. Made his way through the garden, past the house, under the washing-machine arch, back into bloody Manihiki. Where his moletrain waited.

Stupid, useless. That’s what he kept saying to himself, all the way.

FORTY-ONE

ROBALSON WAS IN THE PUB AGAIN. “WHAT GOT HOLD of you?” he said, at the sight of Sham’s face.

“I’m stupid & useless.”

“Blimey,” Robalson said.

“You know I said I was going to see some people? Well, they gave me the chance to go somewhere with them. They wanted me to go with them, I think. One of them. & I wanted to go with her. But I bottled it. & I don’t even know why! I think I did want to go. But I can’t have done, can I?”

“Who were they?”

“Just a family. I found something of theirs. A sort of a treasure map. Sort of. & they’ve gone off to find out if it’s right.”

“This is them Soaks. & you didn’t go?”

“I didn’t. Because I’m stupid …”

“Whoa, hush. Look. Tell me about it. I don’t think you’re stupid or useless. You’re no one’s fool, Sham.”

Nice to have someone think so. It was a scrappy version of the story that Sham told. He rambled about the wreck, spoke in vague terms of “evidence,” of “something,” of a secret that the poor dead prospectors appeared to have managed to keep, that the Shroakes had the right to know.

Robalson was rapt. “I heard Engineday they was going!” he said.

“That was … disinformation.”

“No!” Robalson said at last. He looked thoughtful. He looked grim. “I think I understand. The rumours are right!”

“Eh? What rumours?”

“The rumours about you.”

“What?” breathed Sham. “What are you talking about?”

“You made the right decision not to go, Sham.” Robalson spoke tensely. “I have to tell you something.” He was glancing side to side.

“What is this? What do you mean?”

“Come outside,” Robalson said. “I’ll explain. Wait. Don’t make it look like we’re going together. You’ve got to be careful.” He was not looking at Sham as he spoke. “Outside, left, there’s a little alley. I’ll go first. Five minutes, follow me. & Sham—don’t let anyone see you leave.”

& he was gone, & Sham was bewildered & not unafraid. He waited. He swallowed. He felt his blood rush. At last—head whizzing & not from booze—he stood. Was he watched? He glanced at the drinkers in the dim light. He had no idea.

Into the grey of local streetlamps, the Manihiki night. He crept round into shadows. Daybe came out of the sky & landed on him. He nuzzled it. There was Robalson, slouched by the wall, waiting by a trash bin.

“You got your bat with you?” he whispered nervously.

“What’s the big secret?” Sham whispered.

“The big secret.” Robalson nodded. “You remember when you asked me what my train was? Asked me what I did?”

Sham shivered. “Yeah,” he said. “You said you was—well, you made a joke.”

“Yeah. You remember. The secret’s this.” Robalson leaned closer. “I wasn’t lying. I am a pirate.”

& Sham discovered—as he was grabbed roughly from behind & gripped so he couldn’t move, as his unseen assailant shoved a fumey cloth up against his mouth & nose so great gusts of bleach-&-menthol-smelling stuff went into his lungs & made his head corkscrew into dark, as he heard Daybe shriek a bat shriek—Sham discovered that he wasn’t really surprised to hear it.