Railhead by Philip Reeve Page B

him back to Cleave.

13
    The next day was clear and still. Hammurabi so crisp in the morning sky that Zen felt he could reach out and touch it from the balcony of his room. A day to go exploring down that old southern viaduct, he thought, and was surprised at how happy that made him. He ran downstairs to find Nova.
    But Raven was waiting in the breakfast room with news. “Zen! It’s time to go! Get your luggage together. We’re leaving for Surt.”
    So that was that. Zen’s time in Desdemor was ending just as suddenly as all his other peaceful times. Something fluttered in his stomach like dry leaves as he followed Raven and Nova across the empty station. He knew that feeling. Stage fright.
    “What if the real Tallis Noon shows up?” he asked. He had thought of that a few times, but dismissed it because—well, what were the chances? Now the danger seemed quite real. “What if the real Tallis boards the Noon train while I’m there already, pretending to be him? What then?”
    Raven waved his words away. “You think I hadn’t thought of that? You think I haven’t mapped out all the twists and turns this thing might take? Tallis was at Przedwiosnie last week, just a few stops up the line from Adeli. He probably did have plans to meet the Noon train. But he got delayed. A girl called Chandni Hansa got on the same train. Very pretty. She and Tallis got talking. They got off at Karavina. Do you know Karavina? It’s romantic. Houses on stilts. Moonlight on the vapor lakes. Chandni will make sure Tallis has a long stay there.”
    “How can you know that?”
    “Because I paid her to,” said Raven.
    “Okay,” said Tallis uneasily. So he wasn’t Raven’s only hireling. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. And what did “a long stay” mean? Pretending to be Tallis Noon had made him feel oddly close to the real Tallis Noon, as if they were brothers or something. Was Tallis really enjoying a romantic stopover on Karavina? Or was he lying on the bottom of one of those vapor lakes with a knife in his back? And was that how Zen would end up, too, once he was no more use to Raven?
    They had reached the platform. The
Thought Fox
opened its carriage doors for them. Raven turned and laid his thin hand on Zen’s arm. His eyes were kind, his smile precise. “It’s going to work, Zen. We’ll all get what we want. I’ll have the Pyxis, and you’ll be rich.”
    “What about Nova?”
    “Nova’s just what you’re taking with you instead of burglar’s tools,” said Raven.
    But later, when the
Thought Fox
was stitching its way through space-time’s raggedy fabric, Zen saw that Nova already had what she wanted. Her eyes were on the windows, waiting for the glimpses of new worlds that opened up sometimes between the long underground sections as the
Thought Fox
roared through the K-gates. Nebulae setting over deserts of white sand or refuse floating in a derelict canal, she watched it all with a look that was almost hungry. In her own way, she was a railhead too.
    *
----
    The Dog Star Line ran deep beneath the other platforms at Surt station. The elevators that had led to it were all de-commissioned, and the stairways that once served it were sealed off and forgotten. Even the tunnel through which the old line ran was blocked by a ferro-ceramic barrier. The
Thought Fox
sensed the obstruction ahead as soon as it came through the K-gate. It did not slow down, just unfolded a big gun from either side of its hull, blasted the barrier into pieces, and shouldered aside the smoking fragments.
    It was not a train that said much, or sang for joy as it sped along, the way that other trains did, but after it had smashed that barrier it laughed softly to itself. The deep, unsettling sound gurgled out of the speakers in the carriage ceilings, startling Zen, who sat perched on the edge of his seat, impatient for the journey to be over. The
Fox
’s weapons were still extended when it pulled in at a deserted underground platform a few