The Musseli engineer packed her passengers away from the controls, near the body-warm stacks of power cells that made the locomotive go. Maia's nose twitched at a familiar scent of coal dust, rising from the reserve fuel bin, yet she felt too excited to let it perturb her. Freedom was a stronger redolence, affecting her like intoxication. Her heart sped as she leaned past the battery casing, prying open a narrow, dusty window to let rushing air play across her face.
The prairie raced by, illuminated by pearly, suffused light from newly-risen Durga. There were gullies and ravines, fenceposts and ragged battalions of haystacks, and occasional pocket forests where the porous terrain stored enough rainwater to sustain native trees. Maia had come to hate these high plains, yet now, with escape at last credible, the land seemed to whisper its own side of the story, reaching out to persuade her with stark beauty.
Summer storms have their way with me. Wind and blazing sun desiccate my sodden soil. In winter, ice splits the scattered pebbles down to dust. The poor loam leaks and seeps. I bleed.
And what the wind and sun and ice leave, humans break with steel plows, or bake into bricks, or turn into golden grain which they ship across the sea.
Where are my prancing lingaroos? The grazing pantotheres, or nimble coil-boks, who used to roam my plain in numbers vast? They could not compete with cattle and mice. Or, if they could, humans intervened, improving strains they chose to use. New hooves mark my trails, while the old vanish into zoos.
No matter. Let invaders displace native creatures, who displaced others before them. Let my soil turn to rock, to sand, to soil once again. What difference do changes make, sifted by the sieve of time?
I wait, I abide, with the patience of stone.
Renna, and then Kiel, urged Maia to stretch out where a half-dozen other women lay together like swaddled cord-wood, all facing the same way for lack of room to turn. Not that discomfort kept any of them awake. In Thalia's words, these weren't pampered clonelings, to be irked by a mattress-covered pea. Their synchronized r-r-ronn of breathing soon drowned the gentle whine of the electric motors.
"No, thanks," Maia told her friends. "I couldn't sleep. Not now. Not yet."
Kiel only nodded, settling into a niche near the brake box to doze sitting up. Renna, too, reached his limit. After badgering the poor, confused engineer with questions for just half an hour, he uncharacteristically let that suffice, and collapsed onto the blankets that had been thrown for his benefit over the widest space — a deck plate covering the thrumming engine gearbox. Its lullaby soon had him snoring with the best of them.
Maia unbuckled her sextant and sighted a few familiar stars. Although fatigue and the car's vibration made it a rough fix, she was able to verify they were heading in the right direction. That didn't entirely preclude the possibility of treachery — Am I growing cynical with age? she pondered dryly — but it felt reassuring to know that each passing second brought them closer to the sea. Maia quashed her misgivings. Kiel and the others know more than I do, and they seem confident enough.
Maia wasn't the only insomniac keeping the engineer silent company. Baltha stood watch by the portside window, caressing her crowbar like a short-style trepp bill, as if eager to have just one whack at an enemy before making good their escape. Once, the rugged woman exchanged a long, enigmatic look with Maia. For the most part, each kept territorially to her own pane of cool glass, Baltha peering ahead and sniffing for danger, while Maia pretended to do her part, keeping lookout on the starboard side.
Not that bare eyes would do much good in the dark. At this speed, we'd barely see a thing before we hit it.
Moon-glint reflections off the arrow-straight rails diffracted hypnotically past her heavy, drooping eyelids. Maia let them close — just for a minute or two. There was no arresting of images, however. She continued picturing the locomotive, rushing across a chimeric rendition of the steppe, at first just like the moonlit plain outside, then increasingly the landscape of a dream. The gentle, frozen, prairie undulations began to move, to roll like ocean waves lapping either side of the steel-steady rails.
Fey certainty struck Maia. Something lay ahead, just out of sight. Premonition manifested as a vivid, prescient image, of this hurtling engine bound unalterably toward collision with a towering pile of rocks, recently lain across the tracks by a grinning Tizbe Beller.
"Run if you like," her former tormentor crooned menacingly, like a storybook witch. "Did you honestly think you could escape the power of great clans, if they really want to stop you?"
