Heart of Iron - Ekaterina Sedia [81]
The train whistled and the passengers hurried aboard. I hoped with every fiber of my soul Jack would manifest somehow, that his tall figure would appear cleaving the crowd like the prow of a steamship—almost as much as I hoped he wouldn’t. It was so difficult to decide whether Jack was an asset or a liability, especially with my fear muddying my feelings further.
The train chugged, faster and faster, and I had to step away from the platform’s edge lest I be burned by the steam that poured from the stack of the locomotive and curled along the length of the train like a cloud dragon.
I was still undecided regarding how I felt or what I was going to do next—should I search for Jack or simply wait for him here?—when the locomotive gave a last mournful whistle, spooking the crows sitting on the roof of the station, like so many monks waiting for Easter service to start. The train shuddered and moved, faster, faster. It was leaving now and it was me receding behind it. I could feel myself getting smaller in the eyes of the passengers, until the train curved behind the horizon, and I disappeared from its view, as if I had never existed.
Cold and pain, resurrected from the overwhelming numbness like a particularly cantankerous phoenix, jolted me from my reverie and reassured me—rather rudely—of the existence of my mortal body. Considering the advantages of being an incorporeal spirit, I hopped on one foot toward the station building. There, I found a bench free of village women and their baskets with chickens, eggs, and minced meat pies as well as fur traders and their bundles of freshly hunted and badly smelling furs, and sat down. Rather, I let my leg give under me, and tumbled onto the bench in utter exhaustion and misery, not even caring how ungraceful I looked. It seemed like a good time to decide what to do next.
I did not want to go back to the burned tavern, not with the risk of encountering the arsonists, which happily coincided with the most sensible course of action: waiting for Jack to find me. The train station would be the most obvious place in the absence of other contingency plans. It was just common sense, I told myself, since lacking other information I had to assume he was looking for me, and thus starting to look for him would almost certainly guarantee we would never find each other.
I considered another meal of meat or cabbage pies and shuddered with disgust. Instead, I opened my satchel to work a bit on the confessional (and increasingly sentimental) letter (diary) addressed to my mother (or my aunt) in her sane (female) world. Truly, it was getting too complicated and parenthetical for its own good. Except as soon as I opened my satchel, I realized it was not there.
I cursed under my breath, using words my mother would never believe I suspected the existence of, and dug through several times. It was of no use, and I sunk back into my bench, clutching my cropped head as if I were hoping to crush it between my hands. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the letter contained only troubles of my heart; but as I written quite a bit about Wong Jun and Chiang Tse, and even though I avoided committing to paper the exact details of our task, I suspected I had referenced too many people, including Aunt Eugenia. My only consolation was the hope the letter had either burned in the tavern or was lost somewhere, kneaded by a multitude of feet into the dirty slush, at one with the city’s frozen refuse now.
The throbbing in my ankle had subsided enough to allow me a brief venture toward the back of the station, where a small sectioned area smelled of food,