Fantastic Trains Page 7

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  Kim Solem

  Kim Solem is a licensed mechanical engineer who is fascinated by steam power and has been operating a recycled 1887 steam locomotive engine to heat a brownstone building. “Sadly, the old boy developed a crack and is being replaced by a modern steam boiler.”

  Cursed

  by Kendall Eifler

  Orilly flinched as the Yellow Guard snapped the handcuffs harshly shut over her outstretched wrists and splayed fingers. They were bulky but light, the metal cinching as the plates clicked into place one after the other, adjusting to the exact measurements of her hands, until they fit like gloves. There was no way to use a curse without moving your hands and the guards knew it. She had never used her curse at all until today. She had always been so careful. But now here she was, stuffed into the backseat of the Yellow’s vehicle in front of the school. She was being taken, most likely, to the Crucible, somewhere from which, the rumors had it, you never came back.

  However, Orilly had other plans. It was a risk, but it had been time to take one. Orilly had decided to see if the rumors were true; the Cursed disappearing off trains, whispers of the Resistance growing stronger. If they were, and she was clever enough, she just might accomplish what she had been dreaming of for a long time. She drew in a deep breath and clenched her jaw. Was all this really worth it? She would have to make sure it was. She needed to find the Resistance, she needed to get them to trust her, and she needed to do it fast.

  It was a short cruiser ride to the station. She watched from the slowing guard cruiser as the maglev train station came into view. The maglev trains were the only way between the domes since the air was so contaminated from the Final War. This meant that for the Yellow Guards to transport her, the next step was the train ride.

  The train before them was at least as beautiful as it was functional. The blue, silver, and black swirls that accentuated the streamlined cars came to a point at the needle-like nose, mixing into a sky of metallic blue. It hovered steadily over the track beneath it, patiently waiting to weave itself along the way to the next dome and further. It looked so perfectly formed, she could imagine it speeding around the world, never stopping, just doing what it was clearly born to do.

  Soon they were seated in the first passenger car of the maglev. She barely noticed when the train began to move; it was so smooth, not a bump at all. She leaned back against the plush cushion of her seat and took in her surroundings. It was almost time to execute her plan. Orilly always had a plan. She had her sources and there had been talk for a few days now that the Dimes, a faction of the Resistance — so called because, before curses were illegal, people would often pay a dime to see someone use theirs — were in the area. She was taking a chance, acting on uncertain information. Rumor had it that if the Dimes were here, there was a good chance they had a train-op going strong.

  It wasn’t so unusual for a cursed person to get caught accidentally using their curse. What was unusual about Orilly was that she had gotten caught on purpose. She needed to get to the Resistance, and this was the best idea she had to get them to trust her.

  Hopefully a member of the Dimes would have noticed her being walked in by the two Yellows. It was hard to miss their neon-plated armor. But she had to be sure. So Orilly looked around. She needed to find something that would work. Then she noticed the earrings on a frumpy-looking old lady who sat next to a bored child across the aisle from her. Perfect. There was no way she could actually get her curse to work while being gloved, but she just might be able to do enough.

  Orilly concentrated hard on the earrings; she imagined her fingers moving to pull them and twist them open and out of the old lady’s ears. Nothing happened. She tried again, concentrating harder. Beep! Beep! Beep! Her insert began to set off its alarm. It echoed down the car and along the train just as she had hoped it would do. At once the guards seized her hands and her concentration broke.

  “Prisoner, cease that immediately,” said the guard to her left, holding his baton out threateningly in the direction of her face. The alarm trailed off. Was it enough? The glaring Yellows made her hope it had been.

  Once the guards had released her, the second step was getting to the train’s bathrooms. They were the only place she could think of to be alone. Orilly waited for the people in the car to settle. A fair amount of them had gathered their things and left the car, clearly perturbed by recent events. That was fine with Orilly; it just made her job easier. After a few moments, she decided it was time to act.

  “Um,” she said, trying awkwardly to look into the masked eyes of the Yellow that sat opposite from her. “Um, I need to use the bathroom.” The guard stared at her. She tried not to stare back. She had to appear weak or they would never let her go. “Can I just use the bathroom? I’ll be quick, I promise.” Nothing.

  The other guard, the one sitting next to her, kicked out his neon yellow plated boot, connecting with the taller guard’s shin. He jostled as if he had been asleep and muttered, “What?”

  She tried again. “I need to use the bathroom, uh, sir. I’ll go quickly, but I really need to go.” The taller guard, who, by the markings on his chest, was vastly more experienced than the short, thin one, nodded and stood up. He grabbed her roughly by the upper arm and lifted her as if she were a puppy, placing her in front of him. The smaller Yellow went to stand up, presumably to help, but the plump guard simply planted his oversized gloved hand on the Yellow’s helmet and pushed him back down to his seat like a cork in a wine bottle.

  “I’ve got this one, Topher. Back in the day, the up-and-ups trusted us enough to put just one of us with a prisoner. Those of us with any shred of self-respect are still perfectly capable.”

  Once they reached the bathrooms, and the door clicked behind her, Orilly inspected the room around her. She looked around for possible exits. There was a drain in the center of the floor, much too small. And the small circular air unit on the ceiling didn’t seem to hold any hope of a way out. She was stuck. This was the end of her plan. She heard the Yellow knock on the door. “Just a minute!” She was starting to panic. This was where her information ended. Make it to the bathroom. If you make it to the bathroom, rumor had it that there was some way to escape, but no one ever said how. She needed to concentrate.

  Orilly sat down on the closed toilet and tried to take deep breaths. There was so much riding on this moment, and it was disappearing faster than she knew how to handle. She felt so unprepared. Up until now, she had known what to do, had had a plan. From this point on she would have to rely on herself. She began to inspect the room around her again. The walls were metal and arched over her head into a rounded ceiling. The floor was… Her thoughts trailed off. She leaned closer to the wall opposite her. She ran her incapacitated finger along a thin ridge she had thought was just part of the design of the wall. She gave it a tentative push. Nothing. She had to try to pry at the crack. It was so frustrating to not be able to use her curse the one time she actually needed it to survive. What could she use? There was barely anything in the bathroom, let alone something thin and metal. She clasped her hands over her face in frustration. “Ow.” Some of the scale-like handcuffs scratched her face.

  That was it! If she could just bend out one of the rounded pieces of her handcuffs, she could make a sort of lever to pry open the panel. She bent awkwardly so that she could place her hands on the floor. Then she wedged the corner of her shoe’s heel between two plates and stamped down with all her might. It worked. Now one of the pieces of metal stuck out at an odd angle. Quickly she jammed it into the crack and jerked. A plate of silver tiles ripped backward off the wall. With no time to think, Orilly bent it as far as it would go and squeezed into the small space behind the wall, pulling the sheet of metal back behind her and pushing the edges into place.

  Then she looked around. The same tiny room, silver tiled walls and matching floor drain, but this time she stood face to face with a urinal. Just
perfect. She had hoped to be somewhere like a storage room or a closet, but no. She was in, of all places, another bathroom. Of course she should have put that together. The men’s room had been directly to the right of the women’s when she had entered. She was out of ideas. She leaned against the side of the bathroom, the cool of the metal barely a comfort to her.

  Suddenly, she felt the surface she was leaning against bend and warp beneath her weight. She jumped away.

  Orilly’s heart skipped a beat as she stared at what was most certainly a large bubble forming in the wall directly in front of her. Frozen, she watched the thick metal bend and sway like jello right before her eyes. She backed up against the back wall of the unit, as a tiny dark-skinned hand emerged, appearing to come right through the metal. And almost as soon as she had caught her breath, the bulge pulled away and in front of her, having emerged entirely now from the stainless-steel protrusion, was a small, grinning boy who couldn’t have been older than twelve.

  The boy stuck out his hand, the same one that had pushed its way unnaturally through what Orilly had previously assumed to be an impenetrable wall. “I’m Sam, or at least that’s what you can call me. I’m with the Resistance.” He was still grinning, proud of his unexpected entrance. “I’d explain more, but we’ve got to get going. Don’t worry, it’s all safe.”

  And with that, he stretched his hand out in front of him, grabbed Orilly’s forearm, and she found herself following him through the wall. It was a very strange feeling, walking through the bending and bulging metal, as if she were forcing herself through a thick sheet of cold glue.

  She was pulled sharply until, with a pop, she found herself in yet another bathroom. Sam let go of her arm and started digging through his pockets, leaving Orilly to stare at him in amazement. Clearly this kid had a powerful curse. She had watched him wave his hand delicately in front of them, solid metal bending completely to his will. Her heart began to pump with a new cautious excitement. So, this was what the rumors had been about. But her train of thought was interrupted as Sam delightedly pulled something from the depths of one of his pockets. He held it out toward her and smiled widely again, the creases of his grin nearly reaching the edges of his cheeks.

  Orilly couldn’t hold in her gasp as she realized what he had. He was holding a magnet. Magnets were strictly forbidden. People even said that owning one could give a plain child a curse, that they might even be the source of curses. They said that if you were found with one the Yellows would burn your entire house down to the ground, that the demonic little pieces of metal could drive an adult mad. Instinctively she backed away — as much as she could, anyway, seeing as the bathroom they inhabited barely left the two room to move at all.

  “Watch this.” Sam’s voice broke her from her thoughts. He used one hand to grab her wrist and the other to run the magnet back and forth against her handcuffs. Slowly, as if gently urged by an invisible force, the plates of the handcuffs began to loosen from her outstretched hands. Barely thirty seconds had passed when she could wriggle her fingers; another ten and Sam was able to pull them off with ease. As if he had practiced it a thousand times, the small boy rolled them up into a ball with the ease of a real Yellow and stuffed them into one of his pockets, the bulging fabric leading Orilly to wonder what else could be hiding in there.

  “Don’t worry about the Yellows. They can search the train all they want; they’ve never found me in the place I’m apt to take you — if you pass the test.”

  “What test?” Orilly glanced suspiciously at Sam.

  “Well, you have to show me your gift… I mean curse, sorry, force of habit. That way I’ll know I can trust you. I’ve already shown you mine, so we’ll be even. It’s part of how it works. Don’t blame me, this comes from higher up. I’m just doing my civic duty, plucking Cursed off trains and getting them to safety.”

  Orilly folded her arms. “You’ll have to do something about my implant then, unless you’d like the whole train to know we’re in the staff bathroom.” As a little girl, her implant had gone off when she had accidently used her curse, and the blaring siren and flashing blue light it made was the opposite of what she needed right now. Everything had to go perfectly. This kid was clearly well trained by the Resistance, so he was vital to her if she wanted to do what she had set out to this morning.

  “That’s easy,” said Sam. He whipped out the same magnet he had just used. He dug into another one of his bulging pockets and pulled out a small roll of tape. “Here, just tape this to your skin above it and you’ll be fine. I’ll need it back eventually.”

  Orilly took a deep breath and sighed. No getting out of this one. But maybe she could keep her curse a little bit obscure. She had to find something to do that would make it look weaker than it really was. That was the safest way. So, she went over to the sink and placed her hands just above the hot and cold knobs. She made herself look as though she was concentrating very hard, much harder than she really was, and slowly turned the handles without touching them, until a thin stream of water trickled out of the spout. She turned them back and turned around, crossing her arms over her fast-beating heart. Sam was smiling enthusiastically.

  “There,” she said. “Now can we get to this safe place before someone figures out to look in here?”

  Sam began to pull brown cloth out of his left back pocket. “I’ve got this for you. Nothing special, but it has a hood, so it should give us cover at least for a few minutes. That will hopefully be long enough for us to get to the storage car at the end of the train. Come on, put it on.” Orilly pulled the brown cloak over her school uniform and Sam reached over and tugged the hood snugly over her head. The staff bathroom led out, not to the same waiting area as the men’s and women’s rooms, but into a sort of staff lounge. Luckily it was entirely empty.

  Somehow, Sam and Orilly managed to walk through all the cars without anyone uttering a word. When they reached the last car, Sam breathed a sigh of relief and threw open the door, ushering Orilly in behind him. On each side of the car, top to bottom, were rows of black, shiny safes. They varied in size from as small as saltshakers, to large enough to fit a few people inside. And then she knew what he was going to do. Orilly did not like tight spaces. But soon she and Sam were stuffed rather uncomfortably into one of the largest safes.

  “I haven’t even had the chance to ask your name yet,” she heard Sam remark.

  “Orilly.”

  “Well, Orilly, welcome to the Resistance.”

  After what felt like forever, the two sardines began to feel the train slow. “It’s just about time,” said Sam. “There’s a panel here that I’ll pop off so we can both roll out.”

  “Okay,” said Orilly, who, at this point, was becoming unfazed with Sam’s ludicrous suggestions.

  The train had slowed to almost a stop when Sam pushed open the swinging panel and they both rolled out onto the packed earth next to the tracks. Sam jumped up just in time to whack the panel back into place. They were barely yards from the station, but since they were on the back side of the train, there was no one around to see them escape.

  Seconds later, Sam was across the tracks and off into the crowd. He was yelling for her to follow him. She darted between people and suitcases and clouds of dust. Suddenly it seemed like there were Yellow Guards everywhere. They must have reported her missing. She’d been expecting it. But this was real. Squad hovercrafts and cars had pulled up around the train station. And then she saw him. A Red Guard. She had never seen one before. And the moments it took her to look around were enough to lose Sam.

  She tried to push through the crowd; maybe she could find somewhere higher up, easier to see from. There: the platform. She had to get there. Pushing in that direction, a man barreled right into her and she collapsed into the sandy ground. Her arm seared with pain. It took all her strength to try to force herself up against the people moving over her. She was going to be trampled. More legs hurried past an
d Orilly was knocked this way and that as she tried to get up. Then she felt a hand on her arm. She jerked in fear, trying to pull away. But it wasn’t a Yellow at all; it was a young man, thick as a barrel. “Careful,” was all he said, his voice echoing the rumble of the train that was now pulling away from the station only a few yards away. By the time she regained her balance, the man had disappeared back into the crowd.

  Orilly shook her head, trying to clear her mind. She needed to focus. If she was to have any hope at all, she had to find Sam. The platform — that was where she had to go. She hardened herself with new, panicked resolve and began to weave her way through the mob of people hurrying in varying directions. She managed to pull herself up on the platform, but she wasn’t tall enough to see over the people around her. Then she saw it. It was a risk, a huge risk, but it might be her only hope. Leaping, she grabbed hold of the closest LED orb’s post and began to climb. Finally, she could see everyone around her. Scanning the crowd, something caught her eye. There, maybe ten yards away, was Sam, circling behind the station. But no sooner had she caught sight of him than someone shouted, “Hey, there she is!”

  Orilly looked down to catch sight of a Yellow roughly pushing people out of the way, making a direct beeline for her. She stuffed down a yelp and jumped down from the post, running in the direction she had seen Sam disappear.

  She whipped through a large family, knocking over a pile of luggage as she ran.

  “Sorry,” she said as she flew past. It was like a puzzle. She looked for openings and zigzagged through them, progressing toward the back of the station.

  Then, out of nowhere, her arm jerked back, almost pulled from its socket. A neon yellow plated glove dug into the skin of her forearm, and she lurched backward, adrenaline pumping hard. The other yellow arm swooped out toward her, trying to find its mark. She wouldn’t be taken down like this. Orilly dropped all her weight to the ground, dragging the Yellow off balance. As he wobbled, she shot up again, her elbow bent like a weapon above her head, catching the guard right between his chin plate and chest plate. She felt the sickly squish of the connection. There was no time to see how badly she’d hurt him. She used the seconds he grabbed his own neck to flee.