along the platform to the last cars so they could avoid the crowd that had gathered around the first few.
Sloane climbed the narrow steps into a riot of color. The train’s carpet was a garish pattern in yellow, blue, and pink, all triangles and circles and squiggly lines. But it wasn’t a standard passenger train; it had compartments, each with two long bench seats facing each other. She ducked into one of them and settled in next to the window. Mox closed the compartment door behind them, whistled, then tugged on the door to test it. It didn’t budge. He smiled.
“And you don’t like magic,” he said to her.
“If the only thing magic did was facilitate my curmudgeonly impulses, I would love it,” she said. “Unfortunately it also has a tendency to rip people to shreds, so . . .”
Mox tipped his head in acknowledgment. He sat down across from her and draped one long arm across the back of the seat.
A few people tried the compartment door, but none of them made it through, so when the train pulled away from Union Station, Mox and Sloane were still alone. He was looking out the window, and she found herself looking at him. His face was an assemblage of opposites: stern nose and strong brow sitting over a vulnerable mouth, ears sticking out, childlike, through the tangle of hair, which had a few threads of gray she hadn’t noticed before, despite his obvious youth.
“Feels like you’re trying to take me apart,” he said without looking away from the window.
“You’re hard to figure out,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows. “So are you.”
“No, I’m not.” Sloane shook her head. “You just haven’t been to my world.”
“Something tells me I wouldn’t do well there.”
“Are you doing well here?”
He laughed. “No, I guess not.”
The train charged out of the city, following the path of the river southwest, Lake Michigan behind them. It was the same path Sloane had once taken to go to her childhood home. Her mother had told her to get her things out of the garage because she needed the space. For what, she hadn’t said. So Sloane had packed up her stuff and Cameron’s too and piled all the boxes in a U-Haul to drive back with her. She knew the big empty stretches that awaited them, cornfields crumpled by the chill of autumn, silos standing alone on the horizon. She didn’t think Genetrix’s rural Midwest would be any different than her own.
“Your soldiers will be all right in your absence?” she said.
“It’s not the first time I’ve left them,” he said. “The working that holds them to life will last a few days without me there to sustain it, so they won’t fall apart.” He paused. “Well, some of them might literally fall apart, but that’s easily remedied.”
Sloane cringed. “You were very—tender with that woman whose arm you stitched back on.”
“Oh, Tera?” He shrugged. “Well, it’s a delicate business, sewing someone’s arm back on.”
“I just didn’t realize you had personal relationships with them.”
“Ah.” Mox had been calm, sitting back on the bench, his legs crossed at the ankle. But now he sat forward and started tapping his fingers together. “They’re my friends.”
She had to be careful. She wasn’t sure what might make Mox’s magic lash out, and they were on a moving train. “From . . . before?” she said.
“From before they were dead, yes,” he said.
“How did you bring them back?” She wasn’t sure that she wanted to hear the answer, really. Knowing it would make it hard not to try it herself with Albie or Cameron or Bert. Hard not to make them a barrier between her and the world.
“I wanted it,” he replied, “more deeply than I have ever wanted anything.”
“And that was enough?”
“That’s just the part I can explain.” His hands squeezed into fists. She reached out and covered them with her own. He flinched at her touch and stared at her, dark eyes wide.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” she said, sitting back.
But his hands were relaxing, his body uncurling. He was, she thought, a thousand things at once. A language she did not know.
“You said you were at a funeral when you were brought here,” he said. “Whose was it?”
It had been a long time since she had thought about Albie. He crept into her mind, of course, when she wasn’t vigilant. In unguarded moments before she fell asleep or when she woke up thinking about what she might tell him, only