The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,155

a sudden, brilliant column of golden light. Before he had time to fully register what he was seeing, it was gone—and then, flashing in the glare of the carriage light, the figure of a woman stumbled out of the hedge and directly into the path of the carriage.

The conductor shouted a warning as he grabbed frantically at the hand brake. Mouth forming a stumbling string of epithets, he leaned all his weight against the brake, making the whole carriage jerk and stutter with a scream of tortured metal.

The woman’s face, no more than a terrified glimpse of large eyes, vanished beneath the bottom edge of the viewscreen as the conductor shut his eyes, waiting for a sound he’d only heard in his nightmares just before waking, covered in cold sweat, in time for the hated dead man’s shift. A scream, a sickening thump, a crunch that his very bones would remember for the rest of his life …

The sound never came.

The conductor’s heart was still thrashing in his chest as he scrambled for the latch on the door, his hands sweaty and fumbling. By the time he spilled out onto the narrow service walkway between the hedge and the tracks, he was already trying to figure out what he would say to his supervisor, to his councilor, to his queen—to the woman’s family.

He found her crouching there, nothing but a pair of eyes beneath the near-blinding glare of the carriage light. For a moment, the staring eyes were so still his heart lurched and shuddered to a halt as if compelled by its own faulty braking system, and he thought, I’ve killed someone. But then she blinked, and his heart began to beat again.

“Skyfall, lady, you scared me out of my wits—are you all right? Are you hurt?”

The woman blinked again, and then, slowly, her legs shaking and her eyes still round as ball bearings, she straightened and stood. Now the light from the stalled carriage illuminated her, and the conductor stared.

She wore red, a strange, flimsy garment that hid little as she stood there, silhouetted by the sharp glare of the spotlight behind her. She was younger than he’d first thought. Swearing at himself, he kept his eyes on her face. Her hands were raised and slightly trembling, as if ready to ward off some attack, though by what power the conductor could not guess, for she did not look capable of accomplishing much by brute force. She was lovely, if rattled and terrified, and wore makeup that stretched from temple to temple, the way the royal family did in portraits generations ago, imitating the old tradition of wearing sheer gold cloth across the eyes during certain ceremonies of state. Only instead of gold, hers was black. It had an interesting effect in the darkness, making her seem at once tiny and fragile, as well as unseen and dangerous.

Like the rail current, thought the conductor dazedly. Invisible, undetectable, right up until it kills you at a single touch.

“I am … not hurt.” Her voice carried a strange accent, and she spoke haltingly, as if each word came only after exquisite concentration. Something about those eyes … strangely colored, flickering as if lit from within.

“You can’t jump out on the track like that! You’ll kill yourself!” The import of the words hit the conductor only after he spoke them, and he took a halting step toward her. “You—you weren’t … trying to … ?”

A hiss of air from the carriage made the young woman leap back with a barely muffled shriek, her body tensing into readiness.

“It’s okay, it’s okay!” the conductor hurried to reassure her, baffled by her sudden terror. “It’s just the compressed air in the brake equalizing!”

Her gaze darted from his face to the carriage looming over them, up to the cloudless starry sky above, and back to the conductor, as if assigning each of these things an equal amount of wariness.

When she said nothing, either about the brakes or about why she’d leaped—fallen, really—onto the tracks, the conductor eased another step forward and tried another tactic. “You’re not wearing a chrono or an earring. Do you have anyone you want me to call? Your friends? Your family?”

She shrank back and the conductor cursed himself. She was younger even than his revised estimate—he said family, and she heard parents. She must be no more than a teenager.

The conductor hid a smile. Terrified or no, few kids her age wanted their parents called after midnight. She tilted her head,