at once. She slid down-slope to the ash where Creedmoor lay, and knelt to saw through the oily rags that tied his hands.
He was silent for a long moment. Then he sighed and said, “Thank you, Liv.”
He sat up, stretched his stiff swollen fingers, and winced.
“Hurt less when they were bound. I ask you, does that make any damn sense?”
“Be still, Creedmoor. Let me look at your leg.”
“Ah, Doctor. Doctor. You’re a very wise woman.”
“Never forget it, Creedmoor.”
EPILOGUE
ONE: ENGINE SONG
~ SIX MONTHS LATER ~
The Engines go thundering back and forth across the continent, on scar tissue of tracks raised over the plains, in hideous scarp-sided canyons cut and blasted through the hills. They drive through tunnels and their Song echoes in the darkness, drums beneath the earth, comes crashing out the tunnel mouth into the light in a booming, belling note. New tracks go down, opening new routes. Humboldt to Gloriana, over the wetlands; Antrim to Dryden, obliterating the hills and the villages there; Firth to Coffey. The mesh closes tighter. Lines converge. The tracks are like fences: no one dares cross them. Children come out from towns by the new tracks and stare in awe at those lines stretching into the distance, into the future that waits downline for them. On clear nights, the Engines’ Song beats and drones out over the prairies. Everyone hears it. Everyone, everywhere, knows what’s coming, unstoppable, implacable. . . .
But there’s a new sound in the Song. Something off. A beat that stumbles. A tiny, brittle wrong note. Nothing any human ear can pin down—not in the brief moment of the Engine’s presence, as it comes howling out of the East and receding into the West—but something that’s always there. An impossible impurity. The Linesmen shift uneasily at their posts. They have sleepless nights—they look grayer even than usual. Their hands shake. Construction falters on the new towers of Harrow Cross and Archway. Wiring goes astray and papers are misfiled. Beatings are ordered but morale does not improve.
The Engines sing to each other: Lowry has failed. Lowry has failed. Months go by and no return. Lowry has failed. The trail is lost. What will come out of the West? What will come? The sick note is fear, is not-knowing when their end may come. The continent shudders with it.
TWO: JEN OF THE FLOATING WORLD
The Floating World overlooks Jasper City from up on the bluffs. By day it’s invisible among the trees. In the night they hang paper lanterns on the branches, and gaslight glows from behind the crimson silk curtains in the girls’ rooms, and the Floating World hangs over businesslike buttoned-up Jasper like a lurid dream.
Strangers come and go by cover of darkness. The girls of the Floating World are famous far and wide, but not all the strangers are there for the girls, and there’s more than one kind of business goes on in the Floating World. Everyone in Jasper knows that, and knows to keep their mouths shut: too much curiosity about those strangers can be fatal. . . .
Knoll comes in after midnight, slamming the door open and letting in the cold, slamming it shut again and rattling the lanterns and making the girls jump and scatter. The patrons look at their feet, sidle out of the room. Knoll’s furs stink. He’s big as a bear, and filthy. Hanks of matted black hair sway from his belt. Hillfolk beards. He collects them. He serves the Gun these days—as the monstrous sledgehammer-sized rifle slung over his back, riding him like a dumb animal, plainly shows—but his masters don’t begrudge him this recreation, so long as he does what’s needed when they Call.
Jenny, scarlet-haired Jenny, smiling Jenny, Jen to those who know her well, madam and proprietor of the Floating World, greets him over by the fire. She claps her hands and her girls scatter, leaving Knoll and Jen alone. He looms over her like a storybook ogre. He shifts uneasily in his tree-stump boots. He belongs in a cave, Jen thinks. Jen laughs, and he bows to kiss her gloved hand, and she keeps laughing as Knoll remains stiffly stooped. Under her scarlet skirts, on her thigh, there’s a Gun silver and sharp as a needle. Jen of the Floating World thinks,
—Knoll.
—Ma’am.
—You look different.
—Never seen you before, ma’am. They don’t let me in places like this.
—I should think not. But I didn’t mean you. I meant your weapon. Or what rides it. It used to belong to a friend of