red as beetroot. In the meantime, no one seemed to notice Sonja McEwan’s ankle had fully healed.
Nor that Mrs. Prescott, resting on the front seat of the first carriage, had passed away.
Her heart had given out.
“I could’ve sworn I packed the over-ice—sworn blind. It makes no sense. I had two spare gas torches in this hamper with the soup flasks, two torches full and ready just in case, and plenty of hot strips for the copper pan.” Mrs. Challender rifled through the blankets and food baskets and under the seats in the final carriage one last time, on the verge of tears, before casting her husband and Mr. Auric a pitiful gaze. She turned her face away when she saw Sonja had seen.
Hmm, that’s right, best not cause a panic with the others. But even Sonja swallowed hard at the sight of one her teachers falling to pieces.
Mr. Challender buried his head in the bulky sleeve of his parka, resting against the brass door frame. His wife’s alarming news had the unflappable Mr. Auric worried too; he rubbed his stubbly chin several times with his glove, no doubt thinking of a way out of this. Several locomotive components in the steam engines were frozen solid, and without gas lamps to warm hot strips in the copper pan, and those hot strips to melt the ice, they had no way of freeing up the engines. In other words, they were stuck here until the engines thawed, or they had to walk out.
“Roughly how far, if you had to guess—”
Mr. Auric shook his head, silencing his shorter, fatter colleague. “Don’t even think it. When night falls, you’d freeze to death before you made the nearest village.”
“May well be, may well be. But I don’t fancy leaving these girls out here all night either. See,” Mr. Challender swiped a handful of snow off the roof, “these carriages are only covered by a waterproof canopy. Hardly any insulation.”
“Better that than foot-slogging it,” Sonja rudely cut in, not meaning to—she immediately clasped a gloved hand over her mouth and cringed at Mr. Auric’s headshake on her behalf. Damn, she really had to stop blurting things out like that.
“Right, McEwan, you’ve had this coming.” Mrs. Challender slid from the carriage, marched over the snow and proceeded to whip Sonja with a tea towel. Hateful, erratic blows that either glanced off her kagool or slapped the side of her hood, making her ears sting. “Impudent little—I’ll bloody teach you not to give lip to your elders.” Thwack! “Giving cheek at a time like this—you just wait till I have you in my office, you rotten little terror.” Thwack! Thwack! “You’ll never speak out of turn again, so help me.”
After the initial shock had sunk in, Sonja felt a little sorry for her arts and crafts teacher. The blows weren’t having their intended effect, and the poor woman’s sobs between outbursts made it clear this attack was her frustration speaking, and a pitiable frustration at that. She obviously blamed herself for the dangerous night to come.
At last she desisted, and her husband led her back into the supply carriage. Dorcas Henshall, Aloysius’s twin sister, who probably hated Sonja even more than her obnoxious brother did, thumbed her nose from a carriage window and then, mouth wide like a grouper’s, scrunched her sly face into a hideous sideways laugh for her friends inside.
Incensed, Sonja hurled a juicy snowball. It found the open window and hit the little hellhound square in her fizzog. Sonja dove into the nearest carriage just as Dorcas spilled out of her own, wailing into the blizzard, eager to heap more trouble on her long-time enemy.
But Mr. Auric wasn’t so gullible. “Whatever’s to do, Henshall?” He quirked an eyebrow at Sonja while he held the drama queen crying into his jacket. “If you want my advice, throw one right back—that’s the way to get even.”
“But Mister Aur-ric—she’s always picking on me.” More tears from Dorcas, even less sympathy from perhaps the only teacher in the entire school who saw through her vindictive theatrics. More than that, he was the one teacher who didn’t speak down to Sonja, didn’t talk at her, lecture her the whole time.
He listened.
Father was never there to listen; Aunt Lily was disinterested in anything but gossip and the latest fashions; and Merry didn’t care much for science; which left Derek Auric, five years her senior and soon to be a Leviacrum fellow, as her “huggable mentor”, as she’d written in her diary