What Powers the Train
A side story from The Meridian.
I. The Junction
The junction beneath the floor of Carriage 38 had been rattling for three weeks, and Mira had made a private decision about it.
She could have fixed it on the first morning. She had the tools, the experience, and — more importantly — the intuition. The intuition was the part of the job nobody trained you for and nobody paid you extra for. After eleven years of crawling through the service tunnels under the floors of The Meridian, you started to know what a junction was supposed to sound like, the way a singer knows a wrong note before she knows why it’s wrong. The junction at 38 was wrong. It rattled in the wrong key.
But Mira had not fixed it on the first morning, because the rattle was interesting. She had filed an interim report — Junction 38-C: rattling. Source to be identified. Estimated repair: pending investigation. — and Kettering had grunted at the form and stamped it and put it in the cubby-hole with the others, because Kettering did not read interim reports unless someone was bleeding or something was on fire.
That had been the first morning. This was the morning of the twentieth, and Mira had a notebook full of times and pressures and chalk-marks, and she was beginning to think the rattle was not, in fact, a rattle.
She was lying on her back in the crawl-space beneath the carriage floor with her head torch pointed up at the bracket. Above her, six inches of pressed metal away, someone in Carriage 38 was walking. Mira had learned the carriages by their footfalls in the way some people learn neighbourhoods by their birds. Carriage 38 was working middle: bunks for the train clerks, a small shared kitchen, a cobbler who repaired good boots quietly and bad boots loudly. The footfalls overhead were unhurried. Probably the clerk who limped. Probably on her way to the kettle.
Mira pressed her wrench against the bracket and listened.
The rattle came on a count of four. Tick, tick, tick, tick — and the tick was the wrong one. Slightly louder, slightly longer, slightly off-rhythm. As if something were pushing back against the train’s motion at four-second intervals from a place that should not have anything in it to push.
She wrote 4s, again in her notebook in pencil, because pen smudged in the heat down here. The notebook was small, soft-cornered, wrapped in waxed paper she’d cut from a butcher’s parcel and folded around the cover. The pages were full of timings and pressures and a small running map drawn over weeks, line by line, in chalk transcribed to ink in the workshop at the end of each shift. The map did not match the schematic.
That was the part she had not told anyone.
She slid out from under the carriage on her elbows and got to her feet, bent at the waist. The service tunnel was four feet high — taller in some places, shorter in others, built for the kind of bodies that had been doing this work for the kind of time that made the official height irrelevant. Mira walked it bent at the waist with the practised gait of a woman whose lower back had given up complaining. She was thirty-four. She had been bent at the waist for a living since she was twenty-three. Her vertebrae had a settled relationship with the train.
The next junction along was 38-B, which behaved itself, and after that 38-A, which behaved itself even more aggressively — too quiet, Mira had written in the notebook three weeks ago, and underlined it twice, and then crossed it out, because she didn’t want Kettering reading it and asking her what she meant.
She didn’t know what she meant. That was the problem.
She put her hand on the duct that ran along the ceiling of the service tunnel — ceiling being a generous word for what was in fact the underside of someone’s kitchen — and felt the four-second push. The duct was warm. The duct was supposed to be warm. The duct ran forward, toward the front of the train, and according to the laminated schematic on the wall of the workshop, the duct ended six carriages ahead, at a service wall.
Her hand could feel where the push was coming from. It was coming from past the service wall.
Mira wiped her hand on her trousers, which were already so impregnated with grease that they had stopped accepting more, and went up to the workshop.
II. The Map
The maintenance workshop on The Meridian sat in a low-ceilinged carriage between the freight cars and the laundry, where it had been since before anyone could remember. It smelled of oil, hot tea, and a particular kind of damp that came from being permanently downwind of three thousand pairs of wet socks. The walls were hung with tools: spanners in long racks ordered by gauge, hooked poles for clearing blockages, the long rubber-handled prybars that crews called peacemakers because of the way they ended arguments with seized bolts. A schematic of The Meridian’s underside was pinned to one wall, laminated, edges curling. It was almost certainly out of date. Nobody knew when it had last been updated, because the person who had updated it was, by every available account, dead.
Kettering sat at the desk under the schematic, drinking tea from a tin mug and reading a list. Reading was a slow process for Kettering. It involved a great deal of staring at the paper, occasional muttering, and the regular consultation of a small pencil-stub he kept behind his ear, which he used for adding ticks beside the lines he was sure he understood.
He looked up when Mira came in.
“Thirty-eight again.”
“Thirty-eight again.”
“Still rattling.”
“Still rattling.”
He grunted and ticked something on the list. “You want help?”
“Not yet.”
He grunted again, in a different register, which was Kettering’s way of saying suit yourself. Then he said, “Soren’s looking for you.”
“What for.”
“Couldn’t say. Probably wants to swap a shift.”
Mira did not respond, which Kettering correctly interpreted as agreement, and went back to his list.
She crossed the workshop to the long bench against the rear wall, where her things sat in their patch of claimed territory: two wrenches, a hooked pole shorter than the standard one because she was only five foot four and the standard one was for people six feet, the head torch with the battery she kept forgetting to replace, a small box of chalk pieces, and a folded paper square that was a tracing of the schematic on the wall.
She unfolded the tracing. She unfolded her notebook. She compared the two.
The tracing showed the duct ending at a service wall between Carriages 32 and 31. The service wall was annotated forward of here engineering, in the small, laboured handwriting of someone who had laboured to make the words small. Beyond the service wall, the schematic showed nothing. Not blank space — nothing. The paper simply ran out of detail and gave way to the laminated edge.
Mira’s notebook showed the duct continuing. She had traced its warmth with her hand for three weeks now, junction by junction, sliding her body forward beneath the carriages on her elbows and her hips, marking the duct’s progress in chalk and writing the chalk-marks down. The duct turned slightly at Carriage 35, where a coupling she didn’t have on the schematic produced a small extra loop. The duct narrowed at 33. The duct continued past the service wall.
This was the part she could not show Kettering, because Kettering was not paid to look at the schematic and would not have a productive opinion about anything that disagreed with it. Kettering’s job was to keep the chits flowing and the workers fed and the junctions unstuck. The schematic was for engineers, who were a different class of person and worked in a different carriage and were, as far as anyone in maintenance could tell, never seen.
Mira folded the tracing back into a square. She folded the notebook back into its waxed paper. She put both into the inside pocket of her coat, which was where she kept things she did not want anyone to ask about.
Soren came in then, because Soren had a sense for arrivals. He was forty-something, comfortable, missing the top half of one ear in a way that he had three different stories about and would tell whichever one he thought you’d find most amusing. He was a good worker in the sense that he completed his jobs and a poor one in the sense that he never finished them earlier than he had to.
“Mira.”
“Soren.”
“Swap me Sevenday morning. I’ve got something.”
“What something.”
He grinned. “Personal something.”
“No.”
“Birdie’s having a thing.”
“Then go to Birdie’s thing on your own time.”
“That is my own time. I’m asking you to swap me yours.”
Mira looked at him. Soren had a face that was very hard to refuse, mostly because it had spent decades practising on people who had failed to refuse it. She had, over eleven years, become extremely good at refusing it.
“No,” she said again, with the particular flatness she’d developed for Soren, and went back down to the tunnels.
III. The Hatch
The boundary of her authorisation was a hatch.
Officially it was Hatch Forward Seven — FH-7 on the schematic, the seven in workshop conversation, that thing in conversations after a few cups of grog when nobody could be bothered to be specific. It was a metal hatch about the size of a large suitcase set into the bulkhead between Carriages 32 and 31, where the service wall was. It had a wheel on the front. Above the wheel, a brass plate had once been bolted to the bulkhead. The bolts were still there. The plate was not, having been removed at some point in the train’s long history by someone who had presumably had reasons. A faint outline showed where it had been, and the outline showed FORWARD OF THIS POINT — ENGINEERING ONLY, ghosted into the metal by a century of paint and oil.
Mira had passed Hatch Forward Seven more times than she could count. Forward Seven was where the maintenance crew’s authorisation ended; it was also, conveniently, where the warm ducts and the busy junctions ended, because everything past Forward Seven was — officially — handled by engineering. The hatch was kept closed. Whether it was locked was something Mira had never tested, because testing it would have constituted, in the strict reading of her work order, a breach of authorisation, and a breach of authorisation cost a worker their shift bonus, which was paid in chits and which she had been saving up for eight months toward a private bunk in the middle carriages and which she was very much not prepared to lose.
This was what she told herself, anyway, on the morning she stood in front of Hatch Forward Seven and put her hand on the wheel.
The wheel turned.
It turned with the small protest of metal that hadn’t been turned in a long time but was capable of it. It turned smoothly enough that whoever had last greased it had done a thorough job. Mira noted this. Then she noted that whoever had last greased it was not, strictly speaking, a category of person who should exist, because nobody on her crew had authorisation past Forward Seven and engineering, as far as she or anyone she knew could tell, lived in a different part of the train and did not come down here.
She let go of the wheel.
She looked back along the service tunnel. Empty. The bulbs in their cages swung gently with the train’s motion, casting their slow shadows against the walls. Somewhere behind her, three carriages back, Soren was arguing pleasantly with the cobbler about the price of a heel. She could not hear the argument, but she could imagine it with high accuracy, because Soren had been having approximately the same argument with the cobbler for years.
She took the notebook out of her coat. She turned to a fresh page. She wrote, in pencil:
Forward Seven, twenty-second day. Wheel turns. Hatch warm. Duct continues past wall. Going to look.
Then she put the notebook away, because she did not want to be carrying anything she couldn’t explain if anybody official came down here in the next half-hour. She put her wrench away too, for the same reason. She kept the head torch and the chalk.
She turned the wheel. The hatch opened.
The air on the other side was warmer.
This was the first thing she noticed, and she noticed it because of how her crew talked about the engine. The engine was at the front of the train, was unimaginably hot, was guarded, was the source of the train’s motion, and was — this had been told to her seriously, by an old fitter the year she joined, with the air of a man passing on a piece of folk wisdom — not your business. Hot meant forward. Mira knew this in her body. The air past the hatch was warm in a way that meant she was not going backwards.
She crouched and stepped through.
The tunnel beyond was the same tunnel. This was, in its own way, the first surprise. She had expected it to be different — narrower, or wider, or finished in some other metal, or in some other state of repair. It was not. It was the service tunnel, going forward, the same as it had been on the other side of the hatch. The same bulbs in the same cages. The same gritted-mesh floor. The same overhead pipes, the same ducts, the same faint smell of oil and pipe sweat. The only difference was that the duct she had been tracing — the warm one — continued, carrying its four-second push, on toward the front of the train.
She closed the hatch behind her. She did not lock it, because she did not know whether it had been locked when she found it, and she had a strong professional aversion to changing the state of anything she didn’t have a record on.
She walked forward, bent at the waist, with the head torch on its lowest setting because it was a little brighter down here than it should have been and she wanted to know why.
The bulbs were on.
This was the second surprise, and it was the surprise that made her stop walking and stand very still under one of them and look up at it. It was a perfectly ordinary caged bulb. It was burning, perfectly ordinarily. Somebody had changed it within the last few months — she could tell by the tone of the glow, which was the slightly crisp tone of a bulb that hadn’t yet gone soft with use. Somebody, in other words, had been down here recently. Recently enough to change a bulb. Recently enough to grease a hatch wheel.
Mira had thought — had assumed, and she was annoyed with herself for assuming — that whatever was past Forward Seven would be abandoned. The forbidden territory of imagination. The shut-off, the sealed-up. Engineering, she’d told herself, must work somewhere else. Engineering must come down here once a year if at all. Engineering must — and here her imagination had stalled, because she’d never met an engineer and didn’t actually know what they did.
The bulbs were on. The bulbs had been changed recently. Somebody worked here.
She walked forward.
IV. Forward of Seven
The tunnel continued for what, by her counting of the carriage joints overhead, was four full carriages.
Four carriages of service tunnel, indistinguishable from her own, with bulbs on and ducts warm. The footfalls above changed in character — she was beneath the front-middle now, where the lower-tier first-carriage staff lived, the under-stewards and the kitchen porters and the boys who brought the coal up to the boiler-rooms in the dining cars. The footfalls were quicker here. More purposeful. People who’d been told what time they were due somewhere.
Then the tunnel widened.
It widened into a small workshop.
A workshop. There was no other word for it. A bench along one wall, with tools racked above it — wrenches and prybars and hooked poles, the same shapes Mira had on her own bench in her own workshop, but older. Some of them looked very old. The grips were leather, in places, where her own had rubber. There was a small stove plate, cold. A tin mug on it, empty, but rinsed clean. A folded cloth that smelled, when she got close enough, of soap. The floor had been swept.
There was a chair.
Mira looked at the chair for some time. The chair was a perfectly ordinary maintenance-workshop chair, the kind made by stripping the back off a regular chair so it could be carried more easily through narrow tunnels. There was a folded coat over the back of it. There was a notebook on the seat.
The notebook was open.
It was open, Mira realised, to a fresh page, and the fresh page had the faint gloss of a page that had been turned to and waited at, the way you turn to a fresh page in your own notebook when you know you’ll be writing on it shortly and want to save the half-second.
Somebody was working here. Somebody had been here this morning. Somebody had stepped away.
She did not pick up the notebook. She would have wanted, very much, for somebody not to pick up her notebook in her workshop in her absence, and her sense of professional courtesy was the steadiest thing she had. She looked at the open page from a respectful distance. The handwriting was small, neat, and old — not in age but in style, the kind of script that had been taught somewhere at some point that nobody taught anything anymore. The page recorded times, pressures, and a junction number she didn’t recognise. J/27/F-3, it said. Something about 27. Forward 3.
She wrote J/27/F-3 in her own notebook in pencil, because pencils smudged less than memory.
“Hello,” said a voice behind her.
Mira did not jump, because she had been bracing for something for an hour, and the something had finally arrived, and bracing converted to recognition rather than fright. She turned around slowly, with her hands visible.
The man in the doorway was old. Not catastrophically old — not in the way of Old Satterly in Carriage 74, who had been dozing through the train for as long as anyone could date — but properly, comfortably old, with white hair cropped short and a face that had been weathered into a permanent expression of calm consideration. He was wearing a maintenance coat that had been mended so many times that the original fabric was a minority partner in the garment. He was holding a kettle.
“Hello,” said Mira.
“You came through the seven.”
“I did.”
“Hatch warm?”
“Greased.”
He nodded, as if this was the right answer. “I do it every two months. The bearings dry out.”
Mira said nothing, because she was waiting for him to ask why she was there. He didn’t. He walked past her — not warily, but with the ordinary calmness of a man whose workshop had been entered by a guest who had not yet been offered tea — and put the kettle on the stove plate. He turned a small dial. The plate began, quietly, to heat. The kettle was made of the same kind of tin as the cobbler’s kettle, six carriages back. It was the kind of kettle Mira had been seeing all her life.
“Tea?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Sit.”
She didn’t, immediately. She wanted to ask three or four things first. She wanted to ask them in the right order, and the right order was not yet obvious. She stood near the chair without sitting in it.
He looked at her over his shoulder. “Sit,” he said, more gently. “It’s a long way back. You’ll want to be sitting.”
She sat.
V. The Conversation
He gave her a tin mug of tea, sweet, the same tea Birdie made in the tea car six carriages behind her own and a thousand carriages, apparently, behind his. He sat on a low stool that he pulled out from under the bench. He blew across the top of his own mug. The kettle ticked on the stove plate as it cooled.
“Bellan,” he said.
“Mira.”
“Mira from where?”
“The middle workshop. Carriage forty-eight.”
“Long walk.”
“Twenty-two carriages,” she said, before she had thought about whether to be precise.
He smiled, slightly. “Long walk.”
She blew on her tea. He drank his.
After a while she said, “I’ve been mapping a duct.”
“Mm.”
“It runs forward past Hatch Forward Seven.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not on our schematic.”
“No.”
“There’s a junction at Carriage thirty-eight that rattles on a four-count. I can feel the push down the duct. I think it’s coming from somewhere this side of the wall.”
He nodded. He drank his tea.
She waited. He drank his tea. After a while she realised that he had agreed with everything she’d said and was not going to volunteer anything beyond that, because he did not have a category in his head for visiting maintenance worker who has tracked an anomaly across twenty-two carriages. He was treating her the way a competent man treated any other competent person who had walked into his workshop. He was waiting for her to tell him what she needed.
“I want to know what’s on the other end,” she said.
“Of the duct?”
“Yes.”
“Forward.”
“I know it’s forward. What’s forward?”
He thought about it. He had a way of thinking about questions that involved looking at the ceiling for a moment and then looking back down, as if the question and the answer were filed in different parts of the carriage and he had to fetch each one in turn.
“My junctions,” he said. “Then the junctions of the next worker.”
“Who’s the next worker?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
“You don’t know them?”
“No reason to. We have different junctions.”
“You’ve never met.”
“I haven’t.”
“Where do your junctions stop?”
“Where his start. I think.” He sipped. “If it’s a him. Could be anyone.”
“How far is that?”
“Mile and a half forward of here, give or take.”
“And then his stop somewhere?”
“Presumably.”
“And there’s another one after that?”
“Presumably.”
Mira held her mug in both hands. The mug was warm. The tea was good.
“Bellan,” she said. “What’s at the front?”
He looked at the ceiling again. He looked back. “The front of the train, I imagine.”
“Have you been there?”
“I’ve been forward.”
“How far?”
“As far as my line goes.”
“You’ve never gone past your line.”
“No reason to. I’d be in someone else’s section. They’d ask what I was doing.”
She said, very carefully, “Do you know what powers the train?”
He looked at her. The look was not unkind. It was the look of a man being asked, by a guest, the question he had not been asked before, and finding that he didn’t have an answer prepared, and being neither alarmed by this nor moved to manufacture one.
“The engine,” he said.
“Yes. But what is the engine?”
He thought.
“The engine,” he said again, with the slow consideration of a man who is doing his best, “is the thing that drives the train. I don’t go to the engine. I clear the lines. I oil the pivots. I keep the ducts clean. I file my chits. The engine’s the engine. Whatever drives it drives it. My job’s the lines. Not the line’s reasons.”
He said it without performance and without irony. He said it the way a farmer might say the sky’s the sky.
She drank her tea.
After a while she said, “Who pays you?”
He smiled, properly, for the first time. The smile was small but very warm. “The chit comes through the cubby every Tenday. I sign for it. I take it to the chit-counter at the back of forty-five, which I’m told is run by a woman called Ekka, who pays out in coin. I’ve never met her. She has my number. The coin spends fine.”
“So you don’t know.”
“I know the chit comes.”
“Doesn’t it bother you,” she said, not because she expected an answer that would help, but because she wanted to ask the question, “that you don’t know who decided you should be down here?”
He thought about this for the longest time he had thought about anything she’d said.
“It used to,” he said eventually. “When I was younger. I asked. I asked the man before me. He’d asked the man before him. The man before him had asked the man before him. None of them had been told. They’d all decided, by the time they got to my age, that the job was the job, and the question was a different job, and nobody was paying anyone to do the question.”
“And that was enough?”
“It wasn’t enough. It was sufficient. Different word.”
She nodded slowly. She had heard, in eleven years of maintenance, a great many people say things that were true. She had not, before this morning, heard anyone be quite so precise about it.
He drank the last of his tea.
“Your rattle,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Junction thirty-eight-C?”
“Yes.”
“It’s the third pivot. There’s a pivot inside the casing nobody knows about because it’s not on your schematic. You go in through the side plate. You can do it from your end, but you’ll need a thinner pole than the standard one. I’ll lend you mine.”
She stared at him. “How do you know that?”
“Because I had the same rattle on Junction Forward-Six-C four years ago,” he said, “and I asked a man older than me what to do, and he told me. The pivot in your casing is the same as the pivot in mine. They were made at the same time, by the same shop, probably for the same reason. Whoever built this train liked to build the same junction in two places when one would have done.”
“Why?”
“Couldn’t tell you.”
He stood. He took down a pole from his rack — a hooked pole, thinner than the standard, with a leather-wrapped grip worn shiny in the shape of a hand that was not Mira’s hand. He passed it to her, handle first.
“Bring it back when you’re done,” he said.
“How?”
“Through the seven. I’ll be here. I’m always here on Twoday.”
He saw her to the doorway of the workshop. He didn’t see her any further, because the tunnel was the tunnel and she could find her own way. She stopped just past the door and turned around.
“Bellan,” she said.
“Mira.”
“Has anyone ever come the other way?”
He thought.
“Not in my time,” he said. “There’s a hatch forward of here. I’ve never opened it. Reason being it’s not my hatch.”
He raised a hand, briefly, and went back to his bench.
Mira walked twenty-two carriages back, with the borrowed pole over her shoulder and the notebook in her coat and the faint taste of sweet tea still on her tongue.
VI. The Return
The pivot was where Bellan had said it would be.
She found it in the late afternoon, after Soren had gone to Birdie’s thing and Kettering had gone to the stocktake meeting that nobody enjoyed and the workshop was empty except for the slow sway of the schematic against the wall. She slid under Carriage 38 with the borrowed pole, fed it carefully through the side plate, found the third pivot — small, hidden, and of a kind that wasn’t on any drawing she’d ever seen — and freed it with three turns of the wrist.
The duct stopped pushing.
She lay on her back in the crawl-space and listened. The four-count was gone. The rattle was gone. Above her, six inches of pressed metal away, the clerk who limped passed by on her way to somewhere, and her footfalls were unhurried, and the train moved on at the speed it had always moved at, and Junction 38-C was as quiet as Junction 38-A.
She slid out. She went up to the workshop. She filed her report.
Junction 38-C: rattle resolved. Internal pivot, accessible via side plate. Required thin-gauge pole. Repair complete.
Kettering came back from the stocktake with the resigned look of a man who had spent the afternoon counting wrenches, and read the report, and ticked it, and put it in the cubby for outgoing.
“Took your time,” he said.
“I wanted to be sure.”
He grunted approvingly. “Bonus this week, then.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her for slightly longer than usual, because Kettering was not stupid and had been doing this for longer than Mira, and could tell, in the way old foremen could tell, that something about her had moved a half-inch from where it had been the morning before. He didn’t ask. Asking wasn’t his job either.
“Get some food,” he said. “You look thin.”
“I’m not thin.”
“You look it from over here.”
She went and got food. She sat in the canteen between two haulers who were arguing about the price of grog and a girl on her first week who looked like she was going to cry into her stew. Mira ate her stew. She ate it slowly. She thought about the shape of the conversation she had had that morning, the way it had not gone where she had expected it to go, the way Bellan had treated his own ignorance as the sturdy professional fact that it was. She had walked into his workshop expecting to find an answer and had instead found a man whose entire working life was the management of an absent answer, and the management had been so calm and so competent that the absence had begun, in the hours since, to feel less like a hole and more like the shape of the room.
The girl on her first week sniffed.
“It gets easier,” Mira said, without looking at her.
“Does it?”
“After a while you stop noticing it.”
The girl took this for kindness, which was generous of her, because Mira had not entirely meant it as kindness. She had meant it as the truth as she understood it that afternoon. She went back to her stew.
That night she lay in her bunk in the middle carriages and opened the notebook. She turned past the chalk-marks and the timings and the careful map of a duct that had been wrong on her schematic. She turned to a fresh page. She thought for a long time. The bulb above her bunk hummed its small bunk-bulb hum, and the train rolled on under her in the long unconscious rhythm she had been falling asleep to for eleven years, and she found that the question she wanted to write down was not the question she had walked into Bellan’s workshop with.
She had walked in wanting to know what powered the train.
She wanted, now, to know who had decided that nobody should know.
It was a different question. It was a much larger one. The first question was a fact, somewhere, that you could in principle find. The second was a structure — a long quiet decision, made before her grandmother’s grandmother, that had laid down the lines of who could go where and what they were allowed to look at and what counted, in the end, as their job. Somebody had drawn that line. Somebody had drawn it in such a way that the people in maintenance maintained the maintenance, and the people in engineering engineered the engineering, and nobody — apparently nobody — was paid to stand at the front of the train and ask why.
She wrote, in pencil:
Someone built it this way.
She looked at the line for a while. She did not underline it. Underlining felt like the kind of thing she would have done a year ago, when she had still believed that some sentences were more important than others. She had, since this morning, started to suspect that the important sentences were the ones you wrote down once and then carried.
She closed the notebook. She wrapped it in its waxed paper. She put it under her pillow, because that was where she kept it, and turned off the bunk-bulb.
The train rolled on.
Somewhere five miles forward, a man called Bellan was rinsing a tin mug in a workshop nobody on her crew knew existed, and somewhere five miles forward of him there was, presumably, another workshop, with another worker, with another mug, who had also, presumably, decided that the job was the job and the question was a different job. And somewhere forward of all of them there was the engine. Whatever the engine was. Whatever it ran on. Whoever — and Mira thought this carefully, because it was the part that mattered — whoever had decided, a very long time ago, to put a series of small competent men and women in a series of small competent workshops between the engine and the people who lived on the train, and to pay each of them in chits that arrived through a cubby, and to make sure that none of them ever met.
She thought about it until she stopped thinking about it.
She slept.
In the morning she went back down to the tunnels and unstuck a duct under Carriage 41, which had a perfectly ordinary blockage and rattled in a perfectly ordinary key, and she filed her report, and she got her chit, and she returned Bellan’s pole on Twoday with a tin of biscuits, which he accepted with the particular gravity of a man who had not been given a tin of biscuits in some time, and they drank tea, and they did not speak of the question, because the question was not the kind of thing that needed speaking of between people who both knew it was there.
The Meridian moved on at the speed it had always moved at. The bulbs in their cages swung. The footfalls overhead went to their kettles and their cobblers and their kitchens and their bunks. Junction 38-C stayed quiet. Mira’s notebook filled, slowly, with the timings and the chalk-marks of an ordinary working life, and on the inside of the back cover, where she did not look at it often but did not need to, the line stayed where she had written it.
The train kept moving.
It always had.
Somebody, a long time ago, had made sure of that.