Last Train to Jubilee Bay (2 page)

“How long have you been waiting?”

“Five nights.”

Lucy's heart skipped. “Five?”

“There's a lot of rats,” the girl said with a shrug. “They're fat and stupid and nobody hunts them here.”

Five nights ago would have been Riverton's night. Pig hadn't been lying after all. Ugly Sal was the dealer in Riverton; that explained why the child would eat rats for five cold nights rather than return empty-handed. Lucy could make out the shadow of a bruise beneath the girl's left eye, a healing cut at the corner of her mouth. She was too skinny, even for a Riverton mud rat, shaky and frail like one breath would topple her.

“They never miss a meeting,” Lucy said. She tightened her grip on her knife. “They've never missed before.”

“Now they've missed two,” the girl said. “First time for everything.” But there was worry threading through her voice. She craned her head to look up at Lucy and said, “Not even once?”

“Not once.”

Lucy would have heard. She was sure of it. The city survived, in its own way. Neighborhoods fought and buildings crumbled, floods swept in and roads collapsed, collectors lurked and children starved. But beneath it all, the serum was the only thing that mattered, and it had been since the traders had first crept out of the sea. They had arrived after the quarantine had shackled the city, dripping and bold as though they could taste the despair bleeding from the streets and sewers into the sea, as though they had been waiting in cool green darkness all along.

Lucy had survived as a runner longer than anybody, and she had never once heard of the traders missing a meeting.

She took a slow breath to steady herself, and asked, “What's your name?”

“None of your business.”

“I'm Lucy. Morningtown.” She didn't hide the fact that she was still looking around, even though she suspected the kid was alone. “You're new, aren't you? What happened to Benj?”

“Drifter knifed him,” the girl said, her lips twisting. “He tried to steal her pages.”

“What a shame,” Lucy said.

“I'm Belle. Riverton.” The girl's flicker of a smile vanished, and she straightened her shoulders, tried to make herself taller. “Why didn't they show?”

Lucy stood beneath the sign for Jubilee Bay and looked northward along the tracks. Some days, when the fog was light and the sun shone weak and sickly over the city, Lucy climbed to the roof of the highest building in Morningtown and tried to see the ocean through the garden of hollow-eyed skyscrapers. The pickers said the sea crept closer every day, sometimes swallowing yards of land overnight, the corpses of abandoned neighborhoods disintegrating with every hungry gulp.

“I don't know,” Lucy said. She spoke quietly and hated that it was the truth. There had been nights, long ago, when she had imagined attacking the traders when they came, slashing at their stringy, fibrous bodies with her knife just to see if they could bleed, chasing them down the tracks and throwing their vials of serum after them. She didn't know how they would react or what they would do to defend themselves, and she didn't know what it would take to anger the traders so much that they turned their backs on the city and returned to the sea. But she had considered it, trembling with guilt and fear though she never spoke her thoughts aloud, and she had wondered.

Lucy glanced over her shoulder at Belle. The girl had both arms wrapped about herself, one hand toying nervously with the frayed edge of her scarf. “Do you have a place to go?” Lucy asked. “Somewhere Sal won't find you?”

Belle made a small noise in her throat, no kind of answer, but Lucy understood.

“Do you know Father Antonio?” Lucy asked. “He's at the church by the quarantine fence. You should go to him. You'll be safe from Sal there.”

“You're not going to wait?”

“No,” Lucy said. “I'm going to find the traders.”

She crouched at the edge of the platform and dropped down to the tracks. The gravel slid beneath her feet, and cold water seeped through a hole in one boot. Lucy stepped from one tarred, broken tie to the next. She tucked her knife away, wiped her hand absently on her coat.

Nobody who followed the tracks had ever come back. That's what the runners told themselves when they got curious, what the poachers whispered when they got desperate. The stories were most likely lies, repeated so often they had become meaningless. Everybody was afraid of what surrounded the city.

Behind her, Belle jumped down from the platform, her packet of memories still clutched in one hand. “I'm coming with you. I want to see.”

“But it's not—”

Lucy stopped. She remembered being that young, that scared, that hungry. She remembered the quiver in her gut and prickle on her neck, the long nights in heavy, shifting darkness.

“If you want,” she said. “Keep close.”

She started walking, and Belle followed. The fog closed around them and softened the sound of their footsteps. In places the rails were rucked up like a folded rug, twisted and torn from their ties. Angular shapes loomed and vanished in the mist, the frames of vehicles and leaning fence posts, the corners of broken walls with windows gaping like unseeing eyes.

Lucy didn't know how far they walked; her feet were soaked and cold, her body aching from the effort of not shivering. She tasted mud and salt on her tongue, felt it slick and gritty on her skin. But they kept going, away from the city and toward the sea, until the sound of surf on the shore carried through the night.

“Look,” Belle said.

On the tracks ahead, there was a train car resting at a precarious angle, partially derailed, its far end sunk above the wheels into a broad pool of water. The wooden walls were pockmarked with holes, the words obscured by spidery patches of mold.

Lucy knew she didn't want to look inside. She knew it would be better to keep walking. But she splashed through the water to the car's side, ignoring Belle's curious glance, and leaned against the door to slide it open. The soft wood bent at the press of her shoulder and the rollers shrieked. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, and for that moment, but no longer, Lucy held her breath, a gasp caught tight and hot in her throat.

Round skulls and long bones and ribs in toppling arches littered the floor of the car, half-buried in thick black mud. Around them were scattered the smaller bones, fingers and feet and jaws in a chaotic mosaic of gray and white, barely visible in the darkness.

Belle leaned around Lucy's side to peer into the car. If she was shocked, she hid it well. “What happened?”

Lucy swallowed around the ache in her throat and said, “I guess they got out before the quarantine. But it was too late. They were already sick.”

“They must have died really fast.”

“They did, toward the end,” Lucy said. She remembered feverish skin and hair dark with sweat, bloodshot eyes and rasping words. She closed her eyes, took a slow breath, opened them again.

Belle was too young to remember. There were few enough in the city who did, and fewer still willing to speak of it. Those final days were inevitably the first memories to go to traders: the crush of people at the station, billowing black smoke as the wharfs burned, parents shoving their children into overcrowded cars to send them away, screams and sobs as the doors slid shut, the shriek of train whistles and clammy chill of the fog, and the cold, gray silence that had settled over the city when they realized they were alone.

Thousands had fled by other routes. They broke through the barriers and trampled the fences and walked inland along cratered roads and abandoned tracks without knowing if there was anything to find across the interior. They pieced together rafts from burned and half-sunk boats to paddle into the ocean. The sea devoured the land acre by acre, and with the water came the traders, lurching and stinking like dead fish, trailing green and misshapen limbs, bloated with promises and hunger.

Lucy remembered. She was one of the few who did. She had been Belle's age when the barriers went up, and she had never taken up a pen or charred bit of wood or pin pricked in her own blood to scribble away the memories.

“We should keep going,” Lucy said.

She slipped her hand into Belle's and tugged her away. Overhead a sliver of moon and a few brief stars shone through the clouds. The train was short, only ten cars long, and they did not look inside any of the others. Beyond the engine, the tracks crossed damp, wave-rippled dunes dotted with clumps of grass, then abruptly disappeared into the black expanse of water. The waves tugged at the shore, rising and falling like exhausted breaths.

Lucy slowed her pace and listened.

There was the lap of the water, Belle's quiet sniffles, the sucking squelch of their footsteps, and something else, a deep rumble, a noise Lucy felt in her chest and in her bones, so steady and low she thought at first she was imagining it. It was the sound of a train pulling away from the station, of the city's crowded streets first thing in the morning, of a ferry chugging toward a dock. It had been years since she'd heard anything like it.

“What is that?” Belle asked.

Lucy squeezed her hand, a quick reassurance she didn't expect Belle to believe. “Let's find out.”

They walked along the edge of the ocean. To both sides the mist drifted around the bulky shadows of fallen buildings and abandoned boats. The sound grew louder, and as they crossed the dunes a building emerged from the fog, windowless and huge, half as long as a city block. The sea lapped at its sides; the building was half-drowned, one end sinking into the sand and surf. It was a factory, one of the hundreds that used to fill the land between the city and the sea. They had fallen silent years ago, the fish-packing plants and power stations, shipyards and one sprawling refinery, but this one was still running. The low hum ached in Lucy's teeth.

The building had a wide door on one side, close to where the water lapped at its walls. Lucy leaned against the sharp metal edge, and the door slid open just a few inches before sticking in the mud. But it was enough for Lucy to slip through. Belle followed; her scarf caught on the rusted frame.

Lucy pressed her back against the shuddering metal wall. A heavy mist hung in the air, sickly sweet in odor, instantly slick on her skin. The building had one cavernous room, two stories high, illuminated by the diffuse green light of bulbs strung along the walls. A long machine snaked through the center of the factory: a twisting contraption of belts and spools, gears and pumps, pipes of every size meeting at valves and junctions. The machine was mostly metal, but there was wood worked into some components, carved stone and broken bricks in others, and flat belts of woven kelp and seaweed looped over pulleys. The whole thing shook and clanked; it ran, but poorly, and the building trembled.

At the seaward end of the building, there was a rusted metal vat partially submerged in seawater. Pipes fed into the top and at its base a single valve dripped steadily. A milky white fluid spread over the surface of the water like a pale, creeping mold.

“Serum,” Belle said.

She was squeezing Lucy's hand so tight it hurt, but Lucy didn't pull away, only nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The color, the smell of it was unmistakable. Small bottles and empty glass vials bobbed in the seawater, and with them were scraps of paper, the ink blotched and smudged, clumped together like dead leaves after rain.

Lucy took a few hesitant steps, her boots squelching through the thick mud that covered the floor. Seawater pooled in her footprints, shimmering and green. She stopped just short of the water's edge. Her heart pounded painfully, and she fought the urge to turn and run.

There was a trader floating with the glass debris and bleeding pages.

Lucy watched for a few minutes, her hand twitching for her knife every time the waves lifted the creature, but it didn't move. The trader was sunk low in the surf, long appendages of slimy, slippery green splayed around it, limp and lifeless. She hadn't even known they could die.

Lucy tugged Belle away from the water and the dead creature. At the landward end of the factory, past the bulk of the machine, a towering pile of rubbish spilled through open doors. It was a collectors' heap, the largest Lucy had ever seen, a teetering, haphazard pile of windowpanes with chipped white paint, rusted bicycle frames, clothing in moldering heaps, shoes with the laces trailing, deflated tires from automobiles, wooden crates with papered labels peeling from the sides.

“Who's there?”

Lucy slipped and caught herself, set her foot down with a noisy splash. Her heart skipped and she pulled Belle closer to her. There was an old woman sitting on an empty collector's cart beside the heap, her dark, damp clothes and ragged seaweed cloak blending well into the rubbish behind her. Her skin so gray and pale it was nearly translucent, her eyes milked over from years of serum addiction.

“I know you're there,” the woman said. Her hands shook and her breath rattled in her chest. She said something in the collectors' gurgling language, barely recognizable as words, then raised her voice and went on, “You can't be here. They don't let the warm ones come here.”

“What happened?” Lucy asked. Her throat felt so tight she struggled to breathe. “Where did they go?”

The old woman's shoulders shook and milky tears trailed down her face. “You can't be here.”

“I think it's broken,” Belle said, barely a whisper. She pointed with her free hand. “Look.”

The machine was jammed. Jaws of welded scrap metal groaned but did not open and close, and debris spilled from the mouth, planks of wood with splintered ends, shattered shards of glass, a crushed plastic crate, parts of an engine tangled up in dark fabric, the detached door of an automobile.

There was something soft and white stuck between a wheel frame and a length of metal gutter. Lucy pried her hand free of Belle's grasp and stepped closer. She didn't want to look, already knew what she would see: it was a hand, a collector's hand with torn, milky-pink fingers.