Last Train to Jubilee Bay (3 page)

The traders had never explained where the serum came from. Lucy remembered her father saying it tasted like the sea, salty and cool, like sunshine on sand and soft breezes, and she had believed him. But it had come from the city all along. The collectors picked the city apart piece by piece, and they brought it here. The traders bottled it up in little vials of murky white fluid, and brought it back.

Belle took a step closer, but Lucy pushed her away. The girl scowled and kicked at a broken crate, slanted a glare at the muttering old woman.

“Are they going to fix it?” she asked.

After a moment, Lucy said, “I don't know if they can.”

But they would try. Lucy had no doubt. Perhaps not the traders, if they returned at all. But after another missed meeting, after another neighborhood went a few days without serum, others would leave the station and follow the tracks. They would come from the city and find the factory and fix the machine if they could, arrange a new system and ask a new price, and the serum would flow again. Lucy knew it with a cold, aching sense of inevitability. She could do it herself, with Esther's help, with her knives and this rumbling machine. She could take over the trade and rule the rotting, drowning city, and feed serum to everybody who craved it until the last bright memory in the last clear mind faded away.

Lucy stepped over to the collectors' heap and sorted through the junk until she found a long metal bar, almost too heavy to lift, and a garden hoe with most of its red handle intact. She shoved the hoe into Belle's hands.

“Take this,” Lucy said, wavering with hesitation, with anger. She cleared her throat and raised her voice. “Help me break it.”

Belle started to say something, but she cut herself off. Her eyes were wide and dark, her skin tinted green in the factory light. She was so very young, and so wary, but Lucy didn't let herself look away. Belle had never seen the streets filled with people and noise beneath the blinding reflection of glass windows on a hot summer's day. She had never heard the racket of traffic and startled horns and the pulsing flow of crowds. She had never known anybody who did not live and fade and die by the memories they shed. She was too young to remember, but perhaps she understood.

“Help me break it,” Lucy said again.

She hefted the iron bar over her shoulder, high enough that she nearly overbalanced. She took three long strides toward the machine and swung at a mess of grinding gears and strained bands. The bar struck with a solid clang and pain burned in her hands, but she swung again and again until the gears came loose and the seaweed belts tore. The machine's bolts and welds were rusted, weak, shaking and shedding flakes of iron with every blow. Lucy heard a shout and saw Belle jump onto the machine and scramble up high to hack at a tangled nest of tubes. The old woman was shouting too, unintelligible and babbling, but Lucy didn't look to see what she was doing.

The machine shook violently and the noise was deafening, metal grinding against metal in groans and shrieks, but Lucy didn't stop. Springs snapped and steam hissed, pipes cracked and belts whipped free, dozens of failures small and large. They hacked and pulled at the machine until pieces tumbled down, thundering on the floorboards and splashing in the mud, a rain of broken metal and wood and stone. Lucy's arms burned and her throat was raw; she was shouting wordlessly, louder than she ever dared in the city's silent streets. The serum-stink in the air stung her eyes and tears blurred her vision.

When she reached the end of the machine, her blood racing, her heart thudding, Lucy splashed through the cloudy seawater and jammed the iron bar into a cluster of gears. The fat metal teeth screeched and the machine quaked ominously.

Belle jumped down, ripping at seaweed belts as she fell, tumbled to her knees, and jumped up quickly. Lucy grabbed her hand, and they ran for the door. They raced away from the building and along the shore, slipping and skidding in the mud.

About halfway to the tracks, Lucy stopped and turned, bent over to catch her breath. Night was fading to a gray early morning, damp and bitterly cold. The noise within the windowless factory settled into sporadic clanks and crashes, and the seawater lapping at the outer walls calmed. The mist was clearing and high clouds raced inland across the stars.

Lucy brushed her damp hair back from her face, reached into her pocket to draw out the packet of pages. She looked at the memories in the predawn light. She wondered, not for the first time, why the traders craved the scribbled, ink-stained pages, the words smeared with tears and sweat.

Lucy tugged the end of Esther's neat knot, let the string fall to the ground, and flung the memories toward the sea. They fluttered like dying moths onto the surf, the damp sand and salt grass.

A moment later, Belle hurled her own packet into the water. It splashed quietly, then sank. She pressed close to Lucy's side, small and scared and no longer trying to hide it. She still held the hoe in one hand, its metal flat sunk in the mud.

In the distance, sparse ruins spotted the sea toward the horizon like the remains of a burned forest. Lucy had thought she might recognize something of the seaside, the colorful rooftops along the boardwalk or high curve of a roller coaster, the tall lampposts that had held banners and lights above the streets. But she didn't even know where the shoreline had been before. She could not trust her sunlit memories of those summers long ago.

“People are going to be angry,” Belle said.

Lucy thought of Esther and Olaf waiting in their apartment, sleepless beneath their threadbare blankets, listening for her footsteps on the stairs.

She took Belle's hand. “It will be okay,” she said.

They walked back to the tracks and turned toward the city. Dawn was coming in its slow, insidious way. They passed the train of skeletons and did not look inside. Lucy felt the cold in every muscle, and when she began to shiver she only walked faster, pulling Belle along behind her.

The red signal light came into view as the sun rose, and beyond it the station was a long shadow in the mist. The city was a row of broken teeth against the low, gray sky.

Copyright (C) 2012 by Kali Wallace

Art copyright (C) 2012 by Richard Anderson