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A tumultuous crowd welcomes us in its flow, breaking our small group in two. I’ve already lost sight of Priya and Izod when Numair, Valdus, and I enter the train station.
No procession awaits the princess of Usmad this time, but I’m a Rebel Princess now. The guards would have put me in manacles and taken me to the governor's dungeons if they knew who I was, instead of their past duty of escorting me like one of his wives on her way to the capital.
The thick wall of glass puts me on the other side this time, but even with the crowd pressing from every angle, and a petulant child tearing its lungs out as he screams for his mother’s arms, I enjoy being with the ordinary folk much more than when I boarded the train next to men of power and women ordering servants around with a simple jingle of bracelets.
A whistle pierces the rumble of the muttering crowd, and we all snap our heads up as the train made of dark metal and slick edges rolls onto the platform. It pumps white smoke into the station, swirling around us in waves of suffocating heat. With a thundering cringe, it comes to a stop. Hustling workers detach the last three wagons from the train and two others take their place.
With a whoosh and one last bellow of steam, the doors unlock. Valdus grabs my hand as a stream of people emerges from the cars. Pulled and pushed from every side, I can feel the first bruises spread over my ribs, but some tension fades as I catch a glimpse of Priya and Izod climb up into the car.
A whistle pierces the air, and the last people on the platform nudge us closer to the train despite the line ahead. We all know that if the chief conductor decides it’s time for the train to depart, he’ll leave us all behind without a second thought.
The conductor’s face is set in a constant grimace of disgust, and he barely glances at our tags as he punches a hole in our tickets. Valdus climbs the first steps and disappears inside the car. Numair follows, but as I pull myself up the first step, someone pushes me aside. Numair catches me by the arm and hauls me into the car before I can break my nose on the steps. In a flash, he has the man who pushed me by the neck of his shirt and shoves him against a thin plank of metal I don’t care to call a wall.
“Watch where you walk,” Numair growls.
Valdus looks over his shoulder at the same time, but the conductor climbs into the car with us. “Hey, what’s the trouble there?”
Before anyone can do anything stupid, I put a hand on Numair’s arm. “We can’t afford this kind of attention.”
Numair scoffs, but lets the man go. A string of insincere apologies is all he leaves in his wake.
“Move along before I throw you two off the train.”
The train shakes under our feet. The metal beast is eager to run free through the desert again, but there is not enough coal in the engine yet. Before the conductor can give too much thought to his threat, I pull Numair by his arm and follow Valdus through the narrow corridor. We don’t have enough time to get to our bunks before another jolt of the car makes me lose my footing. Numair catches me before I can fall on the same mean-looking man who pushed me before. The way he grins makes me think he knows that it’s not a boy facing him, and this time I curse Numair for pulling me away. He doesn’t let go of my hand. Not until we’ve crossed the car rocking under our feet to our compartment. When we settle in our bunks, I dare to glance out the window set in the thin metal wall and see The Broken Sands dwindle to a dot on the horizon.
The car jolts, waking me up from the agonizing slumber I’ve sunken into, but I’m not eager to shift my pained muscles into another uncomfortable position. The nightmare lingers on my eyelashes, and each jerk of the train swirls shadows into deadly creatures in the darkened car.
On my trip to The Sour Peaks, I had a compartment all to myself, but now thin metal partitions carve the car into small open sections, denying any privacy to its passengers and allowing loud snores to travel from one end to the other.
When a cramp settles in my calf, I finally roll on my back, facing the last bunk mere feet away, where Numair seems to struggle to find a comfortable position too. Valdus is on the third and last bunk below me. Another three are a mirror image on the other side of a small table and a large window. On the other side of a narrow corridor with a thinning carpet, the last set of three bunks hangs from the wall with a small window splitting the space in between them.
One compartment after another, this car was designed to cram as many people inside as possible.
Every passenger has a thin mattress and an equally thin pillow. For a few silver coins, the conductor has sold a set of fraying sheets to everyone in the car. Far from the crisp white cloth the rich folk of the desert must have at the head of the train, I’m afraid to speculate on the origin of the stains coating the sheets.
As a child’s cry rings through the car, I sigh.
Old men with faces creased by sun and sand share the narrow space with modest-looking women busy with stitching or sewing. Crying babies on the laps of their too-young mothers have claimed the most attention of this tiring week.
With a brief stop at The Veiled Rock, we’ll be off for another seven days of jumbling cars, the stench of sweat and human waste filtering from the lavatory, and a racket of arguing men and crying children.
I close my eyes again, propping my hands under my head to cradle it better than the too thin pillow, but sleep doesn’t come. A constant clink rings through the compartment as the coin lands in Numair’s metal hand time and time again where he is entertaining himself by tossing it in the air. A soft drum comes from below, where Valdus’s black gloves muffle the sound of metal on metal.
We all think the same thing. It’s been on our minds since we’ve left. We’ve been searching for anything that could go wrong on our dangerous mission, and it sums up finely in four words. Every last little thing.
“What if —“Numair starts.
“No,” Valdus interrupts him even before he can end his thought.
Since the moment Valdus has gathered us at the connection between cars where not even the light of the moon nor the snores of men could reach us and told us his plan, Numair’s voiced concerns have been a reliable way of telling time. Each hour, Numair tries to propose alternatives so that Valdus won’t be the one to go in with Numair and me, and each time Valdus cuts his attempts short with unmovable resolve.
When it’s clear I won’t be able to get any more sleep, I climb down from my bunk. My muscles protest at the smallest of efforts all the way down to the rocking floor of the moving train.
“I’ll be back in five,” I answer to Valdus’s silent question.
With my backpack slung over my shoulder, I start toward the lavatory. If a hole in the floor can be called that. It has a faucet with running water and somehow I consider it a luxury.
Priya opens her eyes as she sees me reach for the door, but doesn’t acknowledge my presence in any other way other than sitting up and rummaging through her own backpack. With the stench of the lavatory, air currents, and the door banging in its frame with each bump on the rails, her bunk is among the worst ones in the whole car. Except for Izod’s, where the door hits his feet sticking out from under the blanket.
