The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

“Glass is alchemy made solid. It is sand and heat and patience,” her father would say, when he was feeling poetic. “Glass can trap light, use it, shatter it.”

father plunged the glass into the burning heart of them. There, that is what she needs: the burning in her chest, her own furnace that she is carrying with her. She needs to hold her hand close to its flame, to feel the power that drove her to cast her old life off, that guided her toward this train.

mimicry gave them advantages over predators and it was proof, he argued, that creatures strived to better themselves, to move gradually toward God’s own image.

It is said that so much had been taken from the land that it was always hungry. It had been feeding off the blood spilled by the empires, and by the bones of the animals and people they left behind. It gained a taste for death.

a thing is less beautiful if one knows that it is also dangerous.

“Beauty is subjective, of course,” he begins. “But all of God’s creation must be seen as beautiful, from the most humble, commonplace creature to the most rare. As a scientist and a man of God I say that neither familiarity nor danger should change the fact of their miraculousness.

Grey says, “All things on this Earth are God’s creation, as strange as some of them may seem. There is a place for each of them.” The cleric gives a twisted smile. “Here only the Devil walks, and leaves ruin behind him.”

A world always just out of reach. I grasped at it only to feel it slip through my fingers.

The Professor is silent. “Verum per vitrum videmus,” he says, eventually. “Through glass we see the truth,” echoes Marya.

“I think that looking through his new lenses didn’t just let you see the patterns, the changes. I think that it changed you both as well.

“And so reveal in water and in sky,” he murmurs. “The mirror of the Heavens and the window of His eye.”

Weiwei manages something between a laugh and a sob. “I don’t know what I am anymore.” Elena steps backward, holding out her arms just as Weiwei had done, examining her. “Not just one thing,” she says, with a little nod. “Many things.

The traveller may experience a peculiar phenomenon—a dread of arrival. This may manifest in a dangerous lethargy; the traveller sits by the window, unable to tear their gaze away. They await the sight of the station with anxiety; they do nothing to prepare their luggage or their dress. After all their days and nights onboard, they are afraid of what it means to be still.

We leave new life in our wake; young vines curling around ancient houses; new shoots stirring in the soil; flora and fauna not found in any of the natural histories so far written. We leave you to find ways to live alongside it, to make the choice that faces us all—whether to turn away from the changes, to fight, to flee; or whether to welcome them in.

Where will the great train take us? We stand at the open windows and we watch the horizon approaching.