The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

The train itself—a marvel of the age, a monument to the ingenuity of Man and to his ceaseless striving for mastery over the earth. Twenty carriages long and as tall as the great gates of St. Andrei’s Cathedral, with towers at either end; an armored fortress to plow the great iron road that must itself stand as one of the new wonders of the world, a miracle of engineering that lets us traverse once more these barely imaginable distances. The Trans-Siberia Company succeeded where so many others had failed, embarking on a project so fraught with danger that the greatest engineers in the land swore it could not be done. To cross land that has, since the end of the last century, been turning against its occupants; to face strangeness for which we do not have the language to describe; to build a railway to safely carry us over all those perilous miles. The Cautious Traveller may balk at the very mention of the Greater Siberian Wastelands, at spaces so vast and unkind and stories so inimical to our sense of all that is decent and human and good. But it is the humble aim of this author to take the Traveller by the hand and act as a constant companion on their journey. And if I myself appear to falter, then know that I too am by nature and inclination, Cautious, and that there were times on my journey when the horrors outside threatened to overwhelm me; when reason trembled in the face of unreason.

There is a woman on the platform with a borrowed name. With steam in her eyes and the taste of oil on her lips.

In front of her, a man with a beard and gold spectacles and the kind of voice that elbows all other voices out of the way, leans out of the window and shouts in English, “Where is the Station Master? Be careful with those boxes! Oh, I do beg your pardon.” He squeezes himself against the window and attempts a bow as Marya approaches. She limits herself to a small smile and an incline of the head and leaves him to his hectoring. She has no wish for social niceties, nor the curious, appraising gazes of men, already observing her black mourning garb, noting her solitary state. Let them note. All she wants is to be alone in her cabin, to shut the door and close the curtains and gather a comforting silence around her. But she is not to be allowed, not quite yet. “Really, do stop fussing, I am perfectly capable of looking after myself.” An elderly lady approaches from the other end of the carriage, dressed in dark-blue silk and followed by her maid. “Is this really First Class?” She peers at Marya, and then at the cabin door beside her. “I had been led to believe this train was the finest money could buy. I confess, I cannot see it…” Hearing the familiar sounds of well-to-do St. Petersburg, thousands of miles away from its wide streets and tall houses, gives Marya a painful tug of homesickness.

“My maid was unable to make the journey. It was too much of a strain on her nerves.” “Well, it is good that our nerves are made of stronger stuff. My weak-spleened nephews spent months trying to dissuade me from this journey with tales of all the terrors that may befall us, but I believe they only succeeded in scaring themselves.” She gives an unexpected smile and pats Marya on the hand. “Now then, where is my cabin? If Vera here doesn’t have me stuffed into an armchair with a cup of tea in my hand very quickly, I can’t swear to her behavior.” “Right here, Countess.” The steward gives a much deeper bow and a theatrical wave of his arm. The maid—Vera—opens the door at arm’s length, as if afraid of the horrors within. “Ah! So we are to be neighbors,” says the Countess. Marya gives a curtsey. “Oh, we shall have none of that here. My name is Anna Mikhailovna Sorokina. And I will call you…?” Another catch of the breath, a lurch like the feeling of missing a step she hadn’t realized was there, but the Countess seems not to notice. “My name is Marya Petrovna Markova,” she says.

Her bags have been neatly packed onto the rack above the bed, which has been made up into a couch for the day, padded with plump cushions. Everything looks new. The Company must have poured money into it, displaying its confidence in the gold embroidery on the cushions and the bright brass on the walls and the deep-blue carpet, soft beneath her feet. Everywhere there is the lettering of the Trans-Siberia Company, entwined around the flower vase and the light fittings and embossed on the porcelain teacups and saucers on the little table by the window. Her day case sits on the armchair beside it. The window is framed by blinds and blue velvet curtains. On the other side of the glass run two thick iron bars. She stares at them a moment, then walks over to the wall, where two doors are set into the polished mahogany. One opens into a wardrobe, where her dresses and shawl already hang, unpacked by unseen hands. The other opens onto a cabinet with a compact white porcelain sink, shining silver taps and a shelf holding a hairbrush and little pots of creams from Paris, and above it all a silver-edged mirror. As a child she had been fascinated by the old gilt mirror in her mother’s bedroom. Clouded with silver, she used to think it made her look like a spirit, emerging from the underworld or swimming up out of a lake. Whichever idea happened to catch her fancy, she would enjoy the feeling of being someone else, just for a while, before her mother called her down for tea with her gr...

The train has not even departed yet and she has not followed the first piece of Rostov’s advice: Above all, do not attempt the journey unless you are certain of your own evenness of mind.

It is said that there is a price that every traveller through the Wastelands must pay. A price beyond the mere cost of a ticket on the train.

She sniffs. How she has missed these acrid smells, the creaking mechanics of her train, the old familiar terror and excitement, the noise—so constant that she ceases to hear it until it is gone. How she has longed, these past months, for movement, for speed; she has craved it like the red-eyed men in Third crave liquor, gasping for the last drops from the jar, maddened to find it empty. But now that they are moving again the air vibrates with tension. She has heard the whispers among the crew. Too soon. Too soon for the train to ride again, why not wait for winter and the safer passage through the snow, when the land is drowsy with the cold and danger cannot hide amidst the trees? In summer the land is wakeful, hungry. It is too soon to take the risk. Not soon enough for her. But then again, she is too in love with risk, Alexei always says. “And who on this train isn’t?” she replies, and he has to acknowledge the truth of it; that they are—all of them—half mad with Wastelands sickness already, with a longing and fear that they would struggle to articulate but which beckons them to the Trans-Siberia Company. They are the ones who hear the Wastelands from the safety of their cities and homes, who cannot resist the call of the great train. They present themselves at the grand Company offices in their London headquarters, or on Baiyun Road or Velikaya Street, knock on the famous wood-paneled doors and stand before unsmiling, gray-haired men who regard them sternly and demand t...

Here he comes now, Alexei, only a few years older than her but already promoted to First Engineer, swaggering down the corridor with a railman’s gait, sleeves rolled up to show the tattoos on his forearms—complex, congratulatory patterns that Company engineers give themselves after each crossing. Marks of brotherhood (she has never seen a female engineer), and of memory. They touch their arms, sometimes, when they talk of journeys past; of cranks that failed and shafts that barely held. Gears and cogs have turned into abstract patterns on their skin; into ways of remembering. She tries to see whether there is a new design, one to mark the last crossing, but he sees her looking and rolls down his sleeves.

They speak in Railhua, the language of the train, a mixture of Russian, Chinese and English that began with the builders of the line, although the Company frowns upon it and tries to insist on the use of English.

It is as busy and chaotic as the rest of the train, but at the far end of the carriage, set into the wall, is a little shrine containing an icon of Saint Mathilda and a statue of Yuan Guan. A saint and a god to watch over travellers, and over rail people, who, while putting their trust in mechanics, in wheels and gears and oil, are also inclined to think that it can’t do any harm to give polite recognition to the numinous, just in case. Which of them, after all, had not seen things in the Wastelands more impossible than these saints who were once said to have done miracles? Weiwei sees one of the stewards bend his head then place something on the shrine, a surreptitiousness to his movements. He straightens up slowly, glancing around him as if afraid of being watched, then brings his hands together and bows his head again, before hurrying off. When he has gone she looks more closely to see what he left behind. A glint of bluish-green catches the light from the window; it is a small, perfectly round glass bead.

There is a man watching birds from the farthest window in the observation car. Azure-winged magpies—Cyanopica cyanus—burst from willow trees as the train roars past, the long feathers of their tails iridescent in the afternoon sunlight. When Henry Grey looks at a living thing he sees it as a system of vessels, connected to each other in a pattern of infinite skill. He wants to get closer, longs to touch each quickening of sinew and twitch of muscle, to feel the pulse of life beneath his fingers. In his mind’s eye he walks the corridors of a great glass building, each room filled with marvelous exhibits behind still more glass, eyes swiveling toward him. They are waiting for him to reveal their secrets. He feels their urgency. He has always felt it—the natural world waiting for him, challenging him. When he looks Heavenwards every bird is writing on the sky in words he longs to understand. Beneath his feet the earth is fat with promise.

His stomach twinges again but it is the sharp, almost pleasurable pain of expectation. It is the pain he feels when he is on the cusp of a discovery, when an idea is dancing tantalizingly within reach, or when he has found, beneath a rock or within a stream, some new and marvelous creature whose meaning he does not yet understand. A sudden hearty laugh interrupts his reverie, and a young couple enter the carriage, speaking French. Of the man, he gains only a faintly disagreeable impression of too much hair and too many teeth, but the lady has a pale and delicate kind of beauty. He nods stiffly to them and turns back to the window. He is ill at ease in the company of fellow travellers and has no wish to cultivate new acquaintances. He has met many such travellers in the course of his journeys, at those hotels and inns in which European languages are spoken and the food—while a thin imitation of proper nourishment—can be eaten with familiar utensils. He has suffered too many tedious evenings, amazed at how they can speak so long about so little. Though they could be among the grandest of mountains or cities, their horizons remain barely wider than the walls of their own estates.

Traversers, thinks Grey, with some disdain. The wretched Rostov and his book had a lot to answer for—without him the train would have been left to the serious traveller, firm in purpose, not these foolish gamblers, so rich in money and time that they must find dangerous ways of spending it. They take the train only to collect an experience, like a pretty keepsake they can hang on their wall, to boast about to their friends. They will return home to their comfortable lives, their salons and coffee houses, barely touched by the marvels they have seen. He pities them, and finds it a pleasant feeling. “I travel for study, sir,” he says, “and fear I will have little time for the pleasures of conversation.” “Come, Dr. Grey,” says LaFontaine, “surely there is time enough on this moving fortress for anything we like. When else are we to have so many hours and days released from the burdens of yet another art gallery, yet another museum, yet another statue by some long-dead sculptor which one cannot possibly leave without seeing? We are released from the tyranny of decision-making. What restaurant shall we eat at tonight, my dear? Ah, I know it already! What blessed relief!” Grey gives a tight smile. “We may certainly be grateful for that. But we must not forget where we are. This is not a journey to be taken lightly.”

Grey takes the language he is speaking to be Russian, and although he cannot understand a word of it the cadences of the prayer are as familiar to him as his own liturgy back home, a rising and falling of promises and pleas that wrap around him as they leave Beijing behind, travelling now through fields and scattered farm buildings. Those working in the fields stand still and stare. Some of them take off their hats and bow their heads. Some of them make signs in the air; arcane symbols to ward off ill-luck.

The child of the train is quick and clever. She has never grown as tall as she had hoped, so she can still squeeze into the smallest spaces and scramble up into the train’s hidden corners. She has learned all the secrets of the train—how to duck through the kitchen carriages and steal a hot dumpling on the way; how to tiptoe through the garden carriage without disturbing the bad-tempered chickens; how to get to the pipework and wires when things go wrong (and they do go wrong—more often than the Company would like, or would ever reveal to their investors). She runs in time with the rhythm of the train, a rolling, lolloping gait, slaloming between the walls of the narrow corridors along the sides of carriages, dodging passengers still unsteady on their feet and leaving them spinning in her wake, pausing only to sneak into the Third Class kitchen and swipe a handful of dried fruits from underneath the nose of the sleepy kitchen boys.

Between the kitchens for First and Third Class is a cramped space known to the rail workers as the Divide, or sometimes, sarcastically, as Second Class. Weiwei has never managed to find a straight answer to why the train has a First and a Third class, but not a Second. In his book Rostov argues that the original architects of the Company overstretched themselves and ran out of money, but many of the crew claim that the architects of the train simply forgot. Whatever the reason, on the Trans-Siberian Express, Second Class exists only in this dividing space, where cooks and hands from both kitchens come to snooze or exchange gossip about the passengers. This gives it an unusual neutrality, above the class divisions among the passengers which tend to be replicated in the staff who serve them. And even though the First Class Cook states that the food in Third is not fit for street vermin, and even though Anya Kasharina maintains that the food in First wouldn’t fill up the belly of a gnat, the two cooks have been known to sit on the narrow benches in the Divide, sharing a pot of tea and a slow game of cards.

The stewards’ voices fade in and out. Weiwei imagines them checking over their shoulders. The Captain knows when you’re talking about her, say the crew. They say she’s behind the door before you’ve had time to take a breath. They tell so many stories about her that it is hard to untangle what is real and what has grown into train lore. This much they are sure is true—that her people had come from the land which is now just within the Wall, that they had grazed their cattle and ridden their horses over the grass, until they were driven away when the changes began; the skin of their animals turning translucent, birds falling from the sky, seedlings bursting through the soil like bubbles through water, too fast to make sense of, sprouting unfamiliar leaves. And so the Captain returns again and again to a lost ancestral land, she forces the train over the traitorous soil and she dares the Wastelands to rise up against her. But the stories that Weiwei likes best are about the Captain when she was a young woman—when she cut off her hair and joined a train crew, disguised as a boy. Stories of how she worked her way up to become a driver, her secret so well hidden that nobody ever suspected. Stories of how she was one of the very first crew members on the Trans-Siberian Express, and of how the day she was made Captain she announced to the Company directors that she was a woman and they were so shocked (the story goes) that by the time they had gathered their wits she had already r...

The Blessing sets them safely on their journey. Each crew member takes their turn to scatter water on the engine, using a sheaf of willow twigs, watching it sizzle and steam. The water is in a vat containing the fruit and leaves of the season, and soil from the station grounds, and so the train will carry the earth of Beijing or Moscow with it, to help keep it safe from the unkinder land beneath its wheels. But not on this journey. This journey, the train has gone unblessed. The Company had always disliked anything they perceived as superstitious or backward, but until recently an uneasy truce had existed. The crew could keep their small rituals, their icons and gods, as long as they were discreet, as long as the passengers found them charming. But now, they have been told, it is time for a change. A new century is approaching—the passengers do not want mysticism, they want modernity. There is no place for these rituals anymore, said the Company. And so the crew complain among themselves that the banning of the Blessing is yet another sign that the dusty men in their offices do not understand the needs of the train, and does it not bode ill for this crossing, of all crossings? Have there not been other signs and portents? Wasn’t a white owl seen in the daytime at the Pinghe Temple? Hadn’t a turtle been caught in the river with two heads and with markings on its shell in the shape of a bird in flight?

In the first of the two carriages passengers huddle alone or in pairs, as if holding their fears around them like a cloak. In the second, however, a little community has already formed: a woman handing around bright-red sugar plums; two traders dealing out bamboo cards and passing a tarnished silver flask between them; a young priest reading aloud from a leather-bound book in a language Weiwei doesn’t recognize, a string of wooden beads between his fingers.

He has never, as far as she knows, had enough money to pursue his own studies at a university, because everything he has earned, for all of his life, has been spent on tickets for the train, so that he could study the landscape outside. Members of the Society for the Study of the Changes in Greater Siberia—the Wastelands Society, as it is more commonly known—often travel on the train, and the crew have always felt a certain sympathy with them, recognizing a shared preoccupation, though they look pityingly on those scholars who explore Greater Siberia only in books, and who then insist on writing books themselves, so that their Wastelands are nothing but paper forests and rivers of ink, as insubstantial as the scholars themselves. The Professor, though, is practically train folk himself, and unlike some members of the Society, has other interests to fill his time. He had taught himself Chinese, which Weiwei would sometimes help him with, and he could speak it adequately if unmelodiously, in an accent that always put her in mind of rusting pans rubbing together. “Did you not want to study here?” she asked him once, as they stood in front of the great stone building that he had taken her to, on one of their stays in Moscow. When he told her that this was a place that men went to learn about the world, she was puzzled, because the walls were high and thick as though to keep the world out instead. They watched young men race inside, books beneath their arms, collars high and co...

He looks up at her. But before he can say more he stiffens. She follows his gaze to the doorway, where two men stand, surveying the carriage. They are dressed in black, in suits with tails that could look, if you saw them in the right light, like wings. “Ah,” the Professor says quietly. “Our very own birds of ill-omen.” They are heralded by the clinking of their shoes, polished black and in the European style, with buckles. It is their only affectation: from the feet up, they are as forgettable as the rest of the Company men, in their dark suits and wire-rimmed glasses and humorless smiles. Li Huangjin and Leonid Petrov are, to use their official titles, consultants, but the crew call them Crows. Doubled, like all Company consultants—one from China, one from Russia; a balance that the Directors in London are careful to uphold. They speak in the dry, long-winded English of the Company, so that Weiwei has forgotten the beginning of their sentences before they get to the end. The Crows rattle their shiny buckles and they peck and peck at the train and its crew. Not even the Captain can keep them away, although Weiwei can see that they do not like the way she fixes them with an icy politeness and an eye as cold as theirs. Once, in the middle of a crossing, when Weiwei was racing down the corridors, trying to hold her breath between doors (pretending that the poisonous air of the Wastelands had crept its way into the train), she crashed straight into one of the Crows. She stagg...

Mr. Petrov (they insist on the Mr, as if their own names are too weak to stand up by themselves) even bends down to ruffle the hair of a small boy, who gazes back at him, impassively. Weiwei rolls her eyes. They do not stop for long, she sees. They will be on their way to First, to mingle with the passengers the Company prefers, who better fit their image of themselves. “Try not to look too much like you’re giving them the evil eye,” murmurs the Professor. But she can’t smooth her features into the mask the Company likes. When they reach the middle of the carriage she stands up straighter, feeling the Professor tense beside her. The Crows give her a cursory nod. “We are glad that our most loyal traveller has joined us again,” says Mr. Li to the Professor. “We have heard that there have been differences within the Society of late. We do hope that these have been resolved?” The Professor gives a vague smile and squints short-sightedly at them through his glasses, the very picture of a harmless scholar. “Ah, but differences are the life-blood of scientific discourse, are they not?” “Indeed they are, indeed they are.” The Crows smile back. “What did he mean, ‘differences’?” asks Weiwei, when they are gone, but the Professor just shakes his head. “Not now,” he says, quietly, looking down the carriage as if expecting to see the Crows swooping back.

A crow is a sign of sin, the crew say. When the changes began, crows were the only birds that would fly over the Wall, eating carrion from the changed lands, returning with trinkets or bright stones clutched in their claws. This is why people in the north of China throw stones at them; they are tainted. When she was small she would imagine the Company men flying. She believed that they had wings that unfurled from the black cloth of their coats, that they would take off into the air like the shadow birds in the Wastelands. That they would open their mouths wide and call to each other in clipped and cluttered English, and they would hold all the sins of the train in their claws like a stone, so hard and bright that it hurt to look at it.

The saloon car is hot and cramped with the press of bodies. Perfume hangs in the air and catches in Marya’s throat. There is too much material here, too much silk and velvet. She is suffocating in fabric.

“They haven’t been able to import any real Russian vodka for months,” says the Countess, ensconced on a throne of cushions like a small and irascible monarch in the court of a tiny nation. “So we must make do, I’m afraid.” She shakes her head. “I fear we have a difficult journey ahead of us. I happened to catch a glance of tonight’s menu and it was not a heartening sight. Poor Vera says her digestive system simply cannot take any more peculiar vegetables.” Vera purses her lips and nods in silent agreement. Marya reaches for a suitable response but finds herself at a loss. It is too long since she has been among so many strangers. She is aware, for the first time, of the dullness of her dress, beside the bright plumage of these men and women. She cannot help feeling that her falseness must show on her face; that this other Marya will fall from her like an ill-fitting gown. But Anna Mikhailovna is undisturbed, surveying her court with a critical eye, and her steady stream of observation is rather soothing, demanding that Marya do nothing but listen and murmur in occasional agreement. The Countess’s late husband was a diplomat, she says. “Though it was his father who encouraged it. If he’d had his way we’d have lived forever in the Petersburg swamps. It’s only now he’s gone I can travel for the pleasure of it.” Marya notes that she has retained many of the qualities essential to an ambassadorial life, including a jaundiced eye for her fellow men. “And that gentleman with the ...

The very rich do not only buy estates and fine trinkets, thinks Marya, they buy certainty. They buy the conviction that this journey holds no danger for them. She envies them their confidence. “Well, if he is very rich then he has no need to be interesting,” she says, trying to ignore the false lightness in her voice. “And besides, I have heard that an overabundance of imagination is a dangerous thing on this journey.”

“Oh now, I am sorry. There is no need to speak of it, don’t upset yourself.” The Countess leans forward to pat her hand. She reminds Marya of her grandmother’s friends in St. Petersburg, those black-clad widows who took sustenance from misfortune, inhaled it like the fresh sea air that promised rejuvenation. “Do not feel you have to speak of such painful things.” Yet it is clear that the Countess longs for her to speak of it, so she says, quickly, “And that gentleman?”

“Ah, that is the infamous Dr. Henry Grey,” says the Countess, dropping her voice further but speaking with a certain amount of relish. “Poor man, one cannot help but feel rather sorry for him. These scientific gentlemen do take embarrassment to their reputation terribly hard.” The story had been reported with some glee in the press, the Countess explains—Dr. Grey’s famous discovery of a fossil inside the corpse of a seal on a beach in England, a fossil that showed a perfect representation of a child curled up as if in the womb and that proved, he had claimed, that animals contain within them the blueprints for their eventual evolution into the most perfect of forms, the human—it had all been shown to be wrong. What he claimed showed a human child was actually the curled form of an ancient sea creature, trapped in the limestone of the cliffs and then swallowed by mistake by the innocent seal. All Dr. Grey’s claims came tumbling down, loudly and publicly. The Frenchman Girard, so proud of his theory of the evolution of forms, had mocked him on the stage of the Paris Institute. “Who could mistake a crab for a child? Only an Englishman!”

“The Moscow Exhibition, my dear.” It is Marya’s turn to be tapped with the fan. “An entire building, a palace made out of glass, which does seem rather frivolous to me, but then again one never knows what people will think of next, and I suppose there are worse ways to show off how clever we all are.”

They fall into a reverent silence as the train slows and the tower looms above them and the Wall grows more enormous by the second. Early evening light illuminates the gray, pockmarked stone. She had grown up with the stories of the Emperor who commanded its building, over a thousand years ago, and of the men whose remains lay mingled with its stones. And of course the tales of Song Tianfeng, the Builder, who had engineered the second building of the Wall when the Wastelands began to encroach on the Chinese Empire; the moving of the original foundations one hundred miles to the north, the astonishing task of transporting thousands of stones from the quarries of the north, the reinforcing of the stone with iron, the journey across the great plains, to bring the news to the Russian Empire and to teach them how to build a wall of their own. Marya thinks of all the men who gave their lives to build the walls. If not for their sacrifice, would the blight have spread to Beijing and to Moscow and far beyond? Would there be horrors prowling the countryside, slinking into the cities by night? They slow to a complete halt directly underneath the tower, a huge arch of stone rising above them. And further above still will be guards stationed on the watchtower—ten looking toward China, and ten toward the Wastelands. She knows they wear iron helmets over their masks, hammered into the faces of dragons and lions, to say to anything that approaches—We too have predators here.

But Marya has heard the soldiers from the city garrisons tell of visions and nightmares; returnees from the Wall who tell of voices in the night and inexplicable fevers. “I believe they say that it is haunted, the Wall barracks,” says the Countess. “Ah, the garrison ghost.” The merchant smiles. “I too have heard these stories.” His Russian is fluent, though tinged, thinks Marya, with a trace of the roughness of the Moscow textile markets. “Of course, the Trans-Siberia Company won’t approve,” he goes on. “A ghost is certainly not modern enough for them, and I’m sure it refuses to pay rent. Ah…” He pauses, then nods toward the other end of the carriage. “As if they were waiting for their cue…” Marya follows his gaze to where two dark-suited figures have entered, one European, one Chinese, stopping to shake hands with some of the men and bow stiffly to the ladies. One turns his head toward her, light glinting from his spectacles, and she feels a roaring begin in her ears.

Merchants of probability,” he goes on, with a little smile. The Countess raises her eyebrows. “And what do you mean by this?” “I believe their official title is consultant, but they are money men—advising the Company when to buy and sell; brokering deals and so on. They keep their beady eyes on what the ladies are painting their lips with in Beijing, what the gentlemen are drinking in the salons of Paris. They deal in what future they believe the train will conjure into being.” “How fascinating,” says the Countess. “And there was I, thinking that we passengers are the most precious goods onboard.”

It is one thing to sign a piece of paper when you are standing safely in the First Class waiting room, but quite another to think about it when on the train itself. The passenger travels mindful of the risks. It is the passenger’s duty to inform the train’s doctor should they feel unwell at any point in the journey. The Trans-Siberia Company takes no responsibility for illness, injury, or loss of life sustained when on the train. No responsibility, she thinks. How clear that is.

And now these men, these Crows are introducing the train’s doctor, and he is speaking of the affliction they call Wastelands sickness—of symptoms and signs. She is familiar with them from Rostov’s book—they may start with a lack of vigor, a feeling of lassitude, then develop into hallucinations. The afflicted may be convinced they are pursued, or that they must immediately exit the train. They may forget themselves, their name, their purpose for being on the train at all. Although they may be brought back to themselves, with prompt treatment, not all are so fortunate. There are no physical signs of the sickness; it is more insidious than that—a slipping of the mind, Rostov calls it. “And what are we to do if we notice any of these symptoms in someone else?” asks a small woman who sits gripping her husband’s hand and fidgeting with the pearls around her neck. “Then it is your duty to report it to me just the same, for the safety of the train,” says the doctor, gravely, causing the woman to grip her husband’s hand even tighter.

A shudder through the carriage, and as they all turn to look outside the masked soldiers come to life, stepping backward as one, like clockwork toys. They raise their hands in salute, and then they are lost in the clouds of steam. With a jolt, the train begins to move again and they are out from under the Wall, emerging slowly into a fortified enclosure where tall poles stand, lanterns hung from their tops. To one side, a huge water clock. This is the Vigil ground. The woman with the pearls gives a frightened squeak and flutters her fan in front of her face. Other passengers are turning away. Marya forces herself to look. “Would it really happen?” The Countess’s voice is loud in the silence. “The sealing of the train, I mean.” Vera’s lips are almost white. Someone drops a glass. The Company men did not mention the Vigil in their speech, Marya realizes. Perhaps they feel that some things are better unspoken. Besides, it was made more than clear in the waivers they signed—surely every passenger is thinking now of the day and night they must spend at the Russian Wall before their journey would be safely over; or of Rostov’s words, simple and to the point: If after this time there is found to be nothing growing, either on the outside or the inside of the train, it will be allowed to pass through the gates. And if a trace is found of Wastelands life? Then the train will be sealed. All inside will sacrifice themselves for the good of the Empire.

picking up instead one of Alexei’s penny-dreadfuls from the flea-market in Moscow, and preparing to lose herself in the story of the pirate queen and the sea monsters. She moves the lamp closer, and startles as the shadows in the far corners of the roof space waver. “Don’t be fanciful,” she mutters. “Fanciful thoughts lead to dangerous thoughts,” they are told on the train. But she turns the lamp up higher, anyway, against the darkness. —And the darkness moves, quiet as a whisper. Weiwei freezes. The seconds pass. Perhaps she imagined it. This is what the first night can do—unsettle the mind, unleash its worst fears. You cannot trust yourself on the first night. It is not good to be alone. She starts to let herself uncoil. And the darkness turns, and turns into a face, pale and framed by a deeper darkness. Two inky eyes stare, unblinking. “Who’s there?” she calls out, feeling foolish, poised for a kitchen boy to jump out at her, shrieking with laughter before running back to tell the others how he made the child of the train scream. She has done enough hiding and pouncing herself to know that among the younger crew you are measured by the steadiness of your nerves, your ability to meet a sudden, hideous, masked face with a blank, unimpressed “Good evening”; to not cry out if your bare feet should touch something crawling and damp in your bunk. So she stays still, stares back. A long moment stretches out, congeals. Her breathing sounds unnaturally loud and there is a ringin...

Outside, beneath a pale-blue sky, the grasslands are unfurling into a shimmering, uncertain horizon. They look innocent, empty of everything, even shadows. Be careful, Rostov warns the cautious traveller; no landscape is innocent. If your mind begins to wander, turn away from the window. But his own mind had wandered in the end, hadn’t it? He had become an embarrassment, a man living in twilight. His family had tried to take the book out of circulation, but of course this had only cemented its popularity. Poor Valentin Pavlovich, where did you end up? Drowned in the Neva, some of the stories say, or in a poor house, or drunk in the gutter, still travelling the Wastelands in his mind. “Madam, excuse me…” Someone is touching her shoulder. She starts, looks up, confused. A young Chinese man is standing beside her, his hair a little long, poking out messily from beneath his cap. “I knocked,” he says in Russian, “but no one answered, and then I saw you were disappearing.” No, not a man, a young woman, a girl. She stands back and rubs her nose, and Marya wonders if she has fallen asleep and into one of those dreams where meanings slip away. “Disappearing?” “It’s what we say when someone … when they look like their mind is wandering. We have to bring them back.” The young woman’s tone is abrupt, though it might be down to her Russian, which is rough-edged and unplaceable and much older than she is, and as Marya starts to gather together her thoughts she realizes who this must be—...

“Thank you for your concern,” Marya says, careful to keep her expression blank. “I will be more aware from now on.” Though the old Marya has disappeared already, of course. A careful, deliberate vanishing. Perhaps this new Marya will find it too easy now to disappear, while she is still new, unfinished. While she is untethered from the present. “There is a trick,” the girl goes on, rather diffidently. “If you want to know it. It’s better than the things they tell you in the guidebooks.” “Yes, please,” replies Marya. “I would be most grateful.” “You should keep something bright with you,” says Weiwei. “Something bright and hard that catches the light, like a piece of glass.” If she notices Marya tense she makes no sign of it, but takes out a small marble from her pocket and holds it up to the window. The sun catches a swirl of blue glass caught inside it. “It’s the brightness that matters. People say that you should take something sharp and prick yourself with it, but I think what you really need is something that’s sharp on your eye.” She moves the marble and the light dances across and through it and Marya feels her chest clench. The aching familiarity of it. “It brings you back,” says the girl. “I don’t know why.” “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.” “But not everyone agrees with me. Lots of people don’t.” Weiwei purses her lips. “They say iron is bet...

“I wonder if I can ask you a question,” Marya says, suddenly, and Weiwei turns back, but perhaps there is something in Marya’s tone that puts the girl on guard, because she thinks she sees alarm flit across her face. She tries to keep her voice light. “Were you on the previous crossing? One has heard so many stories, you see, and of course, it is hard not to be curious … Is it true what they say, that you really remember nothing?” Though she says it with a little smile, this time there is no mistaking Weiwei’s look of anxiety. “If you’d like to ask any questions, please speak to the Company representatives, who will be happy to speak to you,” says the girl, in the manner of someone reading from memorized instructions. “Of course,” says Marya. “I understand.” But before she leaves, the girl hesitates. “I’m sorry,” she says, in a voice that sounds more her own. “I … I just can’t remember.”

She will be sly, and watchful, and all the things her mother taught her not to be. “Don’t stare, child, your eyes will fall out of your head … A lady doesn’t listen at keyholes … A lady doesn’t ask so many questions.” But Marya has always watched, and listened. She takes out her journal. As a young girl she had filled her pages with observations of the people around her; her family’s unguarded words, the sparks of her grandmother’s wit, the looks passed between adults. She had begun to understand that what people said and what they meant were not always the same thing.

But the atmosphere of the library carriage is soothing; the smell of the books, the thick green carpet muffling the relentless sound of the rails, the inviting depths of the armchairs. The only other occupant of the carriage is an elderly steward, sitting beneath a large engraving of the train’s route. Grey examines the bookshelves. He notes with approval the selection of volumes on natural history, mostly English and French, and he quickly searches, as he does upon entering any bookshop or library, for the volume that bears his own name. Yes, here, on a lower shelf—On the Forms and Classifications of Mimicry in the Natural World. He picks it up to feel its solidity, the weight of all those hours lying unmoving on the grass to observe the bees in his garden and to prove, for the first time, that some were not bees at all but syrphidae, hoverflies—the weak taking on the guise of the strong, the mimicking of a more perfect form. This 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. He had been praised, lauded, invited to leave his Yorkshire cottage and to lecture in London and Cambridge. He closes his eyes and remembers the feeling of those rooms, hushed with expectation; that eager attention upon him. Then he opens the book to the engraving of his name and sees that someone has defaced it with scribbled words—A holy fool. He slams it shut. When he spies Girard’s tr...

In half-waking dreams the train had carried him far into the Wastelands before stopping amidst a vast ocean of gently swaying grass. There had been a door that had opened at his touch, and he had stepped out into a silence and a peace that he knew to be God-given; insects humming in complex harmonics, majestic birds slowly circling in the air, and around him, a thousand beating wings. Eden, he had thought. Its profusion of forms the key to the wonders of Creation. When his fever had eased, and he was able to sit up in bed, the doctors insisted that he must take better care of himself. He agreed, eagerly. He would treat his body and his mind with care, he promised, because they were gifts from God, and because a new certainty now burned within him. The Wastelands were not simply a means to an end, he realized; not just a danger to be endured, but an opportunity. Over the next weeks, as he convalesced, he submerged himself in as much scholarly research on the Wastelands as he could find. Of course, much of it was the work of the Society, whose amateurish methods were all too apparent—a mere matter of speculation, for the most part; poorly referenced articles, and letters from rural clergymen. But more scientifically rigorous data was simply not available. Of course there had been expeditions, in the early days of the changes, far into the interior. It was human nature, after all—the desire to map, to collect, to understand. But none of the explorers ever returned, and soon a...

What he had come to believe, explained Grey to Alexei, was that within the Wastelands he would find proof of his theory of mimicry—that within all things there is a striving toward a more perfect form. It was this striving that was behind the changes. The Wastelands, he explained, trying to keep his language simple so that the engineer would understand, can be understood in only one way—as a vast canvas for the illustration of God’s teaching. A new Garden of Eden.

Couldn’t he see the contribution he could make? That together, they could change the understanding of the world. “Our names will be remembered,” he had said to the engineer. Isn’t that what everyone wanted? To not be forgotten. To be more than a line in a ledger, the sum total of your life adding up to little more than the strength you wasted to make other men rich.

“Look! What’s that?” At the opposite window the young widow makes no attempt to lower her voice. Grey sighs in exasperation, but of course cannot help but look. A pale-pinkish outcrop of rock, he thinks, at first, just beside the track, but it is moving—no, its surface is moving, as if it is alive with … He stands abruptly, and strides to the window where the widow is pressing her hands to the glass. “It is a train,” she whispers. No, thinks Grey, it was a train, the shapes of its engine and carriages, though overturned and decayed, still recognizable. But now it is something else, beneath the lurching, scuttling mass of crab-like creatures, a whole colony of the things, their pale bodies clambering over one another so that the wreck seems oddly alive. “It’s best to try not to look,” says the steward. “Or if you can’t help yourself, keep hold of something while you do.” “What happened to it?” Grey wraps his fingers around the iron crucifix he keeps inside his breast pocket, next to his heart. The longer he looks at the wreck the more he thinks there is an order of sorts to the creatures’ movements, like a hive of bees that revolve around their queen. “The first crossings weren’t always successful. There were accidents, derailments … And they had to just leave the engines there, of course, and now, well…” “How do you bear it?” The widow’s voice is unsteady. “Working here, being forced to see it. How do you keep coming back?” The steward scratches his chin but he doesn’t loo...

There have been other crossings where her memories were muddled and unreliable. Once a sleeping sickness came over the whole train; passengers laying down their heads on their dinner plates, crew members asleep at their posts. For days it was only the stokers who stayed awake, feeding the insatiable engine. The doctor hypothesized to the Captain that the heat protected them from whatever afflicted the rest of the train. But the rumors among the crew were that the Wastelands knew. It kept the stokers awake because they fed the train, and the train is as hungry as the Wastelands. Like knows like. “An affinity, that’s what it is,” said Anya Kasharina, who inclines toward the mystical—though she would never say it within earshot of the Crows. The sleepers on that journey had all shared the same dreams. They had walked in the snow without leaving tracks behind them. They had been watched by eyes in the dark. On another crossing, the inhabitants of the train had been taken over by odd compulsions, drawing pictures on the walls of remarkable creatures that they swore they had never seen. The Company had worked hard to ensure the stories did not get out. They dealt swiftly with crew members found to be speaking out of turn. But this last crossing had been different. Do you really remember nothing? Only an absence where the memories should be. And then, as if waking up from a dreamless sleep, to find they had arrived at the Wall and the Vigil yard; to find every mirror on the train...

There is a damp feel to the air, despite the heat. Gone is the customary stillness, replaced by the feeling that movement has just stopped, that something is waiting to happen. Her muscles tense. She feels Dima go still, his claws digging through her uniform into her skin. His ears flick back and his nose twitches. And then he begins to growl; a deep, warning noise that seems to rise up from his belly. Slowly, she sets the cat down. “What’s that?” she whispers to him. “What do you smell?” All the fur on his arched back is standing up, and his ears are flattened against his head. He is as disinclined as she is to go further into the shadows. She is the child of the train—she is not frightened of anything. She doesn’t need to run to the Professor like she did when she was small. If there is a bandit here she will expose him. A stowaway is no better than a thief. A stowaway must face train justice. She moves forward, slowly, holding the lamp in front of her, watching the pool of light grow. There is definitely something there, at the far end of the carriage, where a few old barrels still sit. There is a darker shadow that holds itself poised, a tension in its bearing just like Dima’s, as if it were a cornered animal. “You can come out,” she says in Chinese. “I … have bread, and water. If you’re hungry … I can help…” Silence. She repeats the words, in Russian this time. “It’s got seeds in it, the bread … It was made fresh yesterday.” The shadows are still, they are nothing mor...

The girl regards her, unblinking, and Weiwei has to admit to being a little impressed—she has never been out-stared before. Finally, she takes the bread out and the girl snatches it from her hand then scrambles further back into the roof space. When Weiwei raises the lantern she sees a kind of nest. “Are you alone?” It is the first thing she can think of to ask. All the other questions will not put themselves into words in her head. The stowaway nods, the expression on her face unreadable. “Are you—” She stops. It is all too far removed from her expectations to make sense. A man with a knife and threats on his tongue can be understood. Danger that comes dressed in a blade and a snarl can be faced and fought. But this—a girl, alone, this is a different kind of danger. There is a line here that she must not cross.

She is so deep in thought that a thump at the window beside her makes her spit out a train curse and jump backward, colliding with a passing kitchen boy. “Crawlers!” he yells, pointing to the window, where a creature the size of a dining plate clings to the iron bars, its legs tapping wildly at the glass. A shell covers its body but not its pale-pink underside, from which mouths gape, opening and closing at irregular intervals. The kitchen boy grabs Weiwei’s arm as another one falls onto the bars, and another, until the whole window is a mass of tapping legs and gaping mouths. “They must be on the roof…” Though they are usually only on the wrecks, never on the train itself. “I’ll call for the gunner!” the kitchen boy shouts gleefully, scampering away toward the speaking apparatus. Weiwei takes a step closer but the sheer number of creatures has caused them to lose their grip on the bars and they are spinning away from the train, their legs curled into their shells. Moments later she hears gunshot and other pale bodies fall from the roof, clattering against the glass. By the time she reaches the sleeping carriage the under-stewards are betting noisily on the numbers falling from each of the windows. “Want to take your chances, Zhang?” one calls to her, but she shakes her head and clambers up to her bunk. It is the image of the creatures at the windows making her uneasy, she thinks, not the stowaway in her space beneath the roof. But she can’t helping thinking of Rostov’s wo...