The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

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...