The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

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...