The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

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...