---Chapter 6
Just then a low, grating voice came to them through the dark. “Where are you children going tonight? Don’t you know that the dark is dangerous?”
At the sound of a human voice, Amber relaxed her guard just a little. “Yes, sir. We are going home.”
Her words were answered with only a low, menacing chuckle.
“I don’t think it’s human!” Lenny exclaimed in a low tone, “quick, across the street to the next lamp.”
He grabbed her arm and gave it a tug in the right direction. They both started running across the pavement at an angle, while behind them the voice grated mockingly, “run, children, run! My angels of royal darkness will stop you. Don’t think you can skip from one world to the other freely, forever. The master doesn’t like it...”
They burst into the light of a lamppost, before plunging into the darkness again. Lenny looked back over his shoulder once to see the figure standing in the glow of the light, a mass of tentacle-like tubes gleaming on his shoulders and flame reflecting from the white mask on his face. If it was a mask at all. It fit so snugly it could have been his face itself.
In one hand he held a cane, pressed to the ground as if supporting part of his weight. The other hand pointed towards the running pair in an imperious gesture. beyond him, in the shadows, strange forms were starting to take place. A glint of metal and swish of soft blackness was all that he could make out before having to turn back to running.
“Is he still after us?” Amber asked grimly as they pounded down the sidewalk between overhanging, unlit buildings.
“I don’t know about him, but something is,” Lenny replied. He could hear, with his permanently-heightened sound receivers, things swishing and clinking stealthily through the night behind them.
“Do you know any way to shake them?” he added, as Amber turned suddenly down a different street, beckoning him to follow.
“I have an idea...there’s a blind alley here that isn’t so blind.”
Trusting her knowledge of the city above his own, Lenny followed as she darted down a smaller side-street, then into a narrow, musty-smelling alley. The night sky was almost shut out in this space, only a tiny strip of dark lavender showing up above. Amber slowed, feeling her way as she muttered, “I’ve only been this way once. But hopefully that thing never has.”
Lenny stood still as she felt around, listening for the pursuit. He could not hear anything now...except for a faint clicking noise above them. Then a scrape like iron across tiles. Jerking his head up, he caught a glimpse of something perched on the rooftop above them, a dark shape with glittering red dots as eyes, before it flung itself down at him.
“Watch out!” he cried, flipping the dagger upright in his hands like a spike. The shape plunged down on him, darkness expanding around it like half-spread wings. Something struck across his face, a thin metal rod, leaving a lash of cold fire behind. Then he was struck by a heavy weight, which made him stumble back against the building behind him and almost fall. His vision went black as the shape fell on top of him, while he struggled to keep the dagger upright. The creature, whatever it was, scrabbled at him with blunt claws, letting out a screech. He heard a solid thump as if the beast had been struck by something from behind. Lenny found could not hold up the weight any more and released the dagger, thrusting the whole mass away from him. It felt velvety soft at some places, sickeningly damp at others. And along all the edges was the cold hardness of metal.
The creature fell away unto the ground, screeching once more as it writhed in the darkness before going still. Activating his night-vision for another brief span, Lenny saw the scene frozen in fuzzy green light.
A...thing that was halfway between human and a bat lay on the ground, its face a mask of steel with one, probe-like tooth in front and its eyes fading from glittering red to black. Its furry chest was damp with what must be blood where Amber’s dagger had struck into it. The soft, leathery wings on its shoulders were framed in narrow rods of dimly-gleaming metal, with spikes all along the upper edge. Instead of hands or feet, it had paws and claws like a dog’s, stiff and blunt. Lenny could still feel where they had rubbed at his arm, especially where it had scraped the unhealed marks of the little rat’s teeth.
Amber was standing nearby, looking pale, with her gun held reversed in her hands like a club.
“Lenny, are you alright? What is that thing?”
Flicking off the night vision so as to save his strength, Lenny took a deep breath of the musty alley-way air. “I’m okay. It’s some sort of flying creature, I think. We’d better hurry on our way, before others find us.”
“If it can fly...” But Amber did not finish her statement. Lenny heard her scrabble around in the darkest corner of the alley for a moment, before there was the sound of an iron grating being moved.
“It’s going to be dark in here, I’m afraid.”
“Better than these ‘angels of royal darkness’.” Lenny gave the dead figure a kick, before stooping and feeling his way blindly into the corner with Amber. There was a low water drain here, running under the wall which blocked off the end of the alleyway. Amber had moved a grating in front of it and now urged Lenny to go through first, before following and pulling the grate back into place. Inside, the young man had to get onto his hands and knees, crawling with his hair brushing the roof. It was covered in foul-smelling slime. He gritted his teeth and tried to ignore it. Behind him, Amber made a small sound almost like laughter. “I’m sorry, I forgot that it was so foul in here. But at least it gets us through.”
“How long is it?” Lenny asked, holding one hand out in front of him. At the same moment his fingers brushed up against a second grating and he could perceive the slightly lighter sky outside, with the shapes of buildings silhouetted against it.
It only took a few shoves to move the grating aside, after which they both came squirming out of it onto a street. The wall behind them was tall and made of bricks, appearing almost impassable from either side. But the little, low water drain had taken them safely through. Now there was no sound of pursuit directly behind them. And looking around, Lenny recognized the street they were on as the one which he had traversed earlier with Jax, before reaching the purple spot on the wall. It was not far to the park now.
They started walking towards it, neither speaking for a short space of time. Eventually Amber looked over at him, her face a pale oval in the gloom. “You’re not from this world, are you?”
“What do you mean?” Lenny parried, feeling a small spark of alarm.
“I’ve been thinking about it all evening. It simply makes sense,” Amber explained in a direct, but not entirely sure voice, “first, in the library, you spoke of traveling between dimensions with ease, almost as if you had done it before. In fact, you said something about 'the machine’ using power from a central core, didn’t you? But it’s not just that. You can see in the dark. I didn’t know what that creature looked like, nor that the old man was not...a regular human until we saw him in the light. Besides, there’s something odd about how you talk. At first I just thought that you were foreign, but now...”
She ended with a small, sharp in-drawn of breath, letting him fill in the last words.
They walked in silence for another space, before Lenny decided to be honest with her. She was the sort of person Jax was looking for, intelligent and not entirely closed to the ideas of teleportation and other dimensions. In fact, she seemed interested in them, even studied in the theories of such things.
“Yes, I’m not from this world,” he admitted, “but its not that I’m an alien or anything weird like that. I mean, my world is just a reflection of yours. A parallel universe. It has different technology, but I’m still human and we speak the same language. You see, I met this guy called Jax--”
“Perfect!” a cheerful voice interrupted him, just as a footstep was heard behind. A hand descended on both Lenny and Amber’s shoulders, as they stopped and looked around in surprise. Jax’s bright hair and triangular face appeared right behind them, almost between them, as he chattered on, “you’re just introducing me! I always know the best times to show up and join my friends. Now, you were about to tell her how clever and handsome I was, right? And how, with the help of my first pet electronics nerd Grummage, I built a Di-jump machine?”
Lenny was caught between being furious and too glad to see his companion to care. “Jax! There are dangerous things out tonight.”
“What night isn’t there, anymore?” The traveler was still grinning. “That’s one of the reasons that we’re trying to stop the corrupt power core. Anyway, what’s your friend’s name?”
After the introduction, Amber said quietly, “so you invented a way to shift between worlds?”
“With the help of Grummage, an old pal of mine who is too afraid to try out his own machine,” Jax began explaining how he had discovered the power strands and started jumping through worlds, as they started walking towards the park again. They had almost reached the bushes where Raggsy had been left by the time he had told all of his adventures up to leaving Lenny’s world. Though much of it he had explained to Lenny before, he seemed to be inexhaustibly happy to brag about his adventures.
But when they reached the bushes, the thought struck Lenny that some people had an aversion to rodents and it might be best to warn their new friend about what she was about to meet.
“Er, Amber,” he broke in on Jax’s soliloquy, “our friend Raggsy should be around here somewhere. Now, he isn’t exactly human--”
“No, he’s a rat!” Jax finished grandly, pushing aside some branches for her to go through. On the other side they found a small clearing in the bushes, lit by the glow of a tiny fire of dry twigs. Raggsy leaned over it, roasting something that was spitted on a stick and looked suspiciously like a dead lizard. His snout was thrown in sharp outline by the flames, which danced up into his dark eyes and picked out the curled funnel of his ears.
Lenny braced himself for a strong reaction. It came, but not in the way he had expected. Amber drew in a sharp breath, then let it out in a girlish laugh of delight. “A giant rat!” Tripping over to him, she reached out and began scratching him behind one ear, in a gap of his helmet. “Oh, he’s so sweet! Does he talk?”
Raggsy was considerably embarrassed by her sudden appearance, though he seemed just a little pleased as well. His ears turning red up to the tip, he sat up straighter and scuffled a paw in the leaves. “Er, uh, gosh. I didn’t know that I could effect anyone like that! Heh, nice ta meet’cha ma’am. You sure are kind to a poor old Ratperson.”
“So you do talk.” Amber crouched down across from him, smiling. “sorry, I thought that you were more of an animal than a people.”
“That’s alright. You can do it again anytime!” The Ratperson avowed, scooting over to make her room. “Have a seat and sometin’ to eat, missy.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Lenny interposed. He was surprised at the ease with which Amber had accepted the idea of other worlds and their strange inhabitants, but it was better than if she had been revolted by them.
“There are some sort of creatures after us. The night is dangerous on this world, too. We have to find shelter somewhere safe.”
“There goes Lenny again,” Jax quipped, “making sure that everyone is ‘safe’.”
Lenny felt the strong urge to roll his eyes again, but fought it off. Amber was straightening up, nodding in agreement with him, so at least one of the others wasn’t mocking his efforts. And when he looked, Raggsy was hastily throwing pawfuls of damp earth on the fire. “I thought that I smelled evil t’ings about. Let’s get goin’.”
“You can come to my home tonight,” Amber volunteered, “though it may not be what you are expecting.”
“Anything will do,” Jax gallantly thrust his arm under hers and they began to march out of the park in the direction she indicated. As they walked, Raggsy sidled up next to Lenny. He was munching loudly on something, but paused for a moment to whisper, “she’s quite a gal, huh?”
Lenny turned his head aside to avoid the unpleasant smell of his breath, chuckling softly, “I’m glad you like her. She knows some about the sort of thing we are doing, too.”
They walked down the silent paths of the park, stepping out through the gate into a patch of light by a lamp. But they were not alone. As soon as they were in the light a ring of silent figures strode out into it in a half-circle before them. Strolling into the center came the man with the white mask, cane swirling around in one gloved hand. The figures around him were made up of the flying creatures Lenny and Amber had run in to earlier and another type of being that was more like a phantom. A purple robe trailed ethereally to the ground, parted in front to show only darkness. Its sleeves had amorphous hands of orange energy dripping from the end of them, long and thin. Wings of magenta light sprouted from each shoulder, flickering flames in the darkness. Their heads were tall and narrow with faces like a grasshopper’s.
“Foolish children,” the masked man growled, coming into the center of the light. “You thought we would let you go so easily. You have angered the master greatly, meddling in his secrets. Especially you, World-jumper.”
He indicated Jax with a flick of his hand. All four of the companions were frozen in surprise, staring around them at the creatures illumined in the lamplight. Jax had released Amber’s arm and stepped forward just a half-pace when he was named, frowning at their taunter.
The masked man was looking only at him now. “World-jumper, you can not go on any further. I, Mendo Drann, will stop you. The master wants you, oh yes. The master wants you dead!”
The last word was said as a shout. At the same time the man dropped his cane, holding his gloved hands up to the sky. The gloves peeled away on their own, bursting into shreds of white fabric. Underneath, expanding outwards, was a pair of golden metal claws. Mendo’s arms were made of jointed tubes like those on his back, lapped in rings of metal and as flexible as tentacles. In a terrible show of power, the masked man thrust his arms downwards through the pavement of the road, cracking it with a noise like a gunshot. Jax jumped at the sound, Amber gasped and Lenny reached for his electronic reserves. But they were empty, used up on fighting creatures from Raggsy’s world.
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The next moment the arms of Mendo Drann had burst through the stone beside Jax, coiling upwards like a pair of snakes. Boa constrictors, they wrapped around the traveler, binding his arms and tightening around his throat. He let out a cry of fear, fighting to shove them off. But they were as strong as steel, as sinewy as a gorilla’s arm.
Amber and Raggsy immediately jumped forward, trying to pull them off of Jax while shouting at Mendo to let him go. Lenny realized immediately that this would be futile.
Running forward silently, he knotting his two fists together into a club. All of Mendo’s attention was fixed on Jax. Lenny ran up beside him and swung his hands with all of his enhanced strength at the side of the masked man’s head.
They hit with a thump which sent a shock all through them, making his fingers go numb. Mendo straightened, arms relaxing on Jax, and then collapsed without a sound onto the hard pavement. He lay there like limply, a puppet with its strings cut.
Lenny looked up, expecting the surrounding creatures to be charging down upon them. But as Mendo fell unconscious they stood still, flickering like candles about to go out. They seemed frozen in place, as thin and formless as ghosts. Lenny stared distrustfully at them for a moment, before deciding that they were not going to move. Turning back to his friends, he saw that Amber and Raggsy were pulling the limp tentacles of metal away from Jax, who had fallen to his knees from lack of breath. Once the tentacles were freed from him, he drew in a shuddering breath and stood up, looking at his friends with a dazed expression. “Thanks. I thought that I was a goner.”
“We’re not out’a trouble yet,” Raggsy pointed out. Mendo’s claws had retracted, somehow regaining their human-shaped gloves at the end of his arms. Now he was groaning and twitching, while the creatures around them slowly became more solid again.
“We have to make it to my train!” Amber exclaimed, “we’ll be safe there. Come on!”
Lenny hurried over to grab Jax’s arm, helping propel him along. Sticking close together, the four companions started off once again into the dark, this time at a more hurried pace. Behind them, Mendo sat up, a hand to the side of his head. The creatures became fully tangible, shifting about and turning their heads after the escaping travelers.
“Don’t just stand there! Stop them!” Mendo shouted angrily. His voice echoed after the escaping group, spurring them on to greater efforts. The winged creatures and phantoms took to the air in a swooping confusion, wings thundering like the sound of a flock of pigeons taking off.
“Not far now!” Amber panted, leading the way. Lenny gritted his teeth, feeling weariness starting to drag at his limbs. He had used so much energy, feeding his cybernetics as well as his natural functions that he was starting to feel weak. But he had to fight against it, helping Jax along as they ran.
“I’m alright now,” Jax told him, breaking free, “thanks, man, now we’re even.”
Together, they burst out of a street onto the embankment of a train track, the cinders crunching and rolling under their feet. This was a spur of the main line, running to a stop a few hundred yards away from them. Parked on it, backed into the spur, was a short train.
In the lead sat a small steam engine, boiler painted black while the cab and coverings were a coppery red. A lantern hung from its front, dimly lighting up the area. It also had a tender hooked on, like a small boxcar painted black. Behind it, coupled to it, was a passenger car with fancy wainscoting and dark blue trim. Fastened to this, in the rear, was a caboose that had a red lantern hanging from its back gleaming like a vehicle’ tail-light. All of these were fastened together not only by their couplers, but by a catwalk of flexible rope and planking on the side. Underneath the planking hung bundles of tubes and lines, strapped to the rope bridges.
Lenny took all this in with a moment’s glance, also noticing the fact that the engine was steaming faintly where it sat.
“I’ll get it fired up and moving,” Amber shouted, heading for the engine. “Raggsy can help me. Lenny, Jax, get to the turrets on top!”
Her hand pointed to the roof of the passenger car, outlined darkly against the lantern light. On top of the coach was some sort of low turrets, silhouetted against the nighttime sky. The two young men pounded up the embankment, scrambling up a set of steps onto the catwalk. Behind them, the sound of wings flapping through the air was becoming louder, accompanied by fearsome screeches.
“Up here.” Jax started climbing a ladder fastened to the side of the train car, his black coat flapping behind him. Lenny was right on his heals, as the sound of wings grew ominously close. Below them, the engine started steaming louder, puffs of energy hissing out into the air as the engineers fired it. Up on top of the coach roof, there was a pair of semi-armored cockpits with chairs in them fastened to the woodwork. There was also a large gun in each one, of the sort called a Gatling-gun, with many barrels set in a circle that shot one after the other like a machine gun. Lenny recognized them from history documentaries he had watched before.
The guns were fastened on swivels in front of the chairs. Lenny jumped in one cockpit, while Jax scrambled into the other. Neither knew how to load and fire a Gatling-guns, but they learned with surprising swiftness. Feeding the belt of bullets into the top, Lenny slammed the cover closed and gripped the trigger. Purple and black shapes swooped towards them through the air, glowing hands and dark claws outstretched.
“Fire!” Jax screamed as his gun barked to life. Lenny pulled his trigger, turning the gun on its swivel to angle up into the air. He was surprised by the recoil when it started firing, the whole thing shaking and vibrating his hands wildly. He had no time to aim carefully: he just pointed the rotating barrels at the dim forms of creatures and hoped that the bullets were going that way as well. The belt of ammo rattled past him, while the gun jerked out lead. The smell of burning barrel lube filled the air. The coldness of the trigger ate into his hand.
It was hard to say how long they stayed there, shooting at whatever came. It probably was not long, though it seemed like hours. The bullets whipped up into the sky, while every once in a while a strange-shaped body slammed to the roof of the car and slid away onto the ground, or fell directly into the cinders with a crunch. Lenny gritted his teeth, trying not to think too much about what was going on. It felt so crazy, to be suddenly thrown into a gunner’s chair with an ancient form of weapon in it, and be shooting at the creatures which were chasing them. If he had thought too much, he would have stopped in amazement and horror at what he was doing. The moment was both ridiculous and frightening at once. It was best not to consider the moment too deeply.
Finally the train started moving forward, the engine’s cylinders thumping loudly as steamed jetted out of the stack. The siderods shoved forward and back, turning the spoke wheels around. Gradually they gathered momentum until they were flying along the tracks, wheels clicking over the joints and engine thundering. The wind whipped Lenny’s short, pale hair, making his face feel like a cold mask. His hat had long since been lost, probably when he was attacked by the first flying creature. From the other gun pit he heard Jax exclaim, “we’re leaving them behind!”
Looking up, Lenny saw the purple and black shapes of the flying creatures, suspended in the air behind them. They seemed to be trying to fly closer, to no avail. The train was too swift for them to follow.
But no one noticed the one dark creature which had swooped down and clung to the catwalk as soon as they started moving. And no one saw it crawl slowly under the catwalk, between the wheel and into the underside of the passenger car.
Once there was no more danger from the creatures, Lenny and Jax fought the wind to crawl across the roof, back down the ladder. There, they found a door and hustled into the passenger car. Lenny discovered that he was shaking from excitement and fear. Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to calm down.
Amber and Raggsy soon joined them, having walked back along the bridge from the engine.
“Whew.” Jax wiped his forehead dramatically with a sleeve. “I think we’re safe now. What a lot of goons!”
“I don’t think they’ll catch us,” Amber agreed, “not with Sophia going at full speed. I just hope that no trains are coming the other way. This is not a scheduled departure for me.”
As she was talking, she had walked along the length of the car, turning up a series of gas lanterns hanging from the roof. Warm light filled the space, showing every nook and cranny,
“Sophia?” Lenny gave her a look, arching one eyebrow skeptically.
Amber blushed just a little. “My steam engine. That’s her name. Anyway, this is my workshop and living room, while the caboose is bedroom and kitchen.”
Along one side of the passenger car, all of the seats had been taken out and replaced with a long wooden bench. It was strewn with gears, wrenches, tubes and bits of junk which Lenny could not identify. But he did not try very hard at that moment. At the word ‘kitchen’ he had suddenly felt ravenously hungry. Which was not surprising, once he recalled that he had not eaten since breakfast at Raggsy’s place.
At the same time he thought it, Jax slapped a hand to his own stomach and moaned, “I’m starving! What’s going to be for dinner?”
And, though he had just been eating in the park not long before, Raggsy cried in a voice close to a shriek, “food!”
Which made Amber laugh as she replied, “I’ve got things for sandwiches in the caboose. Do you all want to go back there for a bite to eat?”
“More then one!” Jax told her.
There was no need for any other reply to this question. Sandwiches and milk sounded like a feast for returning knights, to them.
---
The next morning Lenny awoke to the soft, swaying feel of the train moving beneath him. He was laying on one of the passenger chairs on the port side of the car, which had been left intact when Amber built her workroom. Though the caboose had a pair of bunks in it, the menfolk had left it to Amber and retired to the coach for the night. There, chairs had been converted into beds, blankets pulled out from under them and a weary night’s sleep fallen in to.
Looking around in the morning, Lenny saw the gray light of predawn filtering in the glass windows which ran down each side of the car. The scenery outside was fields, farmhouses and grain silos, running smoothly past like water in a river. The train did not seem to be going as fast this morning as they had been the night before, as its rattling had smoothed to an even roll. It did not make Lenny feel sick in the least, it was so gentle, and when he stood up he found that walking around the car required little extra caution.
Raggsy was still asleep in the chair ahead of his, curled up with his tail grasped between his hands and coat hanging over the back of his chair. Beyond, in the next chair down, Jax was sprawled with his head thrown back and mouth hanging open as he slept. There were still faint dark marks on his throat from where Mendo’s arms had tried to strangle him, but otherwise he appeared to have recovered perfectly from the ordeal.
Hearing a door open, Lenny turned to see Amber walk in at the front of the car. She had on a wide apron of leather, pocked with scorch marks and scratches all across its surface. On her hands were thick gloves, which she was just starting to shuck off.
“Sophia is oil-burning,” Amber explained, lowering her tone when she saw that the others were still asleep. “But I still can’t help burning myself on the hot places near the controls, or when checking on the fire. That’s why I don’t usually wear a skirt: they light off much easier than leather breeches.”
“Makes sense.” Lenny rubbed his eyes, asking where he could find a drink of water. Amber directed him to a tank and tap in the caboose, while she began to awake the others with gentle shakes.
When Lenny returned a little while later, he found Jax and the engineer talking animatedly, the Di-jump set on the workbench before them.
“Lenny, come here,” Jax called him over, “we’ve just come up with a great idea. It’s revolutionary! A stroke of genius. Look, the Di-jump always has to be grounded on a piece of metal to work, right?”
Lenny nodded, bracing himself for whatever wild idea was coming.
“And we always have to be part of the circuit to go with it, so anything that is part of the circuit or touching something that is, will go with it, right? I mean, we don’t show up without our clothes on, you know.”
Lenny couldn’t help pulling a wry face. “Luckily, yes.”
“So if we hooked the Di-jump up to the train engine, why shouldn’t the whole train jump through dimensions with us?”
This took Lenny a few minutes to think through. He did not like speaking too quickly either for an idea or against it. It had taken him a whole day of intense thought to decide that he wanted cybernetics, when Dr. Devi had first offered to install them.
“How would we make sure that we were part of the circuit? The floor is wood. If we stand on it, we might not be considered 'part’ of the train, so we might not go with the Di-jump when it changed dimensions.”
Amber was lit up with excitement for the idea. “That’s true. If I understand right, we would have to be touching some of the metal on the train when it left, so that the mysterious energy of the power core could flow through us. I would be in the cab of course, where the floor is metal. But we would have to look for something metallic in here to touch or hold, so that the energy could go through us.”
“How would it flow back from the engine?” Lenny asked, “from what I’ve seen, a lot of the framework of these cars is wood, not metal.”
“Ah, but the train has tubing running from back to front,” she explained, “for the air brake system. It is made of metal, or wire-wrapped rubber. That should carry the energy through it. All we need to do is discover a way to touch the tubing comfortably when we are ready to travel.”
His mind put to a problem of electrical flow, Lenny moved over to pick up a spool of thick copper wire laying on the workbench nearby. “Okay, that’s easy. All we have to do is fasten this to the tube, run it through a window and fasten it to this rod that runs along the roof, here.”
He indicated the metal rod which was fastened beside the walkway, for people to hold to while they were walking if the train was moving unstably. Near it was the rope pull to put the brakes on.
“Then we just have to stand here holding it whenever we want to jump through worlds. But there is one other big question. Will that little Di-jump be able to take in enough power to transport the whole train, with us in it, through the dimensional barrier?”
“There’s only one way to find out. Try it!” Jax declared.
Lenny looked over towards Raggsy, who had been listening on the outside of the group. “What do you think?”
The Ratperson shrugged. “As long as we get breakfast first, I’m game. ‘sides, if the train comes with us, so does all the food in the icebox. Which is a good deal when you have four people to feed.”
Catching their enthusiasm, Lenny agreed to make the experiment. They hurried through breakfast, then began installing the Di-jump in the cab of the locomotive. To do this, they simply strapped it to the wall with plumber’s tape, then took one of Jax’s alligator clips (which fascinated Amber) and cut the clip off of it. Stripping the wires bare for a few inches, they soldered them to the thick metal on the oil tank near the grate.
As they worked, Amber told them how the tender held both thick, crude oil and water for the engine. The oil was sprayed into the firebox to burn and create the steam which made the train go. She showed them the levers nearby which controlled its flow and explained that the box of sand was to throw a shovelful into the grate once or twice a day.
“It helps clean out the flues and make everything work smoothly.”
Lenny listened intently to her explanations, interested by the workings of the locomotive. The technology in it was so much cruder than what he knew and took so much work just to get a simple result. But it felt more solid, too. The heavy, dark iron, slick, shiny brass and grainy, flexible wood all united to make something which would be difficult to damage by use, and easy to fix if it were harmed.
Amber also told them a little of how she had come to have her own, private train. It seemed that her father owned the railroad they were running on and had once used ‘Sophia’ as a locomotive for short runs between two cities. But on one of the runs it had derailed, falling into a gulch and becoming dented or broken at many places. Mr. Pyncheon had taken it out of the gulch and been about to scrap it, but Amber had begged to be given it to repair. Knowing his daughter’s ability with inventions, Mr. Pyncheon had given it to her, along with a broken-down passenger coach and a disused caboose later on. All three she had fixed up until they had won his approval, then she had put them on the rails.
Mrs. Pyncheon was against letting her take them on 'adventures’, but Amber had promised to send telegraphs from every city she stopped at, so that they would know she was safe.
“I guess they won’t hear from me again for awhile,” she said somberly, “I hope they don’t worry too much.”
Which made Lenny remember his own family and wonder if they knew why he had never came to visit on Sunday. Hopefully Mark had told them something, but not too much, so that they knew he had been forced to leave Belltoh suddenly. He had not forgotten them through carelessness.