Maxwell was wearing a new outfit straight from the train’s long-neglected lost and found box. The pants were bright green and several sizes too large. He had rolled them up four times at the hem, but they still felt baggy and cumbersome. The shirt fit better, but it read, “I ONLY WORK FOR KROGLINGS!” in bright green lettering.
“How do I look?” Maxwell said to IT.
IT’s sensor moved up, then down, then up again. “Compared to what?”
“Is it convincing? Will anyone think I’m human?”
“You don’t look un-human.”
“Right,” Maxwell said. Talking to the robot wasn’t helping his nerves. He looked down at his new clothes and tried to reassure himself they would hold up to scrutiny. “Is the shirt supposed to be funny?”
“That depends on how much you like kroglings,” IT replied.
At least Maxwell was confident about the boots. They were the one thing Marigold had brought herself. The black rubber boots fit well and were nearly identical to the pair that Marigold wore. They were certainly preferable to the possibility of getting tetanus from the floor of K’s train.
“What about his face? You’re going to have to do something about his face,” IT said. It swiveled around to look at Marigold.
Marigold had been discussing something in a hushed tone with K but cut off the conversation and walked over to Maxwell. She untied her headscarf and fastened it over the bottom part of his face.
“There,” she said to IT. “Better?”
“That’s it?”
“It’s good enough. There are plenty of things in the Backend that look almost human,” Marigold answered.
“If you say so, frog.”
IT lost interest in the conversation and returned to vacuuming and Marigold returned to her conversation. This left Maxwell to sit and worry about his flimsy disguise until the train finally came to a stop, and K announced their arrival.
“Hate to rush you all, but K2 and I have a stop to make over in neutrino engineering,” he said. “A client is taking the system outage as an opportunity to smuggle out some old generators.”
“Right, well, thank you for your help, K,” Marigold said.
“Anytime, and good luck little human.”
“Thanks,” Maxwell said. “Good luck with your, um, smuggling.”
Marigold and Maxwell headed for the door, but a beeping sound stopped them. They watched as IT attempted to cross the threshold, only to become stuck. Its wheels spun helplessly in place.
“What now?” Marigold said, looking back at IT.
“Could you give me a hand?”
Marigold sighed and bent down to grab the robot. “OK, back in the bag.”
“Hey, wait—” The canvas walls muffled the rest of IT’s protests.
They alighted from the train’s gangway connection. For Marigold it was a simple jump, but Maxwell lacked Marigold’s size and agility. He tried to follow behind but tripped and stumbled forward with enough momentum to send him hurdling toward the unguarded edge of the platform. Only Marigold saved him from a fall. With minimal effort she reached out with a single hand and grabbed the collar of his shirt. For a moment, he stared down into the heart of the Junction.
During Maxwell’s brief life, he had been prone to hyperbole. He had used words like massive, gargantuan, and enormous to describe everything from food portions to his credit card debt. For this reason, Maxwell felt as if he had no sufficient words to describe the size of what he saw. It extended so far in every direction that he could see no end, only a dense jungle of stacked and overlapping buildings connected by a lattice of stairs, escalators, and moving platforms. It was all, well, very big.
Marigold set Maxwell back on his feet and motioned for him to follow her down a steep, winding staircase. The stairs were endless, and Maxwell and Marigold descended, he noticed that none of them were held in place by anything. Much like the train tracks, the platform seemed free of gravity. The city around them was no different. All over the cavernous sprawl, train platforms hovered at different heights and train tracks looped in spirals to meet them. The city defied Maxwell’s understanding of physics or would have if he had any understanding to begin with.
Marigold seemed to notice the look of confusion on his face. “You remember what IT said about gravity. Well, since we generate the rules, we can also make them a bit more selective. Gravity is less of an omnipresent force and more of an applied characteristic. You’ll get used to it.”
“Can I float?”
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“I wouldn’t try it.”
They descended the stairs in silence for a while.
“What would happen?”
She looked over the edge and back at him. “My understanding was that long falls typically kill humans.”
“So, it’s only the stairs that are unaffected by gravity?”
Marigold shrugged.
After another pause, something occurred to Maxwell. “Wouldn’t I just end up back in the Spa? I mean, if that’s where humans go when they die . . .”
“No,” IT shouted from the bag. “Once you’re dead here, that’s it. Dead means gone.”
The thought of a long fall and a sudden gory stop made Maxwell more cautious, but caution was made difficult by the dizziness that Maxwell had been feeling since they stepped off the train. The city was not stable. It was not merely the trains that moved through the Junction, the Junction itself was moving. Each of the city’s immense blocks hugged thick iron rails. Some sat atop, encircling the rails at their base. Others dangled off the tracks with curved steel arms that protruded from the sides. Each contained buildings upon buildings, layered and arching over one another as if they were competing for attention. Hundreds of skyscrapers, apartments, and stores, and almost all of them were moving. Above and below, on all sides, walls of the city slid in and out of view, ascended into the featureless sky, or corkscrewed down into dim reaches below. The smaller trains, like the one that Maxwell and Marigold had just left, were weaving through the larger ones like bees in a hive.
“Is the entire city made up of moving parts?” Maxwell asked.
“They’re called leviathans, and they mostly run through the city’s upper levels. Usually, they move better than this though,” Marigold said.
It wasn’t hard to see what she meant. Some were stuttering along in short unpredictable spurts. Others moved much too fast or much too slow. One of the larger leviathans had crashed into a smaller unit in front of it, creating a loud grinding sound that didn’t stop until it had successfully shoved its rival out of earshot. The problems appeared to extend beyond the moving city blocks, too. Each of the countless screens hanging from the building surfaces was flickering and flashing, displaying static or cutting rapidly between endless images of impossible landscapes and horrifying monstrosities. The static hiss they gave off joined into a cacophony with distant alarms.
At the bottom of the stairs a glass box the size and shape of a phone box sat with its doors open. A braided metal cable dangled the box in place, but as Maxwell craned his neck, he could not see where it was attached. Its anchor point was swallowed in the jumble of shifting infrastructure overhead. Marigold seemed to expect him to get in, but he had his doubts that they would both fit inside. Marigold had no such qualms. She squeezed in beside him, forcing his frame flat against the glass panel at the back. He tried not to move or breathe too deeply as they descended at an uneven and occasionally dizzying speed.
Maxwell tried to ignore his heart beating faster and faster at the sight of this strange new world. He tried to focus on the details instead, but this only made things worse. Along a narrow walkway, a diversity of creatures beyond reckoning were making their way through the moving city. A few were obvious enough, mostly the ones that looked like animals. There were a couple of giant cats in conversation, an angry beaver in glasses shouting into a payphone, and an owl perched on a streetlight. However, the rest of the crowd defied the categories of classification available to Maxwell. One looked vaguely like a centaur but had the body of an ostrich rather than a horse. Another was a mass of cubes, with no discernible face or limbs. A particularly challenging creature appeared to be composed of overlapping and interlocking tongues. It ambulated by slobbering its way forward along the ground. Evidently, humanity had created and forgotten more gods and demons than it had remembered.
The elevator continued to make its wobbly way downwards until it came to a stop at the back of a train caboose. Maxwell followed Marigold inside only to discover it was less of a train than a mall. Compartments ran alongside the trains interior and each one was home to a different store or restaurant. A café full of chittering bubble creatures sat next to a shoe store where a large arachnid was helping a much smaller one try on four identical pairs of shoes. Each one was tiny, but they took up enough of the train, that Maxwell and Marigold had to squeeze their way down the narrow arrow that ran between them.
The front of the train led to another glass elevator, and through the roof, Maxwell could see that that it serviced countless identical trains stacked in rows overhead. This one was much broader than the first elevator and was filled with gruff looking creatures in suits and ties. Marigold selected one of the hundreds of buttons that lined the walls, and they descended in an anxious silence, as the elevator moved in a confusing and occasionally precipitous fashion. At one moment it decided to move up several stories before shooting down twice as far and leaving the occupants reaching for the nearest railing.
“Are you OK?” Marigold asked, looking over at the visibly shaken Maxwell.
“Fantastic thanks,” Maxwell replied.
“I’m fine, too,” IT called out from his canvas home.
Marigold ignored the robot and addressed Maxwell. “You don’t seem OK.”
“Well, you know, this is all a little bit horrifying.”
“How so?”
Maxwell turned around and cast a glance at an eight-armed shadow with fangs staring at its wristwatch in the corner.
“Right, yeah,” Marigold said. “I guess some of this is new to you.”
“It’s all new to me. Trolls shouldn’t be real. Cities shouldn’t move. Gravity isn’t selective. I like gravity. I like things staying where they’re meant to be.”
“Shh,” Marigold said, glancing back at the creatures behind them.
“I don’t want to do this. Maybe I should just go back to the robots.” He could feel his breath growing jagged and uneven.
The speakers at the top of the elevator interrupted Maxwell’s panic attack. “This elevator is out of ser—” The announcement fizzled out and the doors popped open. Marigold peered over the edge.
“Bit of a jump,” she said.
Maxwell barely heard. He was hyperventilating.
“No, no more jumps. I’ll just stay here and wait for whatever comes next. I’ve seen enough. If this is the real universe, I don’t want it.”
Marigold brought a webbed hand and placed it reassuringly on Maxwell’s back. It was the kind of reassuring gesture of kindness that had been missing until that point, or it would have been if it wasn’t accompanied by a short sharp push.
Maxwell tumbled out of the elevator. This was it. His short adventure was at an end. Perhaps it was for the best.
When Maxwell opened his eyes, he was relieved to discover he was still in one piece. He had fallen a relatively short distance and landed on a patch of grass running below the train. Marigold jumped down to join him.
“Feeling better?” Marigold asked.
Maxwell had to admit to himself that he was. The roiling panic had settled somewhat. “Thanks for that,” he said.
“You seemed like you needed it. Come on, we’ve got a walk ahead of us.”
She set out at a quick clip, leaving Maxwell to try and catch up.