Текст книги "Dreadnought"

Автор книги: Cherie Priest

Соавторы: Cherie Priest
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

The corpse-man reached for the handrails, just as Mercy had done. While it grabbed, its mouth tried to grab, too-it gnawed at the air in the space between them and snapped at her shoes.

And although she’d spent her adulthood saving lives . . . and although she’d never, not even accidentally, killed a man . . . she seized one of her guns and she fired at the wrinkled space between the corpse-man’s eyes.

He was so close that when his skull exploded, bits of his brain and face splattered across everything, including Mercy’s cloak and dress. Pieces of him slid down slowly off the hem of her skirt, dripping and plopping down between the tracks.

The rolling noise of grunts and screams and groans was all around her now, closing in and pinning her down like a tangible pressure. But she shook it off, and she turned and she climbed-up into the engine, where the inspector was holding his hand down to her, calling, “Here! Climb up!”

She scrambled and seized his hand, and let him help her up over the side, where Lieutenant Hobbes and the conductor were frantically throwing levers, pressing buttons, and shouting directions to the men who were trying to affix the snowplow to the front of the train.

But the swarm was upon them, as if that first corpse Mercy had shot down was only the scout, and the rest were right on its heels. She climbed up on a bin and saw the men out front trying to move the snowplow into place draw their guns and begin shooting, trying to clear a big enough patch that they could work those last latches, bolts, and pulleys and get the train moving.

Behind her, the boiler was coughing and straining its way to full power once more. The stretch of the superhot metal made ghastly whimpers, as if it, too, understood the necessity of leaving, and leaving now.

Lieutenant Hobbes leaped to the foremost edge of the western wall, leaning forward and aiming outward. He fired, providing cover for the men below.

Mercy positioned herself on the east side, and Galeano climbed up to stand with his feet planted apart atop the conductor’s shed. He flexed his wrists, checked his bullets, picked his targets below, and with an anguished shout, opened fire on his undead countrymen.

The nurse followed suit.

She fired off one shot, then two. Aiming down, hitting them in the heads and necks. Exploding their skulls away from their bodies, leaving their arms and legs to splay and sprawl and collapse to the ground. She refused to look past the circle where five men were ratcheting the snowplow into place. Right there, in that circle, the undead were sweeping down on the workers in ones and twos. But beyond that circle, appallingly close, they were coming in fives and tens. In dozens. In hundreds.

But she had only two hands, and only so much ammunition. The satchel she wore was slung across her back, freeing up her arms and elbows so she could aim and shoot, sometimes hitting and sometimes missing. One head. Two heads. A puff of snow like dust, right in the place where a corpse had only just been running. She missed another one, and couldn’t recall how many shots she’d fired.

Below her, the five men were dividing their time between self-defense and the task at hand, and the task at hand was losing ground. Above her, Inspector Galeano was still shouting, still shooting; and beside her, Lieutenant Hobbes was reloading.

Mercy’s right gun ran out of bullets. She whipped her satchel front and center, dug around hastily, and filled both wheels of both guns with quivering fingers gone numb from cold and recoil and fear.

Lieutenant Hobbes said, “Mrs. Lynch!”

And she said back, “I’m reloading!”

“Hurry!” And he fired again, and again.

She clapped the wheel of her left handgun into place, fully stocked once more. Mercy dared a glance up ahead at the Shenandoah. Her heart constricted as she saw the Confederate men holding their position with prybars and long-barreled guns that were long empty. They used them like bats, swinging and swatting the attackers away as long as their arms could stand it.

“Mrs. Lynch!” It was the conductor this time. She’d never caught his name, and didn’t know where he’d picked up hers, except from standing around and listening to people shout it.

She responded by aiming and firing again, as the wave kept coming and the men below kept working.

A dead woman was running in fast, her full skirts in bright colors and patterns layered up together. Her arms were bare, despite the frigid temperatures, and her hair was as wild as a squirrel’s nest. This dead woman’s face was contorted, her lips drawn back and her jaw thrust forward; she was reaching with her teeth.

Mercy aimed carefully. She waited until the woman’s eyes looked wet and near, and her scream could be discerned as an individual cry above the echoing cacophony of the bizarre battle.

And she fired. She pulled the trigger once, and watched the top of the dead woman’s head shatter. Her legs kept moving, only for a few steps more; then she stumbled to her knees, and then forward into the snow. But at least the corpse hadn’t reached the porter, who was beginning to climb up the side of the snowplow; and it hadn’t reached the rail-yard man, who was hot on the porter’s trail.

The rest of them, though. They were still coming.

Inspector Galeano screamed, “ Ay, Dios mío!Keep it clear!” He fired the last three bullets in his barrel and seized at his own ammunition bags, hunting for more. “They are coming! They are still coming!”

The conductor hollered something down at the men on the snowplow, but Mercy didn’t catch it. She was focused on following directions, on keeping the spot in front of the train clear of the climbing, clamoring bodies with their clamping teeth and corpses’ eyes.

Right under her arms, the first porter rose up so that she was shooting past him, over his head. She was surely giving his ears a terrible thrashing, but he didn’t complain. He said at the top of his lungs, “Clear! Fire and start!”

This startled Mercy into looking over at the lieutenant. She saw two of the other rail men coming up over the edge beside him; and then she understood that the men on the ground in front of the train were finished, and the snowplow was readied, and they could leave, if only they could barrel through the barriers before them. She holstered her guns and they sizzled hot against the leather, smoldering warm patches against her hip.

“Here,” she said to the porter, who struggled to lift himself over the edge. She took him by the shoulder, under the arm. “Here, come on. Get up here.”

He fell down past her, into the Dreadnought’s interior, and she reached for the rail man.

The rail man gazed up at her in terror. He kicked hard, knocking away a corpse’s teeth as they nipped and chomped at his boots. He was struggling, his striped shirt ripped and the jacket he wore over it hanging from one arm.

Mercy braced her feet around a pipe that was down by her knees, reached over the edge, and seized his forearms even as he grasped at her wrists. He was heavy, but she was strong. She’d lifted a pony once or twice, and plenty of men at the Robertson Hospital, when it’d come to that. She could lift him, too.

She heaved him backwards, and up, and with an awkward sideways slide over the rim, he toppled down into the interior, gasping for breath like a freshly caught fish in the bottom of a boat.

The conductor was moving, a man with a mission and maybe-God willing-a plan. “Help me!” he said to the lieutenant, who was still firing potshots as the uniformed dead began to climb, using their fallen brethren as ladders and stepstools on their way ever higher, trying desperately to make it up to the living folks inside the iron giant.

Lieutenant Hobbes holstered everything, leaped off the bin, and joined the conductor beside a pair of metal levers that were as long as a tall man’s thigh.

“On the count of three-pull that one!” the conductor said as he pointed.

“Count of three,” the lieutenant repeated.

“One, two, three-” And the levers both came down, not easily, but with the strain of both men’s backs cranking and pulling with all their weight.

A snapping latch cracked almost as loud as the guns, and the balance of the engine shifted; Mercy felt it as a slight leaning forward, where before the engine had seemed to point up just a touch.

“It’s on!” said the rail man. His observation was picked up and echoed around the narrow space. “It’s on! It’s on!”

The conductor’s mouth was a line as hard as a riveted seam. He said, “Let’s go.” He drew down on the whistle, and the edge of his gray mustache twitched with determination, or rage, or desperation, or something else Mercy couldn’t quite read.

As he pulled the whistle, he used his other arm to flip another switch, and pull a knob. He ordered the rail men and the porters to take up shovels, check the hydrogen lines, and make sure the stuff was being made and sent up from the fuel car.

There was no room to maneuver, or even to get out of the way-not with the lieutenant and his two soldiers, the five rail men and porters, the conductor, and Inspector Galeano still firing from his bird’s-eye perch.

Mercy gripped the edge of the nearest bin, and the Dreadnoughtlunged. It didn’t move forward; not quite, not yet, but it gave a shove and a lean, like a man bracing himself to break down a door, and its next lean and shove drew the whole train forward with a rattle as the cars clacked together, flexing on the track, knocking against one another from the sudden pull.

“The plow!” hollered the conductor. “Start it up!”

The nearest porter reached for a lever built into the floor; it had a squeezable handle, and when this handle was drawn back down and the lever was jammed into the necessary position, a new hum joined the fray.

The hum started slow, and low; it began distant, and thundering, and rough. A cloud clearing its throat, or a mountain shrugging off a small avalanche. A windmill caught in a gale, shuddering and flapping. The conductor called for it, saying, “More hydrogen! Divert it from the secondary boiler! Just power the plow first-we won’t move without it!” With more fuel, the hum came louder, and steadier. It went from the crooked fan blade, unbalanced and wobbling, to a smooth and vocal growl that rose up so loud that it almost (not quite, but almost) dampened the sound of Theodora Clay and the men in the passenger car firing; the Mexican inspector, still upright, still shooting, and now openly crying; and the undead hordes oncoming.

Mercy covered her ears. She could see the lieutenant gesturing, the porters shoveling coal, the rail men adjusting gauges, and the whole lot of them-their mouths open, and then their hands signing as if they were all deaf, like her-communicating over the astounding volume.

She couldn’t stand there and hear it, hands over ears or no.

The situation was as under control as it was going to get, and when the Dreadnoughtgave another heave, combined with the devouring hum as the snowplow sucked up the snow, cut it, and threw it away from the tracks . . . she could’ve sobbed with relief. She choked on the sob, forced it down, and looked away. As the engine got moving again, she clung to whatever solid and uncrowded bits of the bin she could hold, and worked her way back to the steps leading off the engine, then back through the fuel car and down its stairs to the gap.

Shaking and eyes watering from the smoke and the snowplow’s ravenous roar, she wobbled to the steps and saw two of the corpse-men. They moved as one and came toward her, but not fast enough to dodge her bullets. It took her three shots to take them down, but she pulled the trigger once on her right gun, and twice on her left and did just that. She didn’t even remember unholstering them. She couldn’t imagine how it had happened, how she’d been holding on to the rail, and then holding on to the guns, and shooting them into the faces of the men in the light-colored uniforms.

The Dreadnoughtpicked up speed until it was running at a jerky, pitiful crawl.

Snow began to spray, commensurate with the pace: up a few feet, and out a few feet, feeding dunes on either side of the tracks as the rotary blades dug in and churned.

The engine followed its snow-gobbling plow. As Mercy stood there on the bottom of the fuel car’s steps, relieved to see the tracks moving under her feet once more, she caught a glimpse of the pilot piece sliding past-abandoned beside the tracks when the men had unhitched it and cast it aside.

Mercy crossed the space between the fuel car and the passenger car, leaping to the passenger car’s platform, throwing open the door, and tossing herself inside.

Malverne Purdue was standing there, his skin whiter than his shirt with loss of blood and the stress of standing when he should’ve been lying down. His blood soaked everything near his wound and seeped down into his pants. He looked through Mercy, registering her only as something that stood between him and something he wanted.

He staggered forward, through the door and out onto the platform again. She stumbled after him and he shoved her back.

She considered her guns and reached for one of them. “Mr. Purdue, get back inside and-”

He swung his arm back and struck her. He was holding something in his hand, and she couldn’t see it clearly enough to know for certain, but it looked like it might’ve been one of the ceramic mugs from the caboose’s stash. It was heavy, anyway, and it knocked her back and almost over the slender rail.

She caught herself on it, folding over it and latching her feet under its bottommost edge. Gasping, she stood upright again and felt at her face. When she pulled her hand back from her mouth, there was blood on her glove. She didn’t think it’d been there before, but she might’ve been wrong.

No, she wasn’t wrong. In a moment she could taste it, and feel it smearing along her teeth.

Malverne Purdue was rambling loudly. “This!” he said. “This, all of this-it could’ve been harnessed, don’t you see? Don’t you understand!”

Mercy pulled herself off the rail and faced him, only to see that he’d turned and was looking over the other short rail at the corpses who were coming at them from every direction at once.

His back to her, he continued. “We could’ve usedthis. We could’ve ended the war. And you would’ve lost; of course you would’ve. You’re going to lose-you know that, don’t you?”

“Me?” she asked, as if it were a personal accusation.

“Yes, of course you. You and that ranger, and those Rebels.” He sneered at the Shenandoah,getting closer off to their left. He sniffed at the men on it, still holding their own. “I knew. I always knew. That’s not a Kentucky accent, you ridiculous woman. I can tell the difference. I’m from Ohio, myself.”

He gave her his full attention again, in a way that was wholly unpleasant and sinister. “And it was yourfault, in a way. You were the one who drew them together, and who made them stand against me. They wouldn’t have done it, if you hadn’t goaded them!”

“Me?” Mercy wondered where the other soldiers were, where the captain was, where the ranger was-where anybody was. Still shooting, she presumed. She could hear them, above her and inside the passenger car. She said, “You can call it my fault, if you want to. And that’s fine. If it’s my fault that you didn’t get to do this”-she waved her hand in the direction of the undead-“then, fine, I’ll take credit!”

“We could’ve controlled it!”

Was it madness or a last-minute surge of strength before death that made him sound so powerful, so fiercely insane? She didn’t know, and she didn’t care to know, but she again reached her right hand for her gun as he came closer.

“This has to end someday. There has to be a winner and a loser. That’s the nature of war!”

“This isn’t nature,” she told him, clinging to her gun and holding it between them. “That, over there, those people,” she said. “That’s not nature.” She didn’t shout it. She didn’t have to. His face was as near to hers as a groom before a kiss.

Pressing her gun up against his stomach she said, “I’m warning you, Mr. Purdue-I’m warning you!”

He said, “Warning me? That you’re going to shoot me?” His breath frosted toward her face, but the cloud was drawn away by the motion of the train. Behind him, a panorama of horror unfolded-a horde, mostly men and a handful of women, running as if they’d only just learned how. All of them dead. All of them hungry. All of them coming, and chasing the train, and howling their morbid despair.

“I willshoot you,” she promised. “If I have to. And maybe even if I don’t.”

His laugh was a barking, nasty sound filled with phlegm and blood, and it was the last noise he ever made.

Surrounded by gunfire on all sides, Mercy couldn’t tell-not at first-where the killing shot had come from. For a moment she thought it’d been her own gun, and she gasped as Malverne Purdue toppled back from her, falling away in a shuffling slump. But there was no new blood at his belly; it was on his head, and pouring down from it. As his body spiraled in a pirouette of death, she saw that the top of his skull had been struck and the crown was all but gone.

His eyes were blank as he hit the rail, and his body buckled over it, falling off the train and into a pack of dead men and women who fell upon it like wild dogs on a deer.

Mercy looked up. She still held the one gun, still pointing toward the place where the scientist had stood. She squinted against the white cliffs and the sparkling of the sun off the ice, and realized she was looking up at Theodora Clay.

Miss Clay was hanging on to the edge of the roof with one hand, her shoulders shaking with every rumbling roll of the rail ties. Her other hand held the gun she’d taken from Ranger Korman.

She shouted down, “For such an educated man, he was never very . . . civilized!”

Twenty

Back inside the passenger car, Mercy was nearly numb.

Miss Clay joined her momentarily, and from the other door at the other end of the car, Ranger Korman entered, looking ruffled but unscathed. A few others trickled in behind him, until there were no more footsteps on the steel roof and everyone was crowded into the sleeper car.

Above the car and all around it, the snow was blowing now-billowing harder and faster than any blizzard could’ve tossed it. Flung by the spinning blades of the plow, the snow gushed up, out, back, and around the passenger cars until it almost felt like riding through another tunnel, this one white and flecked with ice.

It was flecked with other things, too.

Here and there, a streak of bright brown blood went slapping across the side of the train, splattering into a window. A few fingers flipped inside. Chunks of hair. Bits of clothing, and a shoe that-upon inspection-still had most of a decomposing foot inside it. The rotary plow took the undead attackers and treated them no differently from the ice and snow that had clustered on the tracks, chopping them up and tossing them, shoveling them out of the way with its rows of biting blades.

Mrs. Butterfield was crying in a corner; her legs were drawn up beneath her, and her skirts billowed mightily, though she patted at them, trying to push them down, between sobs.

Theodora Clay was not at her side.

Instead, Miss Clay was a row away, reloading. And when she finished reloading, she was hanging out the broken window and picking off more living corpses one by one if they were able to reach the train and cling to it. Next to her, Ranger Korman was doing the same, and on the other side of him, Inspector Galeano did likewise.

Mercy looked to her right and saw the captain, grim-faced and soot-or gunpowder-covered, glaring out at the Shenandoah. Upon it, the surviving men were waving desperately-she could see that much even without a glass, they’d come so close. Some of the undead had wandered away from the Rebel engine in search of the louder, more glittering prey of the Dreadnought;and now it seemed almost possible that the distant soldiers might make a break for it. But where would they go?

As if he’d heard her thinking, the captain said, “We aren’t going very fast. Barely staggering. A live, running man could catch us, easier than these dead things.”

Lieutenant Hobbes shoved his way past the first passenger car door. His timing was almost perfect. He, too, had been looking at the other train and calculating the odds with his eyes. He pointed over at the other engine, now not even a quarter of a mile away, and said, “They’re men, sir. Same as us. Soldiers, is all.”

“I know,” said the captain.

One of the soldiers down the line opened his mouth to object, but the captain cut him off by saying, “Don’t. If it were us out there, we’d hope the other men would lend a hand, wouldn’t we?”

It was Morris Comstock who weakly said what several others were no doubt thinking. The blood loss must’ve made him insubordinate, or maybe he was only too tired to restrain himself. “They’re dogs,sir. Look what they’ve done to us. Look what they’ve done to the Dreadnought,and to the train! And to me! And to-” He looked around at the wounded. “All of us, sir!”

“Dogs?” Captain MacGruder whipped around, pulling himself out the window and glaring beneath eyebrows that were covered in frost. He sniffed, and rubbed his nose along his sleeve to either warm it or dab it. “Dogs did this to you? A man who fights dogs is something even lower. I fight men,Comstock. I fight them for the same reason they fight us: mostly because someone told them to, and because this is just the way the lines drew up, us on one side, them on the other.”

He held his position, breathing hard and thinking. One leg on the seat of a lounger and one knee raised up, braced against the interior trim. His elbow holding him steady, his gun still partly aimed out the window, at the sky.

Nobody said a word, until he went on. “Those things”-he waved the barrel of his gun down at the screeching hordes-“they aren’t men. They aren’t even dogs. And I won’t leave anybody to ’em. No-” He cut off Comstock with a syllable. “Not anybody.”

Ranger Korman, who had not budged this whole time, said, “I like the way you think, Captain. But what precisely are we going to do for those boys over there?”

Inspector Galeano tried, “We could . . . clear a path for them. Maybe?”

“That’ll be just about the best we can swing, I think.” The ranger nodded. “We’ll have to get up front, use the engine’s defense systems, and line up inside here, too, and take down as many as we can. If we’re lucky, at least some of those fellows on the Shenandoahmight make it to a car.”

Theodora Clay, of all people, mused, “If only we had some way to reach them-to let them know we mean to help.”

Lieutenant Hobbes said, “The engineer has an electric speaking trumpet. I saw it, up front.”

“Go get it,” the captain said. “And fast. We don’t have long. All right, folks. Who has ammunition left?”

Most of the soldiers grudgingly admitted that they still had some, and the ranger was still well stocked, but Mercy was out. She said to the captain, “I’ll do it.”

“You’ll do what?”

“I’ll go on top of the car, and I’ll holler to ’em with the speaking trumpet. You men with the ammunition, you clear the way if you can.”

“Now, don’t be ridiculous, Mrs. Lynch. We’ll get one of the porters to-”

“No. I’ll do it,” she told him. “I’m out of bullets, and most of you soldiers are better shots than me, anyway.”

When Lieutenant Hobbes returned with the speaking trumpet, she swiped it out of his hand and took off.

Out on the passenger car platform, the world was white and in motion.

Still moving at a crawl, still throwing chunks of dead bodies left and right, the Dreadnought’s plow cast every flake into a canopy of glittering ice and frothy pale coldness. It arced overhead and off both sides, wings made of snow, twenty feet long and high. Mercy wondered how much faster the engine could pull and how much higher the wings would stretch. But there wasn’t time to wonder much, and the ladder was slicker than ever, covered with pureed ice and freezing gore.

Her gloves tried to stick, for they were also damp and willing to harden.

She pulled them off with her teeth, shoved them into the pockets of her cloak, and then put her bare skin on the frigid metal. Every rung burned, and at least one took small, ragged strips from her fingers, but she climbed and climbed, and then she stood on top of the car, upright and blasted by the wind and the flying snow.

Mercy hoped her cloak was blue enough to signal with. She hoped that the large red cross on her satchel might show across the yards between her and her countrymen, stranded on their engine island.

She waved her arms, stretching them wide and flapping her hands; and when it appeared that they saw her, she lifted the speaking trumpet to her mouth and pulled the lever that said ON. A squeal of feedback was loud enough to pierce her eardrums, even over the roar of the wind and the plow and the tracks clattering past, but she steadied herself-spreading her legs and bending them, just enough to give herself some balance and some leverage. When she was at her full height, the black cloud of coal smoke went streaming over her head, mixing with the snow and covering her with smears the color of pitch and dogwood blossoms.

“Shenandoah!”she hollered as loud as she could. The machine picked up her voice and threw it even farther, as hard as the plow threw the snow. “When the Dreadnoughtstarts shooting, make a run for these cars!”

Her mouth hurt. Her lips were freezing and numb and the words sounded slurred, but she said them anyway, screaming into the cold. “We mean to cover you!”

At first she couldn’t tell if they’d understood, so she lifted the speaking trumpet again to repeat herself. But they nodded, and were drawing closer with every moment, so that new details about their appearance became apparent every second.

They huddled together, then separated again and readied themselves to jump or slide down off the engine at a moment’s notice.

She didn’t know what ought to happen next.

They were ready. She was finished.

The Dreadnoughtsurged, or perhaps its plow snagged on something particularly juicy, and the car upon which Mercy stood shuddered. She dropped to her hands and knees, crushing the speaking trumpet. She clung to the roof, pinching it by the rim and pulling it up against her body as she shuffled along, trying to reach the nearest ladder.

The Dreadnought’s whistle blew.

It was no code of beeps and chimes, and no warning this time, either. It was a declaration of readiness. Everyone was ready. The moment was approaching, and the narrowest point between the two trains was imminent.

Now or never.

She held her breath and waited.

Now or never.

Now.

A volley of shots rang out as timed as a firing squad. Not the nearest undead, but the remaining corpses that stormed the Shenandoah-these dead men fell to the ground, clearing the way for the Rebels to jump, slide, or climb. Not the sort to look a gift horse in the mouth, they jumped, slid, and climbed down to the snow, and after a moment’s confused milling, they ran toward the Dreadnought.

Another round, another pounding volley cut through another small clot of the raging dead. Most of their fellows did not seem to notice that anyone living was coming up behind them.

Another round, another pounding volley.

Mercy thought of the British during the Revolution and how they’d lined up in rows, all firing at once, and then replacing one row with another. That’s what it sounded like, just underneath her. And when she looked over the edge, she could see their guns sticking out the windows, all in a row, just as she’d imagined. When they fired, it was on someone’s signal-she could hear the one-word order even over the blustering wind.

“Fire!”

Another round, another pounding volley, and another cluster of dead men (plus at least one dead woman) fell to the ground. One or two struggled to rise, but were down enough to stay down when the living men ran past.

Mercy counted five. Five souls left, from the entire crew of the Shenandoah, however many that might’ve been.

But they looked like five sturdy men. The strongest, always. Who else makes it out alive? No one, of course. None but the men with the thighs that could pump in time with a train’s pistons, moving their legs toward the enemy train because it was the only thing that could save them now. They were out of bullets and options and ideas, so here they came-hats flying off heads, jackets flapping behind them, boots weighed down with snow and snowmelt as they pushed through the stuff, which was not knee high but at times drifted up to their shins.

Mercy clung to the roof of the passenger car, peering over the edge and cheering the men on with every breath. She prayed little prayers that puffed out in tiny clouds, all of them whisked away on the wind with the snow and the churned-up bodies of the undead who’d stayed on the tracks, charging forward, everyone wanting to catch the train.

Three more volleys, violent rounds of organized fire and gunpowder coughing out the windows, and another hole was blown in the crowd.

“Come on . . . ,” Mercy said under her breath. Then, as one man stumbled, fell, and was shortly covered by the monstrous creatures, she shouted it. “Come on!” she ordered the remaining four. “Come on, goddamn you, come on! You’re almost here!”

Her hood was blown back and full of filthy snow, and her hands were absolutely senseless. They could’ve frozen to the edge of the roof, for all she knew, and for all she was letting go. She cheered the runners until she was hoarse. At some point, one last gap was blown in the thinning circle of undead, and the four men sprinted through, as red-faced and dirty as the nurse atop the train.

“Almost here!” she cried.

And they werealmost there, yes, coming up to run alongside the train. Winding down, though. All of them, from trudging through the snow. They were weakening. They were so close, and it might not be enough.

Mercy prised her hands off the edge. Scrambling, knees and elbows and hands and boot-toes doing everything possible to hold to the roof, she hauled herself to its edge, just above the gap where one of the Rebels was losing steam, not quite close enough to heave himself on board.