“Strange, isn’t it?”

  Startled, I glance up to see Amiyah watching me. I must have been deep in thought; last I remember, she and Ren were at the front of the procession, feeding apple slices to Professor Blackhoof and chatting with Matthew.

  We’ve been walking for a week. It took us only a few days to develop a kind of rhythm. When we start the day we’re usually in little groups. We talk a little, then spread out naturally, each of us in our own thoughts. It’s the uneasy harmony of strangers, but still it’s harmony.

  We eat, we sleep, we talk a little more. We take turns cooking, setting up camp, brushing and feeding the professor, taking care of the thousand little tasks of the day. We don’t tell each other where we’re from or where we’re going. At least not yet. Rissa and Ren keep us entertained, the first with stories and jokes, the second with a steady stream of often inappropriate and irreverent questions. I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone more curious about the world.

  Despite the relative ease of the journey thus far, it feels torturously slow to me. I can, for brief intervals, suppress the knot of anxiety in my belly, but it never dissipates. The more my thoughts turn to the Talavar, the shorter these intervals become.

  “What’s strange?” I ask, shaking off my reverie.

  “I dunno. All this.” Amiyah gestures vaguely around us. “The world.”

  I look back out at the landscape through which we’ve been trudging all day. The ground is dry and rocky, pocked with the occasional stubborn tree that somehow forced its way through the inhospitable crust to stand drooping in the sun. I’ve seen views just like it through the train windows a thousand times, but Amiyah doesn’t know that. None of my companions know I’m a whistler, except, of course, Lucas.

  I’ve interacted with him directly only once—catching his elbow as he walked and pulling him to the back of the group.

  “What the fuck Lucas?” I hissed when we were sufficiently out of Yanto’s earshot. “Have you been following me this whole time? Why didn’t you stay with the Talavar?”

  “Uh…” He looked around like he was hoping someone might rescue him. “It’s complicated.”

  “Can’t be that complicated. I know you’re the one who helped Nevalya frame me. So what, did she send you to make sure I couldn’t come back?”

  “No,” he said quickly, then paused, his expression pained. “I mean yes, I did… the thing you said. No, Nevalya didn’t send me.”

  “So you volunteered then,” I retorted, making no attempt to suppress the bitterness in my voice. “You really are a loyal pet, aren’t you?”

  He looked more flustered than offended when he answered. “It’s not like that. Let me explain.”

  “Just tell me why,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you’d get in that much trouble. I thought it was just… I don’t know, a prank.”

  I held up a hand to stop him. “I could not be less interested in that frankly terrible excuse. Why did Nevalya need me out of the way so badly? What is she planning?”

  He blanched. “Planning?”

  “Yes, jackass, planning. She went to great lengths to get me banished from the Talavar. You don’t do that without a reason.”

  He mulishly insisted on his ignorance and a warning look from Yanto prevented me from pressing the issue.

  “Whatever. Just stay the fuck away from me,” I whispered as I walked away. I have been stubbornly ignoring him since.

  “I don’t know about strange,” I say now. “More like bleak as hell.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she says. “It’s strange to think it wasn’t always like this. There used to be flowers and trees, and ponds or whatever. Things grew here. Like a lot.”

  It is strange to picture, but it hasn’t been the way she’s describing since long before Amiyah or I were born.

  “I mean things change, I get that,” she says as if sensing my thoughts. “But not overnight. Not everywhere, all at once.”

  I nod. “I never really thought about it before.”

  It’s easy to forget there was a time before the world broke. Before massive swaths of the earth stopped yielding growth of any kind.

  “I wonder what it was like,” I venture. “Not just before but on that day. It must have been wild.”

  Amiyah nods. “I’ve read some accounts from people who were there. People watched plants and trees whither in front of their eyes.”

  I shudder but before I can respond Ren comes up behind us, intoning in a deep, dramatic voice, “They say the clouds dissipated. They say the lakes dried. The poets, in their, erm… poetic wisdom say that was the day the gods abandoned the earth. The very breath was drawn from their lungs, the sun dimmed.”

  Pretty much everything she’s saying is exactly true, according to the history books, but I can’t help but laugh. Ren has a way of lightening most moods.

  “What’s that?” Ren asks, pointing somewhere ahead and to the left of our current trajectory. I follow her gaze but have to squint for several seconds before I see the small complication of metal and wood poking out of the ground some distance away.

  “Damn. You have good eyesight Ren.”

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  “Yeah but what is it?”

  “How should I know? Ask Yanto.”

  “Yanto!” Ren calls to the front of our little procession. The guide stops walking and casts a quizzical look at us over his shoulder. Surly with the rest of us, he seems to have developed a soft spot for the girl, as we all have.

  “We saw a thing,” Amiyah explains. “We want to know what it is.”

  “Railroad switch,” Yanto answers when we’ve caught up to him and made him understand what Ren is pointing to.

  I frown. “Are you sure? I feel like I’ve seen a railroad switch before.” In truth, I have seen many of them during my 25 years as a passenger of the Talavar. Whatever this is, it’s far too small. Also, and more importantly, I do not see any railroad tracks.

  Yanto nods. “It’s one of the old ones. Before the Pall there was a lot of travel through this area. Now that’s almost all that’s left to mark it.”

  “But there are no tracks?” Lucas interjects. I shoot him a sour look even though I have the same question.

  “There are,” Yanto corrects. “You just can’t see them from here. There isn’t much left to see, really. Most of them are decayed beyond use.”

  “How regularly were they used before?” I ask.

  Yanto shrugs. “All the time. Daily. Multiple times a day, I think.”

  This makes sense but it feels so strange. There has only ever been one train, for as long as I’ve lived. I can’t imagine a world in which a host of them were running a dozen different places at any given time.

  “What about the trains themselves?” I ask. “What happened to them?”

  “Mostly left in train graveyards around the country. Some of them rot, others are used for parts to keep the Talavar in good repair.

  My eyebrows shoot up at this. A train graveyard sounds fascinating.

  Catching my apparent interest, Yanto adds quickly. “Enough trivia. I’m not a cogging tour guide,” and turns to resume his place at the head of our scattered line.

  That night as we gather around the small portable heater on which we warm our feet and our food, Ren asks Rissa to tell us a story.

  The poor woman is probably going to run out of them before we make much progress on this journey, but she’s too good-natured to say no to an enthusiastic one-armed child.

  “When my daughter was about your age, she begged us to get her a mod that would change her eye color,” Rissa begins.

  This is the first time she’s mentioned having a daughter and I look at her with sudden interest. I’ve been guarding the details of my own life so closely, I realize, that it hasn’t occurred to me to be curious about the others. I study the woman now as if I’m seeing her for the first time. She’s probably in her mid-forties, beautiful and plump with dark skin and deep black eyes. Her long black hair is streaked with silver and escaping from a messy braid.

  She is leaning back against her husband’s chest, his darkly bearded chin resting on top of her head.

  What circumstances brought them to this point? Why is a couple with at least one child traveling from Nokon City to a small outpost nearly two months away by foot? More importantly, where is the child now?

  I bite down on the host of questions that rush to the surface of my mind. I’m not anxious to tell my own story, or answer the many questions it would no doubt inspire. Better to put that off as long as possible.

  “Wait you actually got the mod?” Matthew is asking when I tune back into the conversation. “Because she heard a girl in class say she liked violet eyes?”

  “That’s what I said!” Khalid exclaims with a “Thank you” gesture in Matthew’s direction.

  Rissa shrugs. “Why not? If she wants her eyes to be the color of, and I quote, ‘the rarest and most poetic of the fish’, who am I to deny her?”

  I smile as I retrieve my food packet from its place by the heater, squeezing to determine if the warmth has sufficiently worked its way through the flavorless beans and rice inside.

  Everyone else it seems had the foresight and the budget to pack a more varied menu. Even Lucas somehow managed to get a variety of dinner packs and some dried fruits and salted nuts to break up the monotony. I glare at him but he doesn’t notice. I bought as many as I could of the cheapest meals available, which means I am destined to dine on beans and rice for the foreseeable future.

  To my right, Khalid is eating sardines from a can and I can nearly taste the salty tang of them. He sees me looking sadly into my unevenly heated envelope and holds the can out toward me with a smile. Embarrassed, I hesitate but eventually my desire wins out and I take one gratefully. I pop the savory fish into my mouth and close my eyes to the burst of flavor.

  “I really thought I had been clever,” Rissa says. “I asked all the right questions. I was subtle as hell. I was so cogging nonchalant I couldn’t have been shaken by an earthquake followed by a second Pall.”

  Khalid is grinning at his wife, as he always does when she’s telling a story.

  “So I went through all of that, they finally trusted me enough to introduce me to the dealer, only to find…” she pauses for emphasis. “…that the dealer is a fucking keeper.”

  “Blighted blood!” Amiyah exclaims. “How did you talk your way out of that one?”

  “Oh I didn’t.” Rissa casually takes a bite of her curry. “I went to jail. It was very unpleasant.”

  “It is known for that,” Lucas says.

  “And your daughter?” I ask. “How did she cope with not having the eyes of noble fish?”

  “She didn’t want the eyes of the fish,” Ren corrects. “Just eyes the color of a specific fish.”

  “Although fish eyes would also be an interesting mod,” Amiyah observes thoughtfully.

  “Oh she got the mod,” Khalid says. “We learned from our mistakes and were more cautious the next time we went in search of an off-market mod.”

  “Good thing, too,” Rissa adds, “since she got tired of the mod within a year and wanted her eyes turned back to the color I so thoughtfully made them the first time.”

  Even the ever-stoic Xan smirks a little at this.

  “How many kids do you have?” Lucas asks. Rissa’s smile falters almost imperceptibly. There’s a ghost of sadness behind her eyes when she answers.

  “Three who still live. We will see them soon, stars willing.”

  There’s a weight on the silence that follows which none of us knows how to lift. Lucas looks like he’s wondering if there’s a mod that can make you unsay things.

  “I don’t think it would be a good mod.” The fact that it’s Xan who breaks the silence seems to startle us all out of our frozen silence. All eyes turn toward her.

  “What?” Ren asks.

  “Eyes of a fish,” she clarifies. “They’re weird-looking to begin with and they’d be even weirder lined up side by side, which is how we humans wear our eyes.”

  The tension in her posture and the way her hands grip her canteen seem out of place on a woman whose usual demeanor is one wholly at ease and ready for casual violence. It’s as if the act of engaging in nonessential conversation physically pains her.

  Matthew gapes at her like she’s just shat in an open grave but I see she’s committing an act of mercy. At the moment I could kiss her for it. Khalid flashes her a grateful smile.

  “You could combine it with a mod that moves your eyes to the sides of your head?” Rissa suggests.

  “And that would be, in your opinion, less weird?” Amiyah asks, catching on.

  “Even if that were remotely possible within the limits of science and magic, it would definitely not solve the looking weird problem,” Ren says with all the sobriety of someone tackling a serious issue that needs solving.

  “Okay but people have been using cat-eye mods for decades,” Matthew points out. “We all got used to it.”

  “Perfect reason to shake things up,” says Khalid. “I think we’re onto something. We can invent mods that mimic all the animal eyeballs and get rich.”

  “A fish isn’t an animal,” Yanto interjects.

  “Immaterial.” I wave dismissively in his direction. “The world isn’t ready for fish eyes. We can start with something less drastic, like…” Every animal I can think of still has the eyes-on-the-side-of-the-head problem. “Red panda eyes?”

  Rissa laughs and Xan relaxes, visibly relieved that we’ve picked up the thread, eliminating the need for her to contribute further.

  I’m relieved to discover that anything can ruffle her. And more than a little moved by her kindness.