“Stop! Stop! Thief!” Angry as she’d feared, Msieur’s shout came from behind them. It froze her one long awful second before she could run.
Ahead Ma shoved past a fat man in woolens and sent him staggering to the right. Behind them came more exclamations, more men calling for them to halt, their cries mixed with the shrieks and swearing of the people they knocked aside. How’d he know where to look for her? Trust a man whose business was numbers to put two and two together. Msieur had friends with him – How many? Plaquette barely glanced back. Two? Four? No telling – she had to run to stay in front of Claude so he’d follow her to – an opening! She broke away from the thick-packed travelers and ran after Ma to a long brick walk between two puffing engines. Good. Cover. This must be why Ma had taken such an unexpected path. Swaying like a drunk in a hurricane, Claude in his crate lumbered after her.
The noise of their pursuers fell to a murmur. Maybe she’d lost them?
But when Plaquette caught up with Ma, Ma smacked her fists together and screamed. “No! Why you follow me over here? Ain’t I told you we putting your fool mistake in the storage the other side of the tracks?”
“B-but you came this w-w-ay!” Plaquette stammered.
“I was creating a distraction for you to escape!”
The clatter and thump of running feet sounded clear again above the engines’ huff and hiss. Coming closer. Louder. Louder. Ma threw her hands in the air. “We done! Oh, baby, you too young for jail!”
One of the dark train carriages Plaquette had run past had been split up the middle – hadn’t it? A deeper darkness – a partially open door? Spinning, she rushed back the way they’d come. Yes! “Ma!” Plaquette pushed the sliding door hard as she could. It barely budged. Was that wide enough? She jumped and grabbed its handle and swung herself inside.
But Claude! Prisoned in slats, weighed down by his treads, he bumped disconsolately against the baggage car’s high bottom. Following her and the wardenclyffe, exactly as programmed. Should she drop it? She dug through the deep pockets frantically and pulled it out so fast it flew from her hand and landed clattering somewhere in the carriage’s impenetrable darkness.
Hidden like she wished she could hide from the hoarsely shouting men. But they sounded frustrated as well as angry now, and no nearer. Maybe the engine on the track next to this was in their way?
The train began moving. From Plaquette’s perch it looked like the bricks and walkway rolled off behind her. Claude kept futile pace. The train was pulling up alongside Ma, standing hopelessly where Plaquette had left her, waiting to be caught. Now she was even with them. Plaquette brushed her fingers over Ma’s yellow headscarf. It fell out of reach. “Goodbye, Ma! Just walk away from Claude! They won’t know it was you!” Fact was, Plaquette felt excited almost as much as she was scared. Even if Msieur got past whatever barrier kept them apart right now, she was having her adventure!
The train stopped. Plaquette’s heart just about did, too. Her only adventure would be jail. How could she help Ma and Pa from inside the pokey? She scanned the walkway for Msieur and his friends, coming to demand justice.
But no one showed. The shouts for her and Ma to stop grew fainter. The train started again, more slowly. Suddenly Ma was there, yanking Claude desperately by his cord. She’d pulled his crate off. It was on the platform, slowly disappearing into the distance. Together, Ma and Plaquette lifted Claude like he was luggage, tilting him to scrape over the carriage’s narrow threshold. As they did, the tray holding the books caught on the edge and was dragged open – and it held more than book scrolls. Cool metallic disks, crisp or greasy slips of paper – Msieur’s money!
How? Plaquette wasted a precious moment wondering – he must have put the day’s take into Claude when she surprised him in the showroom.
Ma’s eyes got wide as saucers. She was still running to keep up, puffing as she hefted Claude’s weight. With a heave, she and Plaquette hauled him into the car. He landed with a heavy thump. The train was speeding up. There was no time to count it; Plaquette fisted up two handfuls of the money, coins and bills both, and shoved it into Ma’s hands. Surely it was enough to suffice Ma and Pa for a while. “I’ll come back,” she said.
The train kept going, building speed. Ma stopped running. She was falling behind fast. “You a good girl!” she yelled.
When it seemed sure the train wasn’t stopping again anytime soon Plaquette stuck her head out – a risk. A yellow gleam in the shadows was all she could see of Ma. Plaquette shoved the sliding door closed.
Well. She’d gone and done it now. Pa’s note was no use; this wasn’t the train making the Frisco run. It for sure wasn’t no sleeping-car train. A porter had no business here. The train could be going to the next town, or into the middle of next week. She had no way of knowing right now. For some reason, that made her smile.
She fumbled her way to Claude’s open drawer. The money left in there was all coins, more than she could hold in one hand. She divided it amongst the deep, deep pockets in her trousers and jacket.
She was a true and actual thief, and a saboteur.
Finally she found the wardenclyffe. Feeling farther around her in the loud blackness, she determined the carriage was loaded as she’d imagined with trunks, suitcases, parcels of all shapes and sizes. Nothing comfortable as the beds at home, the big one or the little. She didn’t care.
When the train stopped she’d count the money. When the train stopped she’d calculate what to do, where to go, how to get by. She could slip off anywhere, buy herself new clothes, become a new person.
She settled herself as well as she could on a huge, well-stuffed suitcase and closed her eyes.
Claude would help. She would punch more books for him to read, and collect from the people who came to listen. Send money home to Pa and Ma every few weeks.
She’d write the books herself. She’d get him to punch them. She’d punch a set of instructions for how to punch instructions for punching. She’d punch another set of instructions and let Claude write books too. And maybe come back one day soon. Find Billy. Take him away and show him a new life.
The train ran toward the north on shining steel rails. Plaquette’s dreams flew toward the future on pinions of shining bright ideas.
A MURMURATION
Alastair Reynolds
ALASTAIR REYNOLDS (www.alastairreynolds.com) was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He has lived in Cornwall, Scotland, the Netherlands, where he spent twelve years working as a scientist for the European Space Agency, before returning to Wales in 2008 where he lives with his wife Josette. Reynolds has been publishing short fiction since his first sale to Interzone in 1990. Since 2000 he has published fourteen novels: the Inhibitor trilogy, British Science Fiction Association Award winner Chasm City, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, the Poseidon’s Children series, Blue Remembered Earth, On the Steel Breeze, and Poseidon’s Wake, Doctor Who novel The Harvest of Time. His short fiction has been collected in Zima Blue and Other Stories, Galactic North, and Deep Navigation. Coming up is collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Medusa Chronicles, an as-yet-untiled new novel, and new collection Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds. In his spare time he rides horses.