Gunlaw

Gunlaw 36

Chapter 23 - Present Day

Jenna wondered how long she had been asleep. The question pressed on her, and for several sleep-clogged minutes she let the train window support her forehead. Her body lay inert, trapped in mid-twist, seeking some hint of comfort from the seat. She could make no sense of the darkness beyond the glass, nor of the reflections stretching before her in meaningless abstract. Another question surfaced. Jenna felt it furrow her brow against the window's coolness. What had woken her?

The answer came in miniature epiphany, heavy with the significance of waking thoughts brought from darkness. The train had stopped.

The last tick of a clock can yank the deepest sleeper from their dreams. The silence is a shock after all the tocks and ticks that came before. The final featherweight of effort is wrung from the clock-spring, all of its windings spent. The second hand's measured beat has counted away eternity, and now it pauses. And the sleeper wakes, aching for the missing beat. So many things are not apparent until they're gone. So much beauty unseen until it breaks.

Jenna lifted her head from the glass, leaving it stained with blood. The carriage light hurt her eyes. She yawned, wide, wider, widest. The seat transmitted a tremble to her, the echo of an idling engine. A siding most probably. Jenna nodded to herself. Night trains aren't in a hurry, their sloth is well hidden, an hour or two idling on a siding isn't here or there.

Hemar lay sprawled across the table between their seat, head in his arms, whimpering at his dreams. In the facing seat Mikeos leaned back, hidden under his hat, his breathing deep and slow.

The reflection that had so baffled Jenna was her own. A little distance, a little perspective, and the understanding came. The light caught her face at a shallow angle, making a ghost to float against the velvet dark outside. Jenna saw herself frown. At Ansos the witches used the grazing dawn to reveal secrets time has buried. When the morning sun scrapes across hard and dusty ground, the lines of walls not seen for a thousand years are shown again, betrayed by shadows. Jenna saw the effect reversed upon herself. The glancing light sought out the lines of wrinkles not yet scored, a future history, Father Time's sketch of things to come.

Jenna turned, scanning the seat tops. Most other passengers were slumped too low to see. She yawned again. A peace held her. Idling. A bend in the river, quiet water before the rapids.

"Ma'am?"

The conductor startled her, appearing in the aisle, or perhaps there all along and unseen until this point. Jenna looked around, fully awake now. Mikeos should have sprung up when she startled. Some gunslinger! She kicked his shins under the table but he only muttered.

"What've you done to him?" Jenna demanded.

"The passengers are just sleeping. When the train stops along the way, the passengers sleep." The conductor didn't shrug but Jenna could almost hear it in his voice.

"But not me?"

"I brought the first man here, Jenna Crossard. Issac 'Sykes' Bannon came here on this train, and when he died my sister returned him to life. But you humans are a mystery and your deaths no less so. When she brought Sykes back my sister fracture all your deaths – an accident she appears unable to fix. Now some of you can't die, and corpsers walk.

I brought Sykes Bannon along the first track to Station Rock. The rock was a piece of something I once loved. All that remains of it. And my brother and sister are also all that remains of something I once loved. We were many long ago, then fewer, then few, and now three. It's our destiny to be singular, the destiny of any race that passes its childhood, to combine its strengths and overcome its divisions."