Felicie's Subterfuge

Enemies Out of Friends

Enemies Out of Friends

Emilien and Aloys had pulled their hoods up as they entered the town. Their lighter coloring made them stand out painfully obviously amongst the native Lloegyrians otherwise. They kept their heads down, but they moved with purpose as though they knew where they were going.

Felicie was running along the rooftops, chasing after them without ever lifting her head over the edge of the rooftops. She ran at a crouch, her bare feet sticking on the sloped edge of the crumbling tiles while she used one hand to steady herself at the angle. The rounded Lloegyrian buildings were harder to traverse than the more hard edged ones she was accustomed to running, but with her ability, it wasn't hard to quickly find herself a rhythm.

Cy wasn't as fast as her, but Emilien and Aloys were hardly racing themselves. He didn't fall behind as the two made their way through the broken streets.

They didn't move towards the eastern side of the town, closer to Gascony, as Felicie would have expected. Instead, they walked around the main square, past the locomotive still sitting in pride of place, down a completely different set of abandoned streets, then towards a series of longer buildings that were built around the start of the tracks that the locomotive was resting on back in the square.

The area was guarded by a massive iron gate that was unlocked and partially ajar. Neither man needed to move it to squeeze inside, which was probably for the best since the old metal appear near rusted completely solid.

"What is that?" Felicie asked Cy as the two of them stared at the large yard.

The tracks that crossed through the space were surrounded on all sides by long buildings, a few of which the tracks disappeared into, traveling under tall, sliding doors. The building that Emilien and Aloys chose was directly adjacent to the iron gates.

Every window and the only door were all boarded up, but when Emilien knocked on it, it opened from the inside. The boards moved outward. They weren't actually sealing the exit, only giving the appearance of doing so.

Cy shrugged in response to her question, staring at the entrance. "Let's get closer."

The jump between the nearest building and the one the generals entered was too wide. It also connected directly to the iron fence that led to the gates. The entire area was sealed so that no one could just wonder inside.

They had to climb down into the small street below and run across. Felicie put her hands to the wall and scurried up in a moment, trying to keep her movements quiet. She didn't want the Gasconites inside to know that she was out there. That necessitated her moving slower, allowing Cy to easily keep pace with her.

The two of them lifted themselves onto the roof and crawled to the edge, looking over into a wide open yard that was filled with train tracks. The metal lines were branching off the main line, ending in shorter segments that looked to Felicie like holding spots.

It was on these tracks that she finally saw the cars that Wallis had mentioned. They were clearly different from the engine. Lacking windows, they had an entrance on the shorter wall, and were basically large, metal boxes on metal wheels, stuck on the tracks.

There were seven of them in total, all of them rusted and old. Three were hooked up to each other, their doors closed and locked tight. The remaining four were sitting on different holding tracks, their doors open, though there was no one moving among them.

"This place isn't abandoned." Cy remarked softly, frowning over the area.

Trains had long since faded from use. Especially in a ghost town like this, he would have expected the train yard to be deserted, deteriorated, and rotting into dust and memories.