The Golden Cut

by Merl Fluin

  “Agreed,” said Theta. “Let’s find another place. And this time we leave these filthy beasts of yours behind, TJ.”

  “I need them.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re already riding our best horse. We can hog-tie Mei-Lin on the saddle in front of Cyril.” Theta pointed towards a big man who was feeding a black gelding. “There’s enough weird shit around here without this.”

  TJ looked at the homunculi among the trees. “Ok,” she said at last. “You’re right. They’re starting to slow us down. And it’s time to pick up the pace.”

  39.

  Every face was ghostly, lit from below by reflected moonlight. Only TJ resembled the living. Her eyes flashed above her snow-flecked beard as she strode out into the night, leading the Shire behind her. Distant lights revealed the position of the railroad station on the edge of a dark little town.

  “I don’t like this snow,” said Theta under her breath. “We’re too visible.”

  “Stop worrying,” said TJ. “I already told you, they’ll be sitting ducks. Just hang back here until you hear our signal.” She turned to Lala. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  TJ scanned the faces of the assembled Star gang, handed the Shire’s reins to Theta, and headed for the station. Lala followed.

  They walked without speaking. The white night crunched beneath their feet. They breathed sharp and fast.

  The station came into view, a simple wooden platform with a shack to one side. The railroad tracks were dim beneath the snow; the wooden structure seemed to float in a depthless haze. But the light in the window was steady.

  With her Winchester in her arms, TJ crept to the window and peered in. The stationmistress sat reading a book by the light of an oil lamp. There was a tin cup amid a mess of papers on the table beside her. Her feet rested on a small iron stove. She was alone.

  TJ gave Lala a nod, and together they glided to the door. Another nod from TJ, and Lala knocked and called: “Ma’am, is the train coming soon? It’s awful cold out here.”

  The door opened a crack and the stationmistress looked out. “Heavens, my girl, there’s no train stopping here till morning.”

  “Oh. I guess I got it wrong. I thought I could make a connection to Spinfoam City tonight. I seen the trains racing through the dark often enough.”

  “The night trains run, sure, but they don’t stop at our little station. No one wants to travel at this hour as a rule. You’re a stranger here, I think.”

  The door burst open and hit the stationmistress in the chest, knocking her to the floor. TJ strode past Lala into the shack, put one booted foot on the stationmistress’s chest and pointed the Winchester into her face.

  “I’m always happy to meet someone new,” she said.

  Snowflakes swarmed in through the open door and set the stove hissing. The steam mixed with the vapour that poured from TJ’s nose and mouth. Lala darted into the room and closed the door behind her. The woman on the floor curled into a ball and put her arms around her head.

  “I wonder if you’d do us the courtesy of changing the signal to get the next train to stop for us,” said TJ. Lala pulled the stationmistress to her feet and dragged her over to the signal gears. TJ kept the rifle trained on both of them.

  “There’ll be no money on the next train through here,” the stationmistress said. Her voice shook, but her back was straight. “Bank train’s not coming tonight.”

  “We ain’t bandits!” said Lala.

  TJ cut her off with a growl. “Never mind what we are or what we want. Just throw that signal.”

  The woman obeyed.

  “Now tie her to the chair,” TJ instructed Lala.

  Lala also obeyed.

  When it was done, TJ inspected the rope, tested the knots, grunted, and leant her rifle against the doorframe. She pulled Lala to her and kissed her on the lips. “How long till the next train comes through?”

  The stationmistress did not answer. TJ hit her hard across the face with the back of her six-fingered hand, keeping hold of Lala’s arm with the other.

  “Thirty minutes.” There was blood on the woman’s mouth.

  “Plenty of time for everyone to get into position,” said TJ.

  Lala went outside, howled twice like a wolf, and came back in. TJ sat down in the rocking chair. “Hey, this coffee’s still warm. Come over and sit in my lap a little while, sugar. Our hostess won’t pay us any mind.”

  TJ kept one eye on the clock. Its tick punctuated the sounds from the rocking chair.

  Five minutes passed.

  TJ picked up her rifle, and Lala pulled a six-gun from the pocket of her untidy skirt. They went to the window that looked out onto the platform.

  The snow had stopped, and the air was still. Small lights appeared in the distance, growing larger as the panting of a steam engine became audible.

  Lala crossed to the table and extinguished the lamp. The railroad track snapped into focus behind the windowpane. The engine groaned and shuddered as it pulled to a halt outside.

  TJ and Lala were out the door, across the platform and in the engineer’s cab in seconds. They shoved their guns into the engineer’s face. At the far end of the train TJ saw a figure leap from the caboose and stop dead as two others on horseback rode into view with rifles on their shoulders.

  Without taking her eyes from the engineer, TJ leaned out of the cab and called along the track: “Many passengers back there?”

  “Yeah. Mostly in the first carriage. Few animal trucks too.”

  “Get this thing uncoupled and get rid of them. You,” she said to the engineer, “help my gang uncouple the first car from the rest. We only want that and the engine.”

  Two of Theta appeared behind her. She stepped aside to let them lead the engineer away at gunpoint.

  A commotion erupted behind the tender: shouts and thuds from the first passenger car. Lala jumped down to find out what was happening. She returned to report that the passengers were refusing to get out of the car.

  “Fuck” said TJ. She kicked at the cab door. “Fuck!”

  Lala’s face flared yellow. TJ stuck her head back out of the cab. Yellow light poured from the stationmistress’s window. “The bitch has got loose.” Yelled to the others: “We’re out of time!”

  The two Theta frogmarched the engineer back to the cab. TJ and Lala dragged him inside.

  “Get going.” TJ gestured at the firebox with her rifle.

  “Everyone on board!” Lala shouted behind.

  A scramble to get onto the footboards.

  The train pulled away.

  ***

  The light of the snow was wiped out by the dark of the night. The dark rubbed itself against the windows as the train jerked and rattled along invisible tracks. TJ left Lala and a couple of the others up front in the cab and made her way along the footboard.

  When she reached the passenger car she stepped out of the hurtling cold and into the carriage. Eight of the Star gang, including five of Theta, stood or sat at either end with guns drawn but not cocked. On the floor of the aisle Mei-Lin lay bound and gagged. The seats were crowded with passengers. Some were pale and quiet, some red-faced and sobbing; some leaned over the seats before or behind them, squawking and gesticulating in the direction of the gang members. Standing on her seat, yelling her head off and towering above them all, was Damsol Arcadio. One of the circus clowns was tugging at Damsol’s sleeve, trying to shush her back into her seat, but Damsol was having none of it. Then the clown said, “Christ, it’s TJ!” and Damsol instantly shut up.

  TJ looked around the carriage, then said to Theta: “Where’s everyone else?”

  “A little trouble broke out after you and Lala went to the station. Some decided not to get aboard.”

  “Still didn’t trust me, huh?”

  Theta smiled. “Let’s just say that some of us were more inclined to play the game than others. By the way, our prisoner’s not been in great shape. She won’t be much use to us at this rate.”

>   “Untie her then,” said TJ. “I don’t imagine she’ll try to jump out the window of a moving train.”

  Damsol found her voice. “Holy shit. First you rob my money, now you’re holding up trains!”

  TJ looked surprised. “Your money? Oh... yeah. Sorry about that.”

  More clowns sat sullenly in the seats behind Damsol. One of them patted the shoulder of a boy with a green-wrapped elongated head. The boy was crying. The scrawny couple from Neutrino were on the other side of the aisle, the man’s face hidden by a grotesque mask with bloated cheeks. Beside him was the doctor who had tended to TJ’s arm after she had first lost Cowhead; the doc whispered to a Soldier Boy who sat amid a group of kids. A Companion of the Rosy Hours held a hand mirror and applied kohl to his eyes. Irrie Corrie was in a seat by herself, knitting.

  Mei-Lin crouched upright on the floor and rubbed her wrists. “I know you from somewhere,” Damsol said to her.

  “Of course you do. I’m –” She glanced at TJ. “I’m Cowhead’s mother.”

  Damsol flinched. Everyone in the car fell silent. The only sounds were the clatter of the tracks and the boy’s weeping.

  “Is this true?” Damsol asked TJ.

  “Yeah,” said TJ, and started to laugh. “So fucking what? None of it matters. Yeah, it’s true. You always did say she was no ordinary horse.”

  Damsol climbed out of her seat and knelt in the aisle at Mei-Lin’s feet. “Holy sister,” she said. “Please forgive me. We had no idea that TJ was abusing your child in her circus act.”

  TJ guffawed. “Holy sister my arse. It was her idea in the first place! She gave the kid to me so that the rest of the Eleven Twenty-Threes wouldn’t find out that she’d –”

  She stopped. Mei-Lin flushed ruby red.

  TJ laughed again.

  “Wow, Mei-Lin. Best joke ever. You and Cantos and the golden moonchild. And I never even twigged. Oh my, oh my. What a butterfly net.”

  The car door opened and Lala stuck her head in. “Trouble.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I don’t know what. Something lumpy in the sky.”

  “Look,” said Irrie Corrie, pointing to the window beside her.

  A small lizard pressed its pale belly to the glass outside. TJ looked again and it was several lizards that writhed and intertwined on the glass, tumbling over each other without falling. She looked a third time and it was a large paper kite painted to resemble a nest of lizards, or perhaps a shoal of fish, all joined together at the heads. The kite was fastened to the outside of the window by a short string. It banged rhythmically against the glass as the train jolted along.

  “Cut it loose, get it off there!” TJ was frantic. She pushed her way past Lala, out of the carriage and up a set of metal rungs between the car and the engineer’s cab. Scrambling to the top of the tender, she climbed in and hunkered down on a pile of coal. From here she could see the engineer in the cab, where two of Theta were shovelling coal into the firebox. Soot and steam rolled above TJ’s head; coal rattled and shifted beneath her. Coal, fire, steam. Earth and fire and air and water. She slapped her hand to her forehead. “I’ve fucked this up.”

  The steam spread like a virus, turning everything inside the coal truck into dirty fog. TJ’s hands, black with carbon, began to ooze from her wrists. She tried to climb out of the tender and back towards the passenger car, but she slipped and slid on the oily coal. Her limbs flopped like mud.

  An explosion flashed beneath the edge of the coal truck. More explosions followed, loud and fast. It was shooting stars, but they were shooting backwards: they thudded up out of the desert and blazed away into the sky. The night stank of sulphur.

  TJ flailed as she sank through the liquefying coal, her body dark and viscous. The shooting stars disappeared, replaced by sticky silence. Gravity sucked at her, down, down. She trembled briefly at rest at the bottom, then lurched through the floor of the truck.

  She found herself lying in the possum belly beneath the tender. Here there was no steam, just railroad tracks scudding by beneath her spine. Suddenly solid again, she lay still and counted her body parts.

  A screech of metal. The train ground to a stop, its panting laboured.

  She rolled out of the possum belly, landed on all fours on the tracks, and clambered out from between the train’s melting wheels. Black oil ran from the sides of the tender. People stumbled out of the passenger car, slipping on the steps, grasping at doors and windows that buckled beneath them. Mei-Lin fell from the carriage and landed with a clown sprawled motionless on top of her.

  In a speechless daze, Damsol and the others stood around trackside. All was darkness. The horizon was invisible.

  TJ began to scoop oil into her palms from the tracks beneath the tender. Irrie Corrie pulled the clown’s body off Mei-Lin and tipped him over onto his back. He was unconscious and inert. Irrie held his slack jaws and chin while TJ tipped load after load of oil into his mouth until the black shiny surface rose to the level of his lips.

  “Ok,” said Irrie, “I think that’s enough.”

  “I’ll do the scrying,” said TJ. She gripped the clown’s cheeks and forehead in her icy hands. Then, “Look, Mei-Lin, here’s Cowhead. See, I promised we’d find her, didn’t I?”

  Mei-Lin crawled over to stare into the clown’s mouth. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Well, she’s there.”

  “And the Directrix?” asked Theta. “Do you see the Directrix?”

  “Sure I do,” said TJ, rising to her feet. “Spit it out now,” she said to the clown, but he made no response. She prodded him with a foot. “Huh. Dead.” Then she called out to the others: “Everyone back aboard. Theta, please check the cab and get this iron horse moving again. Irrie, keep hold of Mei-Lin.”

  ***

  Back in the passenger car, TJ stood in front of them all and made a speech as the train picked up speed.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a situation. That was an Eleven Twenty-Three attack using elemental magick. We can expect more of the same. And regardless of how we all might feel about each other, our only chance of coming through this is to stick together and defend ourselves. If we can fight the Eleven Twenty-Threes, then we can retrieve the things we’ve lost. Because everyone here has lost something.”

  “Yeah, you’ve lost your fucking mind,” said Damsol from the back of the carriage.

  “Everyone here’s lost something,” TJ repeated, ignoring Damsol. “I don’t just mean that Mei-Lin has lost her child, or that my Star gang friends have lost their Directrix, although god knows those losses are painful enough. I’m talking about the part of ourselves that we’ve all lost, the part that’s invisible. Reach inside yourselves and you can feel the loss, the emptiness where something should be. Feel the yearning. But now that missing part of us is almost within reach, for all of us. We can fight for it, we can win it back. Trust me. All we need is some sleep.”

  A crash snapped everyone awake. The shattered body of the Directrix plummeted through the roof of the carriage and smashed into the floor of the aisle. Its big white head was splintered open.

  Moving as one, the Star gang cocked their pistols and aimed at TJ. She raised her hands and backed towards the door.

  “This is another Eleven Twenty-Three attack,” she said.

  One of Theta cradled the Directrix’s head in her lap, smoothing the yellow wig with her fingers.

  “This damage looks old,” he said. “There are mould spores in the wounds. It’s obvious the Directrix was destroyed quite a while ago.”

  “Time is only distance,” said TJ, her eyes wide. “We’ve covered a lot of ground on this train.”

  “You treacherous cunt –”

  The door at her back flew open and Lala’s frightened face appeared for a split second before TJ stepped backwards and disappeared.

  With Lala’s six-gun in her six-fingered hand, TJ dropped down and through the metalwork beneath the passenger car, sliding horizontal with the railroad tracks ben
eath her back. She fired upwards through the floorboards into the carriage, five fast bullets. Screams and commotion, then the whizz of lead past her ears and into the clanging tracks beneath her. A ricochet missed but got her moving. She shoved the gun into a pocket and crawled upside down along the length of the carriage. Her neck strained to keep her hair and clothes away from the wheels of the train.

  Everything was din and darkness. Her hands were slippery with sweat. Her thighs and shoulder muscles burned.

  She reached the end of the carriage, hurled her arms up over the edge of the platform and hauled herself out. She crouched low and took a few sobbing breaths before standing upright to look through the window. The gun was still in her pocket.