Tracks

by K. M. Tolan

  She didn’t blink an eye. “What’s the point? You believe I’d say anything just to get you to call your track.”

  “How old’s Cannoli, anyway? About your father’s age? What do you get a guy like that for a wedding present? Vitamins? I’d buy him an actual cannoli to go along with the cake, but he looks like he’s wolfed down a truckload already.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “You’re not marrying him.”

  She paused, studying him with a silence thick enough to stifle his breath. Her lips moved to form a question before clamping shut again. She spoke again as if through sheer willpower. “You know I’m not marrying him.”

  “I don’t know all of it,” he pressed.

  “Yes, you do.” She turned and headed up the track at a trot.

  Not sure what to think, Vincent followed. This was Samantha, after all. The mistress of hidden secrets. A sudden idea broke through the awkwardness of the moment. “We can find Timepiece by first getting Freedom. She’ll probably know where he is, especially if she’s been kept in the house herself.”

  “Unless she’s out in the power plant with the other slaves,” Samantha quickly returned, suggesting she was agreeable to a change of subject. “Getting to either of them isn’t going to be that easy if my father’s already got his guard up. Honestly, Vincent, I haven’t figured out how we’re going to get in if there’s a reception waiting for us.”

  He expelled an impatient breath. “That’s your job, remember?”

  Her eyes narrowed as she slung her bindle over a shoulder. Pushing past him, she pointedly took the lead.

  Soon it became a chore just to find the ties, and finally the rails themselves. Bent by roots from trees a lot older than himself and sunken in a thick matt of leaves, the track succumbing to an onslaught of nature and time. Eventually, they found themselves picking their way along little more than a slight rise through heavy forest. His heart had buried itself beneath the uselessness of their situation by evening. He was hot and sticky from sweat. His refurbished duster felt like a heating pad where he had rolled it up on his shoulder to cushion the bindle stick. His cane dug through loam and rotting leaves, still coming up hard against the remnants of steel bars. The track was still there, but it wouldn’t be hosting any train again unless you counted centipedes and worms.

  “This is as dead an end as it gets,” Samantha muttered beside him, wiping at her brow. “Well, Cannoli did say this was a shot in the dark. Idiot hobo mumbo-jumbo. God only knows where we are right now. Halfway to somebody else’s version of Michigan, no doubt.”

  “You have a better idea? We’re supposed to just walk down that main line from Kingsbury Run into the barony with yegg packed in as thick as fleas?”

  She raised her chin and held up a hand. “Shut up for a second. Can you hear that?”

  He stilled his frustration and listened. A slow rhythmic whoosh or rumble. Not the kind made by steam engines. “Waves,” he realized.

  “Lake Erie,” she identified with a satisfied nod. “We’ll have to follow the shore eastward to find the barony.”

  “I’m not sure we’re in Hobohemia anymore,” he warned. “You don’t know what we’re going to find down there.”

  She started walking through brush toward the waves. “The barony’s already half out of Hobohemia since the trains stopped coming in. Part of the reason we keep steam children like Freedom imprisoned on the estate is to keep from slipping the rest of the way out. All baronies are like anchor cities. There’s a good chance we’ll find the Erie Railroad no matter where we are.”

  You’re just guessing at this point. Vincent shook his head, but followed her anyway. It was getting late, and they were both too tired to hike much further.

  They cut through the woods and found themselves standing along a narrow mix of sand, ground up shells, and rounded pebbles. “Big” was an understatement for Lake Erie when you couldn’t see anything across the horizon but gray waters. Rolling up his pant legs, he experimented with an incoming wave. It was cold. Swearing, he settled for splashing some of the icy water across his face and found a sun-bleached log to sit on and scowl at the lake’s deceptive invitation.

  The sun vanished, the log sheltering a sputtering campfire where Samantha tended bubbling cans of pork and beans, their aroma prodding his growling stomach. He eyed her over his helping. Being outdoors suited her, Samantha’s skin glowing with a fine sheen from the day’s walk, her dark hair cascading in untamed curls down her back. Fighting that demon inside her made for a strength of character he envied.

  Okay, he got himself in head over heels for the girl. Perhaps more than he should. Trust her? No, that wasn’t ever part of the package when it came to Miss Samantha Van Erie, any more than expecting a knot-free ball of twine. For some reason that only added to her allure. But what if she was right? What if the only thing she really cared about was the rock?

  Sitting in the sand with her back against the log, she noticed his attention and glowered back as if guessing his thoughts. “Would it help to say I’m sorry about being so snippy earlier?”

  “Might.”

  “People don’t care about me. Not supposed to.” She returned to her helping of beans for a few more bites before sighing and setting her can aside. “Look, I’m not used to how you treat me. Especially knowing what I am. I don’t know how to handle it. Anything I hear sounds like a bunch of lies, and I don’t like being lied to.” Her eyes lowered. “Especially by you. Look, can we talk about something else?”

  “So you do care,” he pressed. “Jesus, Sammy, is it really so hard to say?”

  “What? That I love you too? That I’m willing to poison the one person who actually makes me feel human? Damn it, Vin, I can’t love you. I don’t dare. Not with the choices I have to make.”

  “What? Being a baroness?”

  “Being yegg. Look, just eat your damn beans. You knew what you were getting into with me.”

  “Fair enough,” he replied, his appetite sinking under the weight of her reasoning. He had choices too. “You’ve had all day to work out a way to get to my sister. So what’s the plan?”

  She frowned. “Signet ring first.” Samantha paused, her eyes narrowing. “What if you offered to work for my father? Just walked in, handed me over, and pretended to take your father’s place?”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “You’ll be watched but I won’t, at least not as much. I could sneak in and grab the ring from the safe while father’s distracted with you. The only hard part is figuring a way to get you out to where you can call in the track.”

  “You want me to pledge to the man who had my father murdered? I’m not doing that, Sammy. Not even as a trick. Besides, the baron didn’t strike me as being so naïve. He’d know this was a ruse.”

  “It gets you in the house.”

  “No.”

  “Father would jump at the chance to have a gandy dancer helping him open new markets, not to mention finding a route around troublesome hobos. He might even see you as leverage to get Freedom’s cooperation in running the diesels on live track.”

  “Yeah, he had the gall to suggest that right after enslaving her in front of me. No.”

  “Damn it. Let me help you!”

  He softened his stubborn tone. “You are, Sammy. Keep thinking. You’ll get us in.”

  The woods kept to its tangled character the following day, requiring them to stay along the shoreline when not discouraged by rocky edges or muddy embankments. Per Samantha’s directions, he held to an eastward course, the girl showing respectable stamina for the root-laced game trails and humidity. They made camp that night on a meadow under a starry night much like the evening he had spent on Red’s porch with her staring up beside him. He preferred to be around this Samantha. During quiet times, she tended to step out from behind the bars life threw around her.

  They greeted the next day with achy stretches and a last helping of eggs. He knew they’d have to find the barony soon or he’d hav
e to call up a track back to King Cannoli and square one. Square one without a handcart to get them there.

  By noon, his resolve had mixed with hope’s residue at the bottom of an hourglass whose patience had run out. “We’re lost.”

  She shook her head and pointed over the trees lining an increasingly difficult shoreline. “I think I found what we’re looking for.”

  “Quarry?” he ventured, squinting at a gash of exposed rock running alongside inland rolls of a turbulent landscape.

  She nodded. “That’s where the limestone came from to build my family’s estate. If I’m right, there’s old track leading from it.” She raised a hopeful grin. “Unwatched track.”

  “We were losing the beach anyways,” Vincent added by way of agreement, casting a critical eye on the sharp slopes ahead of them.

  What they found wasn’t as much a quarry as an opportunistic gouging wherever the land allowed for easier transport. Yes, there were tracks, though the forest nearly swallowed the narrow gauge line. They lost most of the day’s light by the time a rusted set of half-buried rails led them to a fenced-off slash through a low hill. He eyed the narrow defile beyond, imagining all sorts of trouble in the heavy brush and thick runners creeping up yellowing rock. Fallen chunks of limestone cast orange-and-black shadows from the low sun behind them.

  He measured the hill’s forested slope against the weariness in Samantha’s eyes. “We’ll rest at the top,” he decided, aiming his reluctant legs toward an old deer trail. “Damn sure don’t want to climb this in the dark.”

  He didn’t need her nod after they reached the crest to tell him they’d found their destination. The occasional rumble of engines and coupling boxcars came through the trees. Nor were his eyes disappointed upon seeing a broad north-south arc of floodlights playing across ribbons of twisting rail at the hill’s base below them. Small steamers plied their trade like river barges among islands of boxcars, all under the watch of a two-story brick switch house. A line of larger engines growled and clicked with an urgency as unnatural as their rectangular shapes.

  “Diesels,” he hissed. “Bastard’s got more of those damn things. Think they’re hybrids?”

  “Most likely, or going to be,” she agreed. “Don’t get any ideas. Your sister wouldn’t be in one of them. Steam children are kept in the boilers most of the time. He can run those engines without them, at least in the yard where they won’t go far.” She gestured to the south where a stainless steel tank rose amid three levels of encircling pipes. “The white building to the left is the boiler room—all gas fed. Notice how there isn’t even a wisp of steam anywhere. The pipes are a closed system in order to keep the steam children inside.”

  “And double fenced with barbed wire at the top,” he observed, pointing out the rows of steel mesh surrounding the facility. “Looks like a power plant next door where those big fat pipes are going in. Figure he’s using the steam children for that too, the slaving bastard. I can see guards and dogs walking along the fence.”

  He studied the massive mechanical pile of girders, pipes, and other machinery from which spooled a spider’s delight of electric wires. He heard a faint drone of turbines over the yard noises. “You don’t know anything about how to get in there, Sammy?”

  She shook her head. “This’s all new since the last escape.”

  “Fair bet Freedom’s in that thing.”

  “Or up at the estate,” Samantha amended, aiming a finger to a lone track curving around a broad incline east toward a bluff overlooking the yard. A series of square concrete pillars ran alongside the roadbed. Steel crossbars carried more than power lines—the girders also supported a single long pipe wrapped in white insulation.

  Vincent caught the peaks of a grandiose chateau atop the rise, its pale brown walls consisting of the afore-mentioned limestone. “That all one building?”

  She nodded. “Over two hundred and fifty rooms, not counting bedrooms. Good luck finding the emergency vent. If you do, it’ll send her down that pipe to join her sisters here.” Samantha turned to face him like a gambler playing their last card. “You aren’t going to get near that slave boiler. Even if you could, it’s a shell game. Freedom might be in that tank with the other steam children my father’s managed to capture since her last visit, or up at the house in an equally secure system. Even if you did find her, can you seriously pin everything on her finding Timepiece before people discover she’s escaped? Face it, Vin, you can’t do this. Our best bet is getting to that signet ring in the house vault without being caught, and then laying track before we’re found out. Which, by the way, I seriously doubt we’ll do. Just turn me over to my father and play nice.”

  He wanted to trust her. “We’ll discuss Plan B when we need to.”

  “You don’t have a Plan A,” she fumed. “Vincent, get my father to trust you and everything will work out.”

  He eyed the idling diesels. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m not bending a knee to that bastard, even under false pretenses? I’ve something in mind to reduce that little shell game of yours, and give us a distraction to get inside the house.” He swept an arm between the locomotives and the power plant.

  Her expression assured him his idea sounded no less insane than it felt. “You’re kidding me.”

  “If I can get a steam engine rolling, I’ll have no trouble with those diesels. The hard part will be figuring out how to get up into that switch house to line up track between those hybrids and that dead end up against the power plant fence.”

  “You seriously expect you can walk up to those machines unseen?”

  He folded his arms. “I’ll get you to your safe after seeing how your daddy’s fancy no-leak pipes handle a few thousand tons of runaway diesel. If I know Freedom, she’ll be out in a flash and helping us. If things don’t work out, we’ll high tail up to the big house and see if we can’t find a handy side door. You can show us where that emergency vent is, and she’ll zoom through the pipe to the power plant and free herself with the rest once I blow those boilers. I’m still betting she knows where Timepiece is being held.”

  “You’re not even thinking about the signet ring, are you?”

  “They have Katy,” he spat, his first priority asserting itself. Damn Willy and the rest. If everything went his way, the Erie Railroad would be looking for a new baron anyway. He was going to find and kill that son-of-a-bitch.

  She issued a relenting sigh. “Fine, we’ll do it your way and you can wish you’d listened to me afterward. Don’t worry about the switch house. I’ll take care of it.”

  “By yourself? You don’t know how many people are up there.”

  Her voice lowered to a growl, Samantha’s eyes darkening. “I said I’d take care of it, and I will. And yes, I know what handles to pull.”

  “There could be some tough customers up there, Sammy.”

  “I’m tougher.” Her smile seemed forced. “Stop worrying. You’ll have your hands full with those diesels as is. I’ll meet you at the south garden gate straight up the slope. Go left once you reach a low ivy wall and I’ll be waiting.”

  He didn’t like the idea of her going off alone, but conceded her point with a tip of his cane. At least the arguments were over. Time to actually do something. “Let’s go.”

  Sixteen

  Vincent crept down the darkened slope, wincing each time he or Samantha sent a rivulet of loose stone into the intervening brush bordering the rail yard. In a rare stroke of luck, a low fog had rolled in from the nearby lake, the floodlights projecting ineffectual yellow shafts across obscured tracks. He could hear the growling of the diesels ahead rather than see the trio of locomotives. He and Samantha had made the grounds without incident, having left their bindles behind on the slope. Either his plan was going to work, or they would shortly be guests of the Erie Railroad. There would be no second chance, and no going home without Freedom and Timepiece.

  The mists were uncommonly warm, the air humid and sticking to every pore as they hopped over t
he first set of glistening rails. What had Dad said when he talked about these particular machines? Diesels were all buttons and levers arrayed along a simple dashboard. He only had to figure out which one to pull. At least the motors were already running.

  He almost ran into the first engine after tripping over a series of slick tracks. The diesels weren’t coupled, so he didn’t have to worry about getting them all moving at once. Just one of the massive locomotives should do the trick.

  Using the engines’ rumble and clicks to cover the sound of his crunching feet across the ballast, he reached the furthest diesel’s access ladder below the walkway and climbed up. He looked down at Samantha who stood beside the engine. He raised his voice. “So where do we meet, again?”

  “The garden’s south gate just up the hill,” Samantha shouted back.

  He looked off toward the switch house’s lighted windows, the building edging the slope below where she said the garden gate would be. “Just be careful.”

  She threw back a quick smile before running off into the fog.

  Feeling less than assured of her safety, he entered the forward cabin.

  Someone’s surprised snort preceded a smashing impact to his jaw. He tumbled back out onto the walkway. His stunned mind recovered enough to see a uniformed guard charge from the control room with a bellowing roar. Grinning, the bull pulled a thick truncheon from his belt.

  Vincent deflected a skull-cracking blow with his cane, lashing out with his legs to trip the bull up before he swung again. Unbalanced, the guard staggered back, giving Vincent the chance he needed. Staggering to his feet, he dodged another lash of the club. There was something more substantial than a cane in his hand now. He slammed the wedged end of his heavy lining rod between the yard bull’s beady red eyes.

  The cop just stood there with a stupid expression on his broad face.

  Swearing, Vincent swung his rod into the man’s chest, sending him tumbling off the walkway into a motionless heap beside the roadbed.