Then Kate was done. She took a deep breath and leaned back against the wall in the corridor. Whew. That went well.
At that exact moment a loud, excited chittering and squawking came from a compartment down the hall. Kate hurried over, straightening her conductor’s hat. A striking white bird with a black cap and an orange beak was perched on the luggage rack, glaring down at the compartment’s other occupant, which was the big porcupine.
“Get down from there!” the porcupine said. “Right now!”
“No.”
“This is my compartment, you unbelievably unpleasant bird!”
“I don’t see how my being here could inconvenience you even slightly!”
“If you don’t get down right now, I will stand up on my hind legs and—”
“Porcupines can’t stand on their hind legs,” the bird said.
“We can! For brief periods!”
Though he didn’t demonstrate.
“Look,” the bird said, “if we just agree that the luggage rack and the upper edge of the seat backs are my domain, and—”
“Why don’t we agree that you’ll get out of my compartment right now or I’ll quill you into next week!”
“I’m not even sure what that means,” Kate said. “What’s going on here?”
She had only just found out that animals could talk, and already she was wishing these two would shut up for a minute.
“I’ll tell you what’s going on,” the porcupine said. “I have a special ticket for my own private compartment, and now this trash-eating seagull won’t get out of it!”
The porcupine proudly displayed his ticket, which was stuck on the point of one of his spines.
“You are betraying your ignorance,” said the bird. “I’m not a seagull. I’m a roseate tern.”
“Well, good for you.”
“It is good, thank you very much. And we don’t eat trash, we eat fish.” He drew himself up with as much dignity as a roseate tern can muster. “We are plunge divers.”
Kate examined the porcupine’s ticket more closely.
“It says where available,” she said. “That means you get your own compartment if we have one. But I’m not sure there are any empty compartments right now.”
“This compartment would be empty,” the porcupine pointed out, “if you’d just get that bird out of it!”
“I don’t have anywhere to put him,” Kate said firmly.
“Put him in with the hawks.”
“Hawks prey on terns,” said the bird.
The porcupine shrugged. “Circle of life.”
“It’s not! It’s the circle of death!”
Both animals looked at Kate. Incredibly, it seemed like they were waiting for her to settle the argument.
It was the kind of thing nobody ever asked her to do at home. At home there was always somebody else—a teacher, a parent, somebody. But here there was only her. She was going to have to think of something.
But what?
“Maybe,” she said finally, to the porcupine, “you’d be more comfortable in our library car.”
10
The Library Car
IT WAS A CALCULATED RISK. KATE HADN’T ACTUALLY seen the library car yet, and she didn’t know exactly where it was. She wasn’t even 100 percent sure it existed. But it was the only thing she could think of.
“Library car.” The porcupine considered it. Then he sighed, as if library cars were an indignity that he suffered on a daily basis. “Oh, all right. If we must!”
The porcupine’s white-tipped quills swayed stiffly from side to side as he waddled past Kate and out into the corridor. She followed him. Though not too closely. On their way they passed Tom, still in his pajamas.
“Why don’t you head on up to the engine,” she said. “See if the train needs more coal.”
She had no idea if Tom was going to do what she said. Most of the time when she told Tom to do something, he either did nothing or the exact opposite. But now he just nodded and headed forward.
Look at that. She could get used to this conducting business.
Kate and the porcupine walked back along the swaying, rumbling, chuff-chuff ing train, through the sleeper car, then the dining car, then the kitchen car, then the other kitchen car, then the other dining car. Kate was starting to get a little nervous when they finally opened the door to the library car.
All credit to Uncle Herbert: It was not a disappointment.
This was the extra-tall indigo-colored car she’d seen earlier. Every square inch of its walls was crammed with books—the shelves ran all the way up to the ceiling, which must have been fifteen feet high. There were even bookshelves over the doors and windows. The floor was covered in thick red oriental rugs, and there were two overstuffed leather armchairs and a big, long, comfy couch. It even smelled like a library.
OMG, Kate thought. I am awesome at inventing train cars!
The porcupine looked around.
“It’ll do.”
He climbed up onto one of the armchairs, settled down, and closed his eyes.
“I’m mostly nocturnal,” he explained.
Then he went to sleep.
Kate walked the length of the library car, running her fingertips over the spines of the books. Each bookshelf had a wooden bar along it to keep the books from falling off when the train swayed; you could unlatch it and swing it open to get a book out. It was exactly what she’d imagined, only more so.
She skimmed a few titles. It was an incredibly random bunch of books: fat, dignified old hardcovers; big, skinny picture books; cheap paperbacks with spines so worn that you couldn’t read the titles anymore. There were guides to identifying moths in distant parts of the world, and multivolume sets of the complete letters of people with long, unpronounceable names, and romance novels with heroines spilling out of their gowns and heroes busting out of their shirts, and thrillers and horror stories with creepy one-word titles like The Trees and The Leaves, and important grown-up novels that she mentally reminded herself to skim later for interesting and/or bad words.
And every once in a while, like a friendly face in a crowd, there were the kinds of books that Kate liked, which fell into two general categories: books about science and books about ordinary people who find out that magic is real.
Kate took down a promising-looking book from the second category and sat on the couch with it. Twenty minutes later, when the hero of the novel was just at the point of discovering that the horrible, abusive private school he’d been transferred to after the unexplained deaths of his parents had a secret school underneath it, accessible via the locker of that one kid who had mysteriously disappeared last year, something alerted her to the fact that she was being watched.
It was the cat—the one she’d met before, who was neither a big cat nor a small cat. She must have come in without Kate hearing. Her head had dramatic black stripes, almost like a badger’s. Kate really wanted to know what kind of cat she was.
“Sorry,” Kate said. “I didn’t see you there.”
“I saw you there,” the cat said.
“For a second I thought you were a pillow.”