“Oh, that’s only the beginning!” the mamba said. “Mamba venom also causes dizziness, nausea, difficulty swallowing, heart palpitations, and convulsions! Though it’s true, it’s usually the suffocation that does them in.”
“Well, I think it’s horrible.”
“You’re just jealous,” the snake said, “because you can’t shoot poison out of your teeth.”
At this point Kate excused herself to go to bed. She was as tired as she could ever remember being, and she wanted to find a Band-Aid for her shin. And she was worried about the polar bear. And the invader animals. And the train was still short of fuel. When all this started she’d thought it was just going to be one big thrill ride, and it kind of was, but adventures were turning out to be a lot of hard work, too. And kind of stressful.
Tom headed the other way, toward the back of the train.
“The sleeper car’s this way,” Kate said.
“I know,” Tom said. “But the candy car is this way.”
Kate had almost forgotten about the candy car. She was tired—but you could never be too tired for candy.
Kate wasn’t sure where it was, but it turned out that while she was hanging out in the library Tom had—with his usual surplus of energy—been off exploring the whole train from front to back. From the outside the candy car looked like an ordinary red metal boxcar, even a little on the rusty side—inside it was full of bright light and rainbow colors. A wave of cool air rolled out, heavy with the smell of sugar. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with polished wooden shelves, and every inch of every shelf was loaded with candy. It was like Aladdin’s cave crossed with the candy counter at a supermarket and multiplied by a million.
There were bundles of lollipops, and coils of black and red licorice ropes, and barrels of caramel cubes and fruit chews and sours and mints and nut clusters and brittles and candy canes and gobstoppers and honeycombs and gumballs and Swedish Fish. There were heaps of marshmallows and hard candies, and armies of gummy bears, and fields of candy corn. Candy necklaces hung from the ceiling.
There was a machine where you could type any flavor and it would deliver that flavor of jelly beans, by the pound. There was every candy bar ever made. Above all there was chocolate: milk chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate, solid bricks and bars of it wrapped in silver and gold foil. There were trays and trays of chocolates stuffed with caramel and cherries and nuts and nougat and coconut and toffee and cream and pretzels and everything else you could imagine and a lot of things you couldn’t.
It was all arranged by size and type and flavor and color, as neatly and carefully as a library. And it was all free, and it was all theirs.
“You laughed when I asked for a candy car,” Tom said.
“I know.”
“You thought it was funny.”
“Whatever! You were right! Don’t rub it in!” She hated when Tom was right. But if he had to be right about something, she was glad it was this. “Come on, let’s see if we can eat one of everything. Except the coconut ones. Those are all yours.” She hated coconut almost as much as she hated Tom being right.
But that night she never even made it past the chocolates, and Tom got stuck trying to stump the jelly bean machine till he couldn’t eat any more.
Afterward they walked back together, happy, not talking, knowing that their cozy sleeping car was waiting for them, stopping only at the boxcar to make sure the polar bear was warm and sleeping peacefully. The train was chugging along beside a mountain lake as flat and smooth as glass. At home there were always streetlights around to spoil the night sky, but now, far away from the cities and suburbs, Kate and Tom really saw for the first time in their lives the blazing-white Milky Way spilling out across the deep black sky, which was perfectly reflected in the black mirror of the lake.
Uncle Herbert had said something before about a twilight star. She wondered if he’d meant one of these.
Then she went to bed. If the world were a just and fair place, she and Tom probably would’ve gotten stomachaches, but they didn’t. Every once in a while the world is unfair in a good way.
15
The Branch Line
THE NEXT MORNING WHEN KATE WOKE UP THEY WERE moving more slowly because the train was heading uphill, into mountains.
The cat and the mamba and the heron and the porcupine played with the baby pangolin. He’d finally woken up and was drinking milk from a bottle. They’d made a new, even more luxurious nest for him in a big salad bowl from the kitchen lined with a soft, thick towel. He was unbelievably cute for something whose entire body was basically covered in fingernails.
The polar bear was still asleep, but the fish and the water Kate left for her were gone. That was a good sign: She’d eaten and drunk. Kate left her more of both, then went forward to the engine to check on the Silver Arrow.
They were crossing a steep slope covered with thin grass and gray rocks. Powdery snow fell out of a gray sky, and she picked up her heavy black coat from the sleeper car on the way forward.
But cold as it was outside, it was still warm in the cab. She breathed in the smell of steam and coal smoke and hot metal.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
HUNGRY
NEED MORE FUEL
Right. It had said that before. She checked the tender, and it was getting pretty empty, just a few piles of coal left in the corners.
“Do you know where we can get more?”
MAYBE
“Maybe? How can you not know?!”
THERE’S NOTHING ON THE MAIN LINE
WE’LL HAVE TO TRY A BRANCH LINE INSTEAD
“Okay. Is that bad?”
WE’LL FIND OUT
THE BRANCH LINES ARE NOT WELL EXPLORED
“Well, I guess we’ll explore them!”
There she went, looking on the bright side. She was as bad as Tom.
An hour or so later they came to a fork in the tracks and stopped. Kate and Tom climbed down from the engine and walked a few yards ahead to where a branch line peeled off to the right. There was a big iron lever by the side of the tracks that shunted trains from one line to another. They pulled it and ran back to the warm cab, and the big train rumbled on down the new track.
PROMISE ME SOMETHING
“Sure,” Kate said. “Anything.”
DON’T LET MY FIRE GO OUT
IT’S THE ONE THING I’M SCARED OF. I DON’T WANT TO GO TO THE ROUNDHOUSE!
Kate and Tom looked at each other.
“Sure. Of course.”
“We promise,” Tom said. “What’s the Roundhouse?”
I CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT IT
After a few hours they entered a silent, misty forest. The tops of the trees disappeared overhead into thick fog. Kate knew it was still daytime, but the sun was hidden by the mist. It looked miles deep.
Still: so far so good. She found Tom in the dining car eating a muffin and looking out the window at the giant trees in the gloom.