“Great. How does that help?”
“Because,” Tom said, “it means that I’ve looked inside the mystery car, and you haven’t.”
Kate had completely forgotten it was there.
She’d seen it from the outside, of course. It wasn’t especially mysterious-looking. In fact, it looked exactly like an ordinary old-fashioned boxcar: wooden, not steel, and painted a pale, watery blue. But it had a small door on one side, and now that she looked closely, she saw that it had something painted on it, in faded white paint:
?
Tom waited outside while Kate opened the door and looked.
“Right?” Tom said.
Kate nodded. All that extra energy of his did come in handy sometimes.
“When you’re right,” she said, “you’re right.”
“We should probably talk about this with the Silver Arrow.”
“Maybe. Maybe not, though. It’s disappointingly sensible about things like this.”
They went back up to the engine together.
WELL?
“We’re backing up.” Tom put the engine in reverse.
WHY?
ARE WE GIVING UP?
“We’re not giving up,” Kate said. “We’re backing up.”
HOW FAR?
“Just enough,” Tom said. “Let’s say a mile.”
“Enough for what?”
“Enough,” Kate said. “Do you trust us?”
There was a pause from the Silver Arrow. A long one. Finally it typed:
yes
“Wow,” Tom said. “I didn’t know you even had a font that small.”
MAYBE WE SHOULD PUT KATE BACK IN CHARGE THOUGH
“No, this is good,” Kate said. “You were right. Tom knew what to do.”
AND I’M ALL FOR ENCOURAGING HIM BUT
“Good.”
After they’d backed up about a mile, Tom brought them to a stop. He gave the engine some steam, and the Silver Arrow started moving forward again. Faster. And faster. Soon they were really moving.
Tom hit the whistle:
FOOOOM! FOOOOOOOOOM!
The chuff-chuff of the engine was in double time and getting even faster, merging into a continuous roar. Kate looked outside. There was no stopping now, even if they wanted to.
“Go, Kate!” Tom shouted.
Kate sprinted back through the train to the mystery car.
“Find something to hang on to!” she called to the animals as she shot through the library.
What she’d seen inside the mystery car were two enormous metal cylinders bolted onto the arms of a massive steel girder shaped like a T. The cylinders were bright unpainted steel and flared out into huge cones pointing backward. It was pretty much impossible to mistake them for anything other than what they were: a pair of rocket engines.
“I knew Uncle Herbert should’ve gotten us a rocket!” Kate said to herself.
Unsurprisingly, the operation of rocket engines wasn’t something that the Silver Arrow had covered in their training sessions. Fortunately, these particular rocket engines didn’t seem too complicated. In between them on the T-shaped support was a single small red button. A label under the button read: PUSH ME THEN RUN AWAY
Kate pushed the button.
Immediately, powerful pneumatic mechanisms roared to life and shoved the cylinders outward in both directions, right out through the wooden sides of the boxcar, with a shuddering crash. Splinters flew everywhere. The rocket engines were now sticking out on either side of the train.
Kate ran away as fast as she could.
A calm voice began to count down from ten. Kate thought maybe it should’ve picked a higher number to count from, and if she ever had the chance, she would report that as a design flaw. She made it through the boxcars, through the candy car, across the flat car, and all the way to the library car before the rockets kicked in.
Kicked was the right word: It felt like a giant soccer player had reared back and booted the train right in the caboose. Or like it really was a silver arrow and it was being fired from a huge bow. Kate flew right off her feet and slammed into the back wall of the library.
She stuck there like Velcro: The train was accelerating so fast it pinned her against the wall. Everything else in the room that wasn’t nailed down joined them on the back wall. (Fortunately somebody had thought to nail down the furniture. Though not any of the cushions.) Fighting the g-forces, Kate could just turn her head far enough to see the world outside racing past in the window, faster and faster, even faster than they’d gone down the mountain. The whole train was shuddering and rocking with the force of the acceleration. She couldn’t see them, but the rockets were now shooting out bright blue-white spikes of flame behind them, shoving the train forward faster and faster and faster toward the edge of the cliff.
The pressing question in Kate’s mind was, did the rockets have enough power to push an entire steam train straight up a more-or-less vertical track? And if they did have enough power, where was that track going to take them?
The fields outside disappeared: The Silver Arrow had cleared the cliff. Now there was nothing but empty blue sky in the windows, and the train was still accelerating. Then it started tilting back, back and back and back as the track under it bent up toward the sky, back and farther back till every nerve in Kate’s body was screaming, Stop! Stop! For the love of all that is good and reasonable, stop!
But rockets don’t come with brakes. These didn’t even have an OFF button. One of the wooden bars gave way, and Kate was pelted with a shelf’s worth of books. They kept going up and up, blasting up through the clouds, and then Kate could feel something even crazier happening: The track kept curving back past the vertical, back in the direction of upside-down—but the rockets were driving them so hard that centrifugal force kept them stuck to the track. The track kept curving till it did a complete roller-coaster loop, and for one delirious, transcendent moment they were completely upside down, with Kate’s head pointed at the earth, and she went weightless, and in that moment all her fear suddenly evaporated into nothing and she laughed out loud with the awesomeness of it all.
And then they were past it and roaring down the downslope, still at high speed but no longer accelerating. Kate and the books and everything else slid down the wall and back to the floor, where they belonged.
Her whole body felt limp and spent. The noise of the rocket engines faded and then stopped. She managed to get on her feet and stagger to the window. Outside, underneath them, there were only clouds.
They were on a railroad in the sky.
“Is everybody okay?” she whispered.
Click-bing.
OMG THAT WAS AMAZING
22
The Train Station in the Sky
THE SILVER ARROW WAS ROLLING ALONG ON TOP OF A cloud.
Click-bing.
IF THIS IS DEATH, IT REALLY ISN’T THAT BAD
It was a long way down. Ahead and behind, train tracks curved off through the sky into the distance, looking very thin and precarious.