Kate made her way forward, wondering what was up here in the clouds that could be worth all that. She found herself stepping lightly and carefully, as if she might somehow fall out of the train at any moment.
But now she could see a station ahead of them. It looked like an ordinary country train station—a long, narrow platform with a railing and a little shelter—except that it was floating a mile in the air, and it was completely made of clouds. It was like somebody had decided to build an entire station out of fluffy white cotton wool.
She found the animals in the dining car.
“I wonder whose stop this is,” Kate said.
“Not my natural habitat,” the porcupine said.
“It’s not even mine,” the heron said.
“I think I might know,” the fishing cat said.
She looked over at the baby pangolin, who had survived the rocket ride unscathed and apparently fast asleep, curled up safely in a scaly little ball.
“The pangolin’s?” Kate said. “Pangolini? Whatever? I don’t understand. Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” the snake said. “But it’s somewhere very magic.”
Kate picked up the pangolin, and he opened his wise, dark eyes and looked up at her. He’d definitely grown since that first day when she’d mistaken him for a pine cone, but he still weighed hardly anything. She carried him forward to the passenger car and opened the door.
She felt around with her foot, the way you would with thin ice, but the cloud platform was perfectly solid. Very carefully, she stepped out onto it. It was soft but bouncy, like a firmly stuffed cushion. It would’ve been fun to jump around on it, but for some reason Kate wasn’t in a jumping mood. This was a strangely solemn place.
Tom climbed down after her, followed by the other animals. There was nobody here to meet them. A cool wind blew. It gave Kate a floaty, dizzy feeling to be up this high.
This couldn’t be right. Were they supposed to just leave the little pangolin up here in the middle of the sky all by himself? Alone, like she’d found him? She sat down cross-legged on the platform, in the shadow of the huge train, with the pangolin in her lap. The others stood around her.
Usually there was a sign telling you where the station was, but the sign here just read SOMEDAY.
“What does that mean?” she said. “Someday? That’s not a place.”
“It means there is no place for him,” the fishing cat said. “Not now. Not yet. There’s nowhere in the world we can take him that’s safe enough. He’ll just have to stay up here till things get better.”
Kate looked down at the pangolin in her lap, with his silly, lost little pine-cone face, and a tear fell onto one of his brown scales. He licked Kate’s nose with his weirdly long pink tongue. It seemed incredible to Kate that anybody would ever do anything to hurt him. She wanted to hold him and keep him safe forever.
But it wasn’t that people wanted to hurt him, she thought. Not really. They just weren’t paying attention to him. They didn’t care. They weren’t thinking about baby pangolins, they were just thinking about themselves.
But you have to think about them. You can’t forget them. Kate resolved that always, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she would remember baby pangolins. She saw now what she was supposed to do. She gave the pangolin a kiss and placed him all by himself on the platform.
“Goodbye,” she said. “I love you.”
The baby pangolin gave her a last look, sniffed, then unrolled and began bumbling around happily, just the way he always did.
Kate stepped back into the passenger car, where the others were already waiting, and even as she did, the cloud station began to change shape. It was softening and melting, turning itself into a soft little island for the pangolin. It would keep him safe till there was somewhere real for him to go.
The train gave a mighty hiss and puff and pulled away from the station in the sky.
Some problems in this world just don’t have answers. Not yet.
23
Never, Ever
KATE KNEW WHAT WAS COMING NEXT, BUT SHE WASN’T sure she was ready for it.
They rode through the sky all day. As the sun set, the track gradually bent down toward the earth until sometime in the night it touched down on a mountain peak. The Silver Arrow was hurrying now—it kept fretting that it was late in the season to be on this route. They didn’t stop till the morning, when they reached a small, neat station with a corrugated-tin roof and vines hanging down all around it. The air was humid and smelled like exotic flowers and growing things. The heat hadn’t come up yet, but you could tell it was going to be a hot day.
Kate stood in front of the open door. A voice spoke close beside her.
“This is me,” the mamba said.
“It is? Where are we?”
“Mozambique. This is the East African coastal forest. Lots of mambas here.”
Kate squatted down to meet the snake’s dark, unblinking eyes. She remembered how frightened of him she’d been when they’d first met. Now when he reared up and slid himself around her neck, she didn’t mind at all.
In fact, the cool, dry smoothness of the mamba felt lovely on her skin. He was as long as she was tall, but so slender that he barely weighed anything.
“We mambas are really very shy, you know,” he said. “But I don’t feel shy with you.”
“I don’t feel shy with you, either.”
“Thank you for getting me here, Kate. I know it wasn’t easy.”
“It was an honor. It was the least I could do. I mean after… you know. Everything else.”
“Don’t feel too bad about what humans have done,” the mamba said with a gentleness in his voice that she’d never quite heard before. “Feeling guilty doesn’t help anything anyway. Humans are animals doing what all animals do: surviving. It’s just that you’ve done it too well, so well that now you have to become a new kind of animal, one who makes sure that all the others survive, too.”
The mamba slid noiselessly out the door and across the platform, a vivid green squiggle, and vanished into the forest.
The next stop was by a wide, shallow, milky-pale river that ran fast over rocks.
“My turn,” the white-bellied heron said.
She stepped out onto the platform on her twiggy legs. They still looked weird to Kate, even if her knees really did bend forward.
“I don’t suppose you come to Bhutan very often,” the heron said.
“Not really.” Kate hadn’t actually been aware until that moment that Bhutan was a country.
“Not a lot of people do.”
“I guess that makes it a good place to be a heron,” Kate said.
“Exactly.”
“I’ll try my best to keep humans from destroying everything. I really will.”
The heron nodded her beautiful crested head.
“I know.” She brushed Kate’s hand with her wing. “It may be too late for us. The last white-bellied heron will probably die in your lifetime. We were beautiful, and we hurt no one, but that wasn’t enough.
“Just promise me you won’t give up. The world has lost its old balance, but it’s not too late. It could still find a new one.”