The Silver Arrow: Chapters 1–9

It made Kate wonder how such a lazy, irresponsible person could’ve gotten his hands on all that money, but adults never explained contradictions like that.

“It’s not a whole train,” Uncle Herbert said modestly. “Just the engine. And a tender—that’s the coal car right behind it.”

You really don’t appreciate how incredibly colossal a steam locomotive is till one shows up parked on the street in front of your house.

Kate’s father stopped and thought about it, which was a tactical error. What he probably should have done, Kate thought, was lose his temper and call the police.

They reluctantly got off it and retreated to a safe distance, but Kate still couldn’t stop looking at it.

It looked ominous and fascinating, like a sleeping dinosaur. The longer you looked at it, the more interesting it got.

Back then the world was way too prejudiced to allow women to be computer programmers, and computers hadn’t been invented yet anyway, but in spite of all that Grace Hopper became a computer programmer and wrote the world’s first software compiler.

The cab smelled like old oil, like at a car mechanic’s. It was definitely real, but it was also completely incomprehensible.

Tom pretended it was a tank and stood on his seat and machine-gunned an army of invisible Nazis out the window, but you could tell his heart wasn’t a hundred percent in it. Then they climbed down again. It was all a little anticlimactic.

Weirdly, Kate sometimes caught herself actually wishing she had a problem like that—a zombie apocalypse, or an ancient curse, or an alien invasion, anything really—so that she could be a hero and survive and triumph against all the odds and save everybody.

And the worst part of it all, Kate thought—as she lay on her bed, her eyes feeling sticky from crying, and stared glumly out the window, and the afternoon stretched on and on toward evening—was that she kind of saw her mom’s point.

Tom thought about it. “I’m going to stay too,” he said finally, in his most serious, solemn voice.

The train swung to the right, following the tracks into the woods behind their house, which just barely saved Kate and Tom from crashing through the fence and annihilating the neighbors’ house and probably the neighbors.

The train chuffed along; Kate thought it chuffed a little faster and more vigorously now that they’d given it more coal.

Outside nothing moved. Lamps cast a soft, eerie light over everything and lit up the falling snow in a great white dome.

“Uncle Herbert?” Tom looked like he had a thought that he was trying hard to formulate into a question. “Why are we here?”

Train cars loomed over them, big as houses, casting sharp black shadows in the artificial light.

She turned out the light, snugged the blanket up over her, and took a deep contented breath.

In an alcove by the door to the passenger cars they found two conductor’s hats, which somehow looked a lot less dorky now, and two of those mysterious metal hole-punchers that train conductors always have.

No one barked or growled or squawked or tried to eat any of their fellow travelers, though Kate did notice that the larger and more predatory animals—a wolf, a bear, a couple of large owls—tended to sit in the forward carriage, and the smaller, fluffier, more vulnerable animals kept to the rear.

These weren’t pets, or farm animals, or animals in a zoo, which always looked so dull and downcast and desperate. These were wild animals, and there was nothing between her and them—no fence, no glass, nothing.

She waited till the train was moving again, then opened the door to the first compartment. It was occupied by a family of deer—a doe and a stag and a fawn—plus a somber, tattered-looking gray hawk.

“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.”

“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.”