The Silver Arrow: Chapters 10–17

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.

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.

There was another lull. Kate tried to think of something more to say. It was hard to tell what the cat was thinking. Though she guessed that was true of every cat ever.

“You always say things are fantastic,” the snake scoffed.

On the ground and the branches overhead sat a whole flock of black birds with a slight iridescent rainbow shine to their wings that reminded Kate of an oil slick.

She recognized the birds. They were sparrows—or no, not sparrows, starlings! That’s what they were.

He was rude, and sulky, and thoroughly unpleasant, and Kate had never been so glad to see anyone in her whole life.

The porcupine was impressively unruffled by his confrontation with the boar.

“Humans are animals,” Kate said a little defensively.
“Of course you are,” the fishing cat said. “But you’ve spent so much time pretending you’re not, you’ve lost the knack.”

The heron tactfully changed the subject. "Did you know that baby pangolins are called pango-pups?” she said.

“Let me tell you a story about starlings!” the porcupine said. “Starlings originally came from Europe. That’s where they’re supposed to live. But then some nitwit got it into his head that North America should have every bird species mentioned in the works of Shakespeare.”

Kate put a wary hand on the polar bear’s cold shoulder. Her fur was coarse and wiry. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re safe now.”

By then it was dinnertime, and she went to the dining car to eat with the gang from the library. Tom came, too. The mood was subdued.

“It’s probably the way you inject your prey with horrible venom,” the porcupine said, “that makes them suffocate in their own skin.”

“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.”

“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.”

It was a thought, but it wasn’t her thought. It came in a voice that felt old, and very gentle, and very strong. And not alone, but like many voices speaking in unison.

The bottoms of her feet tingled. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it gave her an uncontrollable urge to take off her shoes. And not just her shoes but her socks, too: Suddenly she was craving the feeling of prickly, loamy soil under her feet.

Kate threw her suddenly huge arms wide, and as she did they stiffened, and her fingers spread and multiplied and then burst gloriously into twigs and foliage.

A friendly giant, she listened to the frisky low-level chatter of the little plants around her and the shadowy whispering of the fungi below that. It wasn’t all fun; there were pain and strife, too. Insects and caterpillars fed on her. Birds pecked holes in her.

Her leaves and her branches—her magnificent, multitudinous branches—were withering, and her roots were letting go of the soil, pulling back up out of it like a ship weighing anchor, preparing to set sail again.

As quiet and dignified as they were when they got on, the animals were always excited to get where they were going—they scampered and loped and fluttered out through the doors the second they opened.

When they finally spotted a light at the end of the tunnel, it wasn’t daylight, it was the yellow subterranean light of a subway station.

Tom kept whispering “I-think-I-can I-think-I-can” to the train, like in The Little Engine That Could, and the train kept telling him to knock it off.
I'M NOT DESIGNED TO CLIMB MOUNTAINS,
I'M NOT A FUNICULAR!

When Kate put her head out the window again, she saw up ahead the worst thing she could possibly see: They were coming up on a tight curve on the edge of a sheer cliff, and they were going way too fast. Their momentum would take them right off it.