Beneath Ceaseless Skies #172 Read Free Page A

against performers and animals alike. The animals.
            I cannot say how many train cars there were, for unless my memory fails, this number changed over the course of the journey. The train itself changed based on what Jackson and its people required of it. Of
her
. I felt a kindred spirit inside this metal body, a thing I have felt in no other place. I might compare her to what I felt in my partner, that spirit beneath the flesh being opposite of the flesh itself—but this train had no flesh that I could see. (If I had known then of the severed hand within her engine, I would have understood that indeed she possessed such flesh yet another doubled spirit, she of metal and woman.) She was a creature bound to travel the tracks of the world, but sometimes she skimmed through sky and cloud.
            Some of the train cars held animals that we did not know and each car appeared to change its shape based upon their occupants. The cars looked entirely normal on the outside but inside, each and every beast or person was properly housed according to their needs. The animals did not need cages when they had small landscapes to roam.
            Among the beasts, we discovered lions, sirens, and one pale bear that Gemma and Sombra said would soon be in its proper place. The sirens drew us because of their bird natures, their train car spackled with glittering fish scales from their many meals. We saw in these striking women our mothers and wondered if they were why Jackson had such a hunger for the thunderbirds. Did he seek to mate one spirit to another? We did not ask, only burned sweet grass in the small compartment we had been given and clasped our hands as we asked for a safe journey, for guidance, for the ability to know what would need doing in the moments to come.
            Those nights, I heard thunder through the hills, felt the rattle of windows as wind tried to invade. I dreamed of our mothers bursting from the snow-laden mountains, cracking the world apart until it was buried in white. Unable to sleep with such thoughts, I watched the dark world pass beyond the train windows beyond my own reflection.
            Eventually, the train slowed, stopped. I left our cabin to understand what had happened.
            I found Jackson easily enough. I expected him to be concerned—surely a train stopped upon tracks was bad luck—but his face split with a grin.
Come
, he said,
watch them work.
            It was one of the most magnificent things I have witnessed. Jackson guided me to the cab and sure-footed his way up the ladder that led through a roof hatch. I grasped the ladder to follow, but this is when I saw the woman’s hand. Severed at the wrist, partly bundled in cloth, it spilled threaded fatelines into the world, its palm crossed with gold. I felt its eternal heartbeat, the rumble of the train even though we stood still, and climbed my way up and out through the hatch.
            Gemma and Sombra, Jackson told me, had a way with metal, in the finding of it but also in its manipulation. Beyond the train, the tracks lay heavy with ice and snow, and though the women could not move these directly they reached with their essences to the buried rails. They warmed the metal, which sheared the ice; as stars fall from the night sky, bright shards of ice plummeted down the dark valley over which we stood on the elevated track.
            The whole hour through, the women worked tirelessly, digging their spirits into the ice to reach the metal, to make it simmer with a warm, unearthly light. In its own way, this avalanche of ice sounded like thunder, and I looked to the sky above, wondering if our mothers could feel our approach.
            Gugán, roused by my absence, soon joined me, and we sat upon the cold engine cab roof with Jackson, watching the ice’s destruction. Gemma and Sombra were illuminated by the glowing tracks, water sputtering into the air as more ice