“Come,” my love urges.
My sabots slip on the frozen pavement as he leads me toward the station. Are we going to leave by train? Do trains still go this late? Will we make it back in time, before I’m missed? A thousand questions bud in my mind, but I can’t ask them, lest I break my disguise.
We don’t enter the railway station, but halt at the trolley stop before it. It’s nothing more than a slightly wider stretch of pavement with a sign hanging from an iron arch and a pen made of planks painted gray. The pen is full already, full of people wrapped up from head to toe in factory-woven coats and shawls and blankets. A few sport lamb furs, tattered things showing decades of stains. My love greets these people with a nod. They nod back at him. I don’t know what to do, but it doesn’t matter. When I’m with him, I belong everywhere.
“Are we going to take a trolley?” The mere thought of doing so sends my heart pounding. Whenever I travel farther than I can walk, it’s either with the imperial train or in a comfortable carriage with a platoon of soldiers escorting me.
My love draws me into an embrace that smells of wood smoke and cigarettes. He places his chin on my shoulder, and I can feel his warm breath through the floral scarf shielding my cheeks. “I love you.”
I cling to him more desperately than I care to admit. The night around us is cold, but at that moment it doesn’t matter. He loves me, and I love him.
It’s a new experience for me to wait for the trolley. For a Daughter of the Moon, everything always happens at once. When I’m her, I don’t wait—others wait for me. But I’m not myself tonight.
More people gather at the trolley stop. A group of railway men huddle right next to us. The biggest and burliest of them sips from a dented flask and offers it to my love. “Care to wager a bet, man? I bet that on a night like this the imperial family drinks mulled wine as they roast deer before a roaring fire. All wrapped in their nice white furs, sipping nice hot drinks, while we ordinary people chill our arses off.”
I tense and cringe despite myself. Though the railway man masks his displeasure with jokes, the undercurrent of anger runs so strong that eventually it will flood. For he’s right, even as ashamed as I am to admit that.
My love, he just chuckles, declining the flask with a jovial shake of his head. When he speaks, his voice is different from what I know. Rough around the edges, as if he, too, worked at the railways, day after day. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m not much of a betting man.”
The railway man shrugs. He sways toward us and halts right before me. He peers down at me, as if trying to see what my scarf hides. “What do you think, young lass?”
“Ah, don’t tease her.” Janlav nudges him on the shoulder, just a friendly reminder that I’m with him, not someone to be bothered with unwanted attention. “My love, she’s a shy one.”
The railway man snorts, mucus frosting under his nose. His bushy beard glistens with snowflakes. His breath smells of rye liquor. “What sort of rebels are we if we don’t listen to what our little misses have to say?”
He squats down and stares at me with such unrelenting interest that I can’t bring myself to turn my face away. How does he see me? As I am or as I pretend to be?
Every day I see my face a thousand times in the mirrors scattered around the palace. My skin is pale as porcelain, kept more so by cream and powder. My cheeks are freckled, stubbornly so. My eyes are gray, rimmed by blackened lashes. Mine isn’t a face that belongs to a factory girl.
Be that as it may, I can but try. I lift my chin up and meet the man’s stare, not with defiance, but with a smile as luminous as a flame first summoned to life. I should be afraid. But I like this world, the world without ranks. Where people are what they are and nothing more or less. I say, “The cause is right. The cause is just. That is what I think.”
In my ears, my trained voice is akin to a nightingale’s song. True enough, the railway man staggers up as if I had cursed at him. I hold my breath. Behind me, Janlav’s pose has changed. He’s a soldier dressed in plain clothes now.
A screech of metal on metal tears through the night. Neighs and clicking of iron-shod hooves scatter against the ice-laced flagstones. The people crammed into the pen swarm out. I dash to my love before I realize it’s just the trolley arriving.
The trolley draws to a halt, and people surround us. The railway man still stares at me in wonder, for he hasn’t—I know it for sure—ever before seen or heard one like me.
“You.” The railway man points a trembling finger squarely at my love’s chest. “You are one very lucky man. Never let go of her. Never let her go.”
My love’s pose eases. He swoops an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. I shiver out of sheer exhilaration of being so close to him. “Never! I swear as the Moon is my witness. I will never let go of her.”
The railway man chuckles, and then he’s already boarding the trolley. He pushes people around him aside to make space for us. “Hop in, friends!”
My love smiles wildly at him, and we board the trolley. As the trolley jerks onward, my love whispers in my ear, “You did good.”
I don’t reply a word. I truly am one amongst many. This is the future.
It’s silent in the trolley, almost as if we were in a church, listening to a gagargi speak. As the trolley rattles over the stone bridge that arches over the Navna River, I stare through the window fogged by the breath of dozens of people. The train bridge runs alongside this bridge, but no locomotive steams through the night. Was it just this spring when I leaned out of the imperial train’s window, so overjoyed to arrive in the Summer City? This bridge was then crammed with people waving white handkerchiefs at us.
“Or perhaps it was just pieces of cloth, ripped from old sheets and shirts,” I mutter under my breath before I can stop myself.
The trolley screeches as it changes tracks. The people gripping the poles or holding on to each other sway. My love bumps into me, but not by accident. “What was that you said?”
“Oh, nothing important,” I say as I realize something I was too blind to see earlier. All the people in the trolley wear red gloves or mittens.
The trolley rattles through the city for a good hour or so before it draws to a halt before a massive warehouse. The red-brown bricks bear a white veil. Snow rests on the slanted roof.
Sensing that I can’t place us on the map, my love says, “We are at the train depot.”
People disembark the trolley in an orderly, even jolly manner. The current carries my love and me out, toward the sliding doors that yawn wide open.
“Stay close.” My love squeezes my hand.
“I will,” I reply, though he wouldn’t have needed to remind me. Even if he isn’t wearing the imperial uniform, he radiates such confidence, bears such an air of command around him, that people shuffle out of our way without even noticing that they are doing so. I clutch his hand as people close in behind us. For if I were to lose him, I would never find him again in this crowd, and I might not be able to navigate my way back to the Summer Palace without risking revealing my identity.
The train depot is a vast steel structure with a large lattice of windows as a ceiling. Thin snow covers the glass panes, piled by wind into waves. Huge lanterns hang from the iron bars spanning across the whole hall. The tiny lights flicker, too weak to chase away this many shadows. I think they are powered by chicken souls, but it might be another cheap soul that’s in use.
“At least it’s warm here.” A man in a peasant’s baggy shirt nudges his mate with his elbow. His shirt is cinched at the waist with a leather belt re-holed too many times. “Eh?”