“What kind of delay?” Miriam asked.
“I don’t know.” Erasmus stood up. “Got everything in your bag?” He raised an eyebrow.
Miriam, thinking of the small pistol, swallowed, then nodded. “Yeah.” It was stuffy in the un–air-conditioned carriage, but she stood up and headed over to the coat rail by the door, to pick up her jacket and the bulging handbag she’d transferred the notebook computer into. “Thinking of getting off early?”
“If we have to.” He frowned. “If this is—”
Footsteps. Miriam paused, her coat over her left arm. “Yes?” she asked coolly as the door opened.
It was a middle-aged man, wearing the uniform of a railroad ticket inspector. He looked upset. “Sir? Ma’am? I’m sorry to disturb you, but would you mind stepping this way? I’m sure we can sort this out and be on our way soon.”
Erasmus glanced sideways at her. Miriam dry-swallowed, wishing her throat wasn’t dry. Bluff it out, or…? “Certainly,” he said smoothly: “Perhaps you can tell us what it’s about?”
“In the station, sir,” said the inspector, opening the door of the carriage. The steps were already lowered, meeting the packed earth of a rural platform with a weathered clapboard hut—more like a signal box than a station house—hunched beside it. Only the orange groves to either side suggested a reason for there to be a station here. The inspector hurried anxiously over towards the building, not looking back until he neared the door. Miriam caught Burgeson’s eye: he nodded, slowly. The Polis would just have come aboard and arrested us, wouldn’t they? she told herself. Probably…
As her companion approached the door, Miriam curled her fingers around the butt of her pistol. The inspector held the door open for them, his expression anxious. “The electrograph from your cousin requested a private meeting,” he said apologetically. “This was the best I could arrange—”
“My cousin?” Miriam asked, her voice rising as the door opened: “I don’t have a cousin—”
A whoosh of escaping steam dragged her attention up the line. Slowly and majestically, the huge locomotive was straining into motion, the train of passenger cars squealing and bumping behind it. Miriam spun round, far too late to make a run back for it. “Shit,” she muttered under her breath. A steam car was bumping along the rutted track that passed for a service road to the station. “Double shit.” Erasmus was frozen in the doorway, one hand seeming to rest lightly on the inspector’s shoulder. Another car came into view along the road, trailing the first one’s rooster-tail of dust.
“Please don’t!” The inspector was nearly hysterical.
“Who set this up?” Erasmus asked, his tone deceptively calm.
“I don’t know! I was only following orders!” Miriam ducked round the side of the station house again, glancing in through the windows. She saw an empty waiting room furnished only with a counter, beyond the transom of which was an evidently empty ticket office. It’s not the station, she realized, near-hysteria bubbling under.
“Into the waiting room,” she snapped, bringing the revolver out of her pocket. “Move!”
The inspector stared at her dumbly, as if she’d grown a second head, but Erasmus nodded: “Do as she says,” he told the man. The inspector shuffled into the waiting room. Erasmus followed, his movements almost bored, but his right hand never left the man’s shoulder.
“How long ’til they get here?” Miriam demanded.
“I don’t know!” He was nearly in tears. “They just said to make you wait!”
“They,” said Erasmus. “Who would they be?”
“Please don’t kill me!”
The door to the ticket office was ajar. Miriam kicked it open and went through it with her pistol out in front. The office was indeed empty. On the ticket clerk’s desk a message flimsy was waiting. Miriam peered at it in the gloom. DEAR CUZ SIT TIGHT STOP UNCLE A SENDS REGARDS STOP WILL MEET YOU SOONEST SIGNED BRILL.
Well, that settles it. Miriam lowered her gun to point at the floor and headed back to the waiting room.
“—The Polis!” moaned the inspector. “I’ve got three wee ones to feed! Please don’t—”
Shit, meet fan. Even so, it struck her as too big a coincidence to swallow. Maybe the Polis are tapping the wires? That would do it. Brilliana had figured out where she was, which train she was on, and signaled her to wait, not realizing someone else might rise to the bait.
Burgeson’s expression was grim. “Miriam, the door, please.”
“Let’s not do anything too hasty,” she said. “There’s an easy way out of this.”
“Oh please—”
“Shut up, you. What do you have in mind?”
Miriam waved at the ticket office. “He’s not lying about my cousin: she’s on her way. Trouble is, if we bug out before she gets here she’s going to walk into them. So I think we ought to sit tight.” She closed the door anyway, and glanced round, looking for something to bar it with. “I can get us both out of here in an emergency,” she said, a moment of doubt cutting in when she recalled the extreme nausea of her most recent attempts to world-walk.
The first car—more like a steam-powered minivan, Miriam noted—rounded the back of the station and disappeared from sight. Almost two minutes had passed since they reached the station. Miriam slid aside from the windows, while Burgeson did likewise. Boots thudded on the ground outside: the only sounds within the building were the pounding of blood in her ears and the quiet sobbing of the ticket inspector.
“Mr. Burgeson!” The voice behind the bullhorn sounded almost joviaclass="underline" “And the mysterious Mrs. Fletcher! Or should I say, Beckstein?” He made it sound like an accusation. “Welcome to California! My colleague Inspector Smith has told me all about you both and I thought, why, we really ought to have a little chat. And I thought, why not have it somewhere quiet-like, and intimate, instead of in town where there are lots of flapping ears to take note of what we say?”
Across the room, Burgeson was mouthing something at her. His face was in shadow, making it hard to interpret. The inspector knelt in the middle of the floor, in a square of sunlight, sobbing softly as he rocked from side to side wringing his hands. The appearance of the Polis had quite unmanned him.
“Like this: parlez vous Francoise, Madame Beckstein?”
Miriam felt faint. They think I’m a French spy? Either the heat or the tension or some other strain was plucking her nerves like guitar strings. Somehow Erasmus had fetched up almost as far away as it was possible to get, twelve feet away across open ground overlooked by a window. To get him out of here one or the other of them would need to cross that expanse of empty floor, in front of—
The ticket inspector snapped, flickering from broken passivity to panic in a fraction of a second. He lurched to his feet and ran at the window, screaming, “Don’t hurt me!”
Erasmus brought his right hand up, and Miriam saw the pistol in it. He hesitated for a long moment as the inspector fumbled with the window, throwing it wide and leaning out. “Let me—” he shouted: then a spatter of shots cracked through the glass, and any sense of what he had been trying to say.