This is why Milos allowed the reaping expeditions. If there were a good number of sleeping souls, it might make up for all the ones they had lost. And sleeping souls can’t run away.

“Everyone wants to know where we’re going,” Speedo had told him. “Did Mary tell you where she was leading us before you . . . uh . . . ‘made her cross’?”

“Of course she told me!”

“Well, it might make us all feel a little bit better if you told us.”

“That,” said Milos, “is between Mary and me.”

With all the starts and stops, backtracking and zigzagging, their journey was taking months. During that time, Mary’s kids all fell into new routines . . . yet even in their routines there was a sense of impatience—as if they were all reluctantly passing the time until something happened—until Milos actually DID something that brought them closer to their unknown destination. More and more he felt like a leader in name only.

Now, as he knelt alone in the caboose, he looked through the glass to Mary’s closed eyelids, trying to remember what her eyes looked like. Soft and inviting, while at the same time keen and calculating. It was an intoxicating combination.

“I have tried, Mary,” he said, in barely more than a whisper. “I have tried to lead your children and to bring even more into Everlost, just as you had asked . . . but there is only so much that I can do.” He found that he had forced his hands together, clasping his knuckles in something resembling prayer. “We face so many obstacles. And now this church . . .” He looked to the date she would awaken, written on the largest pane of glass. It was still more than six months away.

“I’m not sure I can do this without you, Mary,” he pleaded. “Please, please wake up soon. . . .”

For an instant, he thought he saw a twitch of her cheek. But it was just a trick of the light sifting through the crystalline coffin.

Late that afternoon, Milos gathered all of Mary’s children in a clearing just beside the train, then he climbed up on top of the caboose, and told them his plan. “We will build a bypass around the church,” Milos told them. “But to do it, we’ll need to find loose railroad tracks that have crossed into Everlost.”

Speedo jumped at the opportunity to lead the expedition. “Leave it to me,” he said. “I used to be a finder—I can find anything!” And since it was well known that he was, indeed, Mary’s favorite finder, he was chosen to lead an expedition of twenty-five souls to scour the Oklahoma City trainyards.

The crowd seemed to approve of the idea, but then a lone voice—it could have been anyone—called out from the crowd, “And then what? Where are we even going?”