“If Mary succeeds,” Jix asked, “and she ends the living world, what do you suppose will happen then?”

“Isn’t the end of the world bad enough, without having to think about what happens afterward?”

So then he asked, “Is it so bad to end one world, when another world still remains?”

“Do you really believe that?”

“Maybe not,” he told her. “Maybe I just wanted to see what you would say.”

She struggled once more against her bonds, but they never got any looser. “So,” she asked again, “are you going to let me go?”

“We’ll talk again,” Jix told her, as he always told her, and left.

Jix was not an insomnoid. He would choose to sleep when it suited him, and that night, he wanted to sleep, if only to keep his mind from pondering heavy things. Yet even though he tried, he could not settle his thoughts enough to sleep. Jix still told himself that he was traveling with the train just to gain information before returning to the City of Souls, and reporting what he had found to the king—but not even he was sure of his own motives anymore. At first he had told himself that he’d leave in Dallas, find a big cat somewhere, and furjack his way back home, but instead he stayed with the train. There was too much about this train of souls that intrigued him: the sleeping witch in the caboose, the train’s destination—which the king himself would like to know about if, indeed, it was real . . . but most of all he stayed because of Jackin’ Jill.

After their last encounter, Jill made a point of ignoring Jix, and yet he often caught her watching him out of the corner of her eye—but whenever he returned the gaze, she would get snappish and say, “What are you looking at?” It always made him smile.

As a skinjacker, he had the privilege of staying in the parlor car, so he and Jill were never too distant from each other, and when Jill got tired of pretending to ignore him, she would ask questions.

“How long have you been at this? Furjacking, I mean?”

But the real question was hidden beneath her words. She was more interested in knowing how much time he had left.

“The time will come that my slumbering body dies, and I can no longer furjack, just as that time will come for you.”

“So you know about that. . . .”

Jix nodded. His Excellency had explained to him right away about how his body was in a coma—and how his gift of skinjacking was only a temporary one. “When I can no longer do it—when I become a normal Afterlight, I will find a coin, and pay my passage into the light.”

“You mean you don’t have your coin now?”