“Well, I wish you all the luck in both worlds,” Isaiah said. Then, as a gesture of friendship, they put their hands together, and crushed Isaiah’s one unbroken fortune cookie between their palms.

Their fortune read, “Luck is the poorest of strategies.”

While Isaiah might have felt insulted, Nick took this as evidence that he was doing the right thing—preparing for his confrontation with Mary as best he could.

That was more than a month ago. Since leaving Atlanta, Nick and his train had zigzagged from town to town, city to city, on any dead rails that would get them there.

“I’d rip us fresh train tracks,” Zin said, “but I can only rip things I can actually move.”

The “mud-pie” look that Isaiah had spoken of was even more pronounced than before—so much so that Nick had taken the mirror in the parlor car, and spread his chocolate hand back and forth across it until it was too thick with the stuff to show his reflection. He had work to do, and thinking about himself, well, it was just a distraction.

Based on what Isaiah had told him, they traveled to more than a dozen towns and cities in Georgia and the Carolinas, bringing in volunteers everywhere they went. Zin had become a whiz at dazzling audiences with the items she ripped right before their eyes, and once they were wide-eyed with wonder, Nick offered them a feast without being asked, because if there was one thing that was universal in Everlost, it was the absence of, and the craving for, a good meal.

By the time they reached Chattanooga, Tennessee, and added that ninth train car, Nick’s anti-Mary fighting force numbered nearly four hundred.

“It’s good to be part of an army again,” Zin told Nick, as they headed south toward Birmingham, Alabama. “I’ve been waitin’ halfway to forever for someone to fight.”

“We fight because we have to,” Nick told her. “We fight because it’s the right thing to do, not because we want to.”

“Speak for yourself,” Zin said. “Everybody’s gots their own reasons for the things they do. Alls that matters is that your reasons and mine carry the same flag.”

“We don’t have a flag,” Nick pointed out.

“I could make one.”

“Just as long as it’s not Confederate.”

Zin thought about it. “Whacha say I rip some fabric into Everlost, and come up with sumpin’ brand spankin’ new?”

“Great—you could be our own Betsy Ross.”

To which she replied, “Betsy Ross was a Yankee.”

It was a strange thing to build an army when they had no idea where to find the enemy. “I’ve heard rumors that Mary’s gone west,” Johnnie-O told Nick. “Maybe even across the Mississippi—but I also hear there’s no way to cross the Mississippi, so who knows?”

“D’ya think she’s afraid to come this far south?” Charlie asked.