It was the first time Nick had said Allie’s name aloud for quite a while. It made him long to see her—to know what had become of her. And as if to answer that longing, one of the kids they had picked up in North Carolina said, “Yeah—Allie the Outcast hates the Sky Witch—she told us so herself.”

Nick turned so fast, chocolate flung into the kid’s eye. “What do you mean she told you? You saw her? Where?”

“A couple of months ago, in Greensboro,” he said. “She came with this other kid who didn’t talk much. I liked her, but the other kid scared us a little.”

Nick couldn’t contain his excitement. “Tell me everything!” he said. “How was she—how did she look? What was she even doing there?”

Nick sent for the dozen or so kids they picked up in Greensboro, and, pleased to be on the Chocolate Ogre’s good side, they were thrilled to give all the information they could. They told Nick all about Allie—how she had become a finder; how she and a boy that Nick could only assume was Mikey McGill rode into town on a horse covered with saddlebags that were packed with crossed items.

“They had good stuff,” the Greensboro kids told him, “not junk like most other finders have—and they traded fair. We asked her to show us some skinjacking, but she wouldn’t do it.”

Then everyone flinched at a loud popping sound, followed by another, then another. Nick already knew that sound. It was Johnnie-O cracking his knuckles. It was always a sign that he was either very anxious, or very excited.

“Y’ know …” said Johnnie-O, “if we find Allie, we’ll have a ripper and a skinjacker. With a combination like that, there’s a whole lot of things we could do.”

But Nick was already miles ahead of him.

“Where was she headed?” Nick asked the Greensboro kids. He didn’t expect much of an answer—after all, finders rarely gave away their trade routes. But the boy said quite simply:

“Memphis.”

* * *

“How well do you know the rail system west of here?” Nick asked Charlie. He thought Charlie would balk at the question, but Choo-choo Charlie was a tried and true conductor, and seemed ready for a new challenge. By now Charlie had gotten himself enough paper to copy the rail map he had been scratching into the engine bulkhead, and mapping the Everwild rails had become a personal mission for him.

“I know what cities should have a lot of tracks that have crossed over—but there’s no way to know till we get there. D’ya mean we’re not going to Birmingham?”

“Change of plans,” Nick told him. “We’re going to Memphis.”

“I hear that’s where Everlost ends,” Charlie pointed out. “The Mississippi River, I mean.”

“Well, I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”