It’s a woman at Olympia’s knees. A knife in her heart. Her own fingers on the handle.

“We don’t even know if they still drive people mad,” Tom says. But there is less force behind this.

“We what?” Malorie asks. “What does that even mean?”

Olympia removes her glove. The blood is caked, hardened by the sun. The way it climbs up the woman’s neck it feels like fingers.

“Olympia!” Malorie yells.

Olympia stands up.

“Right here, Mom.”

Silence then. As if, by mentioning Olympia’s name, Malorie has added some element of balance.

“No more,” Malorie says. Olympia knows she doesn’t only say it to Tom. She says it to everything. To the creatures. To the fact that she’s searching for people she’s already grieved.

Olympia cocks an ear ahead.

“Guys,” she says. “I hear an engine.”

She doesn’t think it’s a car. It sounds more like a generator, the steady hum of an amplifier. A big one.

“Ahead?” Malorie asks.

“Yes.”

“It’s not a car,” Tom says.

“No,” Olympia says.

“Tell me more,” Malorie says.

“It’s…wider than a car…” Tom says.

“It’s the train,” Malorie says.

Olympia blanches. Is Mom right? Is this what a train sounds like?

It sounds huge.

“We gotta move fast,” Malorie says. “Two miles?”

“A little less,” Tom says.

“Now,” Malorie says. Tendrils of hysteria present. “Now.”

The train.

Is it, though? Or is that, as Olympia has read in so many books, only what they want it to be?

Malorie and Tom are gaining distance on her. Olympia turns once, back to the dead woman in the tall grass on the side of the country road.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Sorry I didn’t acknowledge you at all.”

But she knows this was the right thing to do. Her mom and her brother are working together, ahead, neither any darker for a dead body.

An omen.

A portent.

Not now.

And sometimes, again, keeping secrets is the right thing to do.

She hurries to catch up with them. The unfamiliar engine hums steady in the distance, and she imagines a machine bigger than the house she was born in.

She moves.

She catches up.

She keeps secrets.

TWELVE

Malorie’s mind is ablaze.

She thinks it’s a train. She wants it to be. She can’t tell. She’s never focused so hard on a sound, any sound. What does a train actually sound like, from this distance, from this state of mind?

She moves fast. Too fast. Yet Olympia is a step ahead. Her daughter calls out when there are dips in the road, and more than once she’s reached back to take Malorie by the arm.