Loretta looked frightened. She turned, still holding her crossbow, from him to the Kid and back again. “Step back!”

“What are you looking for, on the train?” the Stranger said again.

“I don’t know!”

“Is it the substance?”

“I don’t know!”

The Kid got up. The engineer cursed as the train hit the switch on the island and shifted to the loop, slowing down.

“Don’t brake!” the Stranger said.

The engineer mumbled something unintelligible.

“What?”

“I can’t shift her back!” the engineer said. “There’s a—” He subsided again into furious muttering.

The Stranger stared out of the windshield. The dark and desolate landscape of the island gave nothing away. The lake gloamed all around them, trapping them in, looping in on themselves. He pointed his gun at the girl and cocked the hammer.

“Tell me what you are looking for,” he said.

An explosion tore through the night. The caretaker’s hut was a ball of flame, and the fire snatched at the starlight, casting an eerie glow as the flames danced in a wild tarantella. The Stranger saw a small, lithe figure leap, impossibly, into the air, with unwholesome grace, and then the man was through the broken windshield and inside the cabin with them.

“Carl!” Loretta said. The Kid trained his gun on the man, who was unarmed. Carl smiled faintly at the Stranger.

“The Dumuzi Device,” he said.

Loretta stared at them all helplessly. She knew Carl, knew what he was capable of. He’d once tossed her against the wall with a contemptuous casualness when she’d dared ask for a break from the endless practice, and she’d broken her funny bone in two places.

A terrible fear squeezed her insides. The others were talking, they thought they had control of the situation. She wanted off the train. She longed to escape, to go anywhere but there. Even, she thought with a shudder, to that other place.

“What?” the Stranger said. He seemed so slow and dim-witted then. It was happening, she could feel it.

“A chthonic bomb,” Carl said, carelessly. It was the way he did all things. It was how the others ended up dead, she realised, Eduardo and Simone. Because he never cared, they were all just tokens to him.

“It’s a large piece of materiel. We have reason to believe it is on this train.”

“What does it . . . do?” the Kid said.

Carl shrugged. He brought his hands together, then spread them wide, in slow motion.

“. . . oh.”

The train kept going round and round the island. The caretaker’s hut burned bright. It was coming, she could feel it. The Stranger said, “It looks like your plan didn’t work.”

“How so?” Carl said.

“Your people are dead. You’re outnumbered. It’s just you, and the girl over there.”

“Loretta,” she said. “My name is Loretta!”