“If he talks again, shoot him,” Simone said to Loretta. Loretta looked at the Stranger. He had sad eyes, she thought. The train slowed down as it approached the island. Eduardo pressed the arrow’s tip into the engineer’s back. Everything was going according to plan. At least until the stoker went mad and released the ghosts.

The man had put down the book he had been reading to the boy and now he sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and his head pulsed with pain. The woman moved around with a distracted air as though she simply could not sit still, and the man winced with the bright daylight and with the sound of cars outside, and each time he heard a horn he winced.

I couldn’t, he said, I couldn’t stay there anymore.

I know.

I had, I had this dream that I could do something, that even now, just sitting here, I should be elsewhere, searching for—

I know, she said. I know. And then she burst out crying. She cried quietly. The tears just ran down her face and she never made a sound or tried to wipe them away. She kept moving, kept pacing the small kitchen from side to side. He rose to her. He put his hand on her cheek, felt her skin wet with tears.

There’s nothing, she said, savagely. There’s nothing, there’s nothing, there’s—!

The Stranger came to with a rush of air. Ghosts kept streaming out of the boiler, mouths open in soundless screams. The cab felt freezing. The stoker was on the floor with an arrow through his chest. The drum of substance had rolled and the crystal dust fell everywhere and the cold flames had latched on to it and filled the whole room. The Kid was on the floor, gasping for air. The train’s windshield was broken and the engineer was holding in vain to the instrument panel and cursing, over and over, in an unknown tongue. The island rushed towards them. Of the banditti, the man who had watched the engineer had been thrown through the windshield and was somehow holding on to the broken glass with bloodied hands before he finally let go and was sucked away into nothingness. The girl who had kept watch over the kid was dead with a bullet in the heart. The man who’d guarded the door was gone, and the only one remaining was the girl, Loretta. He tended to remember someone’s name when they were threatening to kill him.

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.