Now the boy lay, patiently, on the sliding table of the machine. He didn’t speak and the man held his hand but said nothing, either. He had run out of words long before. The doctors moved about the room like white ghosts. They were brisk and efficient and gave nothing away. The room was kept very cold. A motor hummed and the tray that the boy lay on slowly slid towards the belly of the machine. The machine kicked into life and the boy disappeared inside and the man and the woman waited. They had been waiting a long time and were destined to wait for a long time more.

A cloud of butterflies had engulfed the broken train in the night. The train crawled along the tracks, a wounded, dying beast, and the butterflies hit the broken windows and burst inside and fluttered along the corridors where blood-soaked carpets lay ruined. The Kid and the Stranger were holed up in the engineer’s cabin and the engineer kept muttering and twiddling his instrument panel and in the boiler the ghosts kept fluttering half-heartedly. It was possible that the butterflies were drawn to the ghosts, for it was said that butterflies, on the Escapement, were merely the vessels of spirits from that other place, and who was to say whether it was true or not?

The butterflies vanished in the dawn light as silently as they had come. The ghosts in the boiler faded away to nothing and the engineer stopped muttering and his hands were still, and the train came to an ungainly halt at the nearest stop: an outpost of the Thickening in the middle of a great empty plain.

A solitary wooden sign, planted in the hard ground, gave the name of the terminal: lugar de espera.

As soon as the train stopped the engineer collapsed to the floor and remained there. He was fast asleep. The Kid and the Stranger disembarked. The Kid was covered in ghostly substance and the Stranger in black ink and blood. Now they stood there, in the pale light of dawn, and looked on the terminal.

It was not really a town, merely a waiting station on a branch line, and it was miles still from any other human habitation. Nothing around. The sky spread over the grey empty plain like a mirror which only served to enhance the place’s isolation. There is nowhere to go, it seemed to suggest. There is nowhere to run. Not from here.

There was a long terminal building built with wooden floors and a sloping tin roof, and a garage, which was shut, and a convenience store, which was also shut. The Stranger looked to the distance and he thought he hadn’t looked properly before. Somewhere out there on the plain a group of people, ill-discerned, was digging. But what was there to dig?