The Ister was chillier than the Kálmán Imre, and Max tucked her blankets tightly around herself. It had been a long day, and she had hardly slept the night before. Despite her worries, she fell straight to sleep.

She was woken up again by a loud thump.

Or, she thought as her mind began working properly, maybe she had dreamt a thump and then woken up. It was difficult to be sure. Either way, she didn’t know what time it was or where in the world the Ister was by now, and she was in that night-time haze where nothing seems quite real, and there was a strange sense of dread in the pit of her stomach. If it had been a dream, it had been about something awful.

Now that she was awake, she needed the toilet too badly to just drift back to sleep. She poked a cautious foot out of the blanket. It was freezing. She poked the rest of herself out of the blanket very reluctantly.

As she crept down the dimly lit corridor, something about that thump lingered in her mind. She hurried to the toilet double-quick and hurried double-double-quick back again – but as she passed Rupert’s door she paused, remembering his desperate phone call, suddenly overcome with pity for him. His door was open, rattling slightly as the train swayed along. She peeked inside.

Rupert wasn’t there.

He had turned his seats into a berth, and made up the bedding. It gaped in the darkness like an empty mouth, the blanket lolling over one side like a tongue. As the train sped past electric lights the car flashed light-dark, light-dark, reminding Max of the blue lights outside Fort Vaults. Her unease seemed to thicken. What was Rupert doing, creeping around at night?

Somewhere further down the train a door banged, snapping Max back to her senses, and she hurried to bed before Rupert could come back and ask what she was doing. She slept, but she dreamt uneasily all night.

In the morning there was snow.

Now, I don’t know how much snow you have seen in one go, but you probably need to picture more snow than that. There was a flat sheet of snow stretching all the way out to the horizon, finally meeting far-off mountains covered in more snow. Only the very tallest mountains had snow-free peaks, and they stood out against the winter sky like bruises. Sometimes the train passed fir trees iced all over with snow, and every now and then they passed houses oozing icicles from the eaves – houses with football posts and picnic tables, monuments to a summer that was now impossible to imagine.

Sister Marguerite woke up to see Max with her nose pressed to the window, and smiled. “Welcome,” she said sleepily, “to Romania, mon lapin.”