They stared at each other. He didn’t seem to be even the slightest bit bothered by having the doors closed on his head. Kate thought about it: Really, who would it hurt if she let them on? It’s not like she needed their money. (If animals even had money. She wondered again how exactly they got their tickets.) Plus this boar weighed about five times what she did and could probably kill her in about ten seconds, even taking into account the awesome kicking power of her new steel-capped boots.

One of the brown snakes pushed forward between the boar’s hooves.

“Look, I can see you’re in a tough position.” The snake’s voice was calm and reasonable and almost sympathetic. “You’re on a tight schedule. You have to get this train moving. But thing is, we’ve got all day, and we’re not going to let this train go till you let us on. You can’t win, so why not just let it slide and we’ll all be on our way?”

“Trust us,” a squirrel said, “you don’t want to make an issue out of this.”

It would’ve been so easy to give in—giving in was almost always the easiest thing, in Kate’s experience. The only problem was—what was the problem? It felt wrong. This was her train. Uncle Herbert had given it to her, and it was the first thing ever that was well and truly her responsibility. It came with rules, and the rule was that you had to have a ticket. Maybe it was a stupid rule, but that was up to her, not these animals. It was time to decide whether she was going to let herself be bullied.

And when she realized that, she realized that she’d already decided.

“But I don’t trust you. Not in the slightest.” She wished her voice weren’t shaking, but it was. “And I’m not making an issue out of this, it’s already an issue. Get off my train, please. Right now.”

Kate pointed in the direction of “off the train,” in case that made it clearer. She stared into the boar’s tiny orange eyes. She wished Tom were there.

The boar didn’t move. Instead he snorted at her:

“RONK!”

The sound was deafening—like an explosion. She jumped three feet backward out of sheer terror.

“RONK RONK RONK RONK RONK!”