They got back to their regular routine, picking up animals and dropping them off, in lush rain forests, flaming autumn forests, frozen arctic forests of evergreens, dry thorny scrub forests, flooded swamp forests. Kate took ticket after ticket: AL-ANSARIYAH MOUNTAINS, MAOLAN KARST FOREST, CROTHERS WOODS, DYREHAVEN, FORÊT D’ÉPERLECQUES, LONE MOUNTAIN STATE FOREST. As quiet and dignified as they were when they got on, the animals were always excited to get where they were going—they scampered and loped and fluttered out through the doors the second they opened.
The Silver Arrow stopped for ibex and chinchillas. It picked up a massive bison who looked totally bizarre close up, like a bull from another planet, though he carried himself with great dignity. They picked up a pair of mighty-winged, bald-headed condors and a black-and-white-banded snake called a Malayan krait who was so venomous that she made even the mamba nervous. At one station a delicate, airy glass greenhouse car was added to the train, full of different-colored fluttery butterflies. They dropped it off again a few stops later.
Once they rumbled through a long tunnel under a mountain—miles long, it felt like. Kate worried for a second that the library car wouldn’t fit, but it did. She switched on a light in the cab. (Interestingly—or Kate found it interesting—even though there were electric lights on the train, they actually ran off power from a little onboard electric generator that itself ran on steam power.) When they finally spotted a light at the end of the tunnel, it wasn’t daylight, it was the yellow subterranean light of a subway station.
Men and women and girls and boys stood on the platform, all staring down at their phones. The train stopped and the doors opened. A single well-groomed owl stepped on.
Kate thought that people might potentially be interested in the fact that a huge steam train full of animals and driven by children had just come roaring into their subway station—but they never looked up from their phones. Not once. They never noticed. It’s like they’re awake but they’re asleep, Kate thought. She swore silently to herself that she would try to never be that asleep herself.
Kate spent most of her time in between stops in the library car, where she finished the book about the secret underground school-under-a-school and started a new one. They found a fuel depot and switched back over to coal. She explored deeper into the candy car, as far as the Swedish Fish section—she never knew they came in more than one flavor! When it was hot she swam in the swimming pool car, which was exactly as fun as you’d think swimming in a pool on a fast-moving train would be. Tom experimented to see whether he could walk all the way through both dining cars stepping only on tables and chairs. (He could.)