But rockets don’t come with brakes. These didn’t even have an OFF button. One of the wooden bars gave way, and Kate was pelted with a shelf’s worth of books. They kept going up and up, blasting up through the clouds, and then Kate could feel something even crazier happening: The track kept curving back past the vertical, back in the direction of upside-down—but the rockets were driving them so hard that centrifugal force kept them stuck to the track. The track kept curving till it did a complete roller-coaster loop, and for one delirious, transcendent moment they were completely upside down, with Kate’s head pointed at the earth, and she went weightless, and in that moment all her fear suddenly evaporated into nothing and she laughed out loud with the awesomeness of it all.
And then they were past it and roaring down the downslope, still at high speed but no longer accelerating. Kate and the books and everything else slid down the wall and back to the floor, where they belonged.
Her whole body felt limp and spent. The noise of the rocket engines faded and then stopped. She managed to get on her feet and stagger to the window. Outside, underneath them, there were only clouds.
They were on a railroad in the sky.
“Is everybody okay?” she whispered.
Click-bing.
OMG THAT WAS AMAZING
22
The Train Station in the Sky
THE SILVER ARROW WAS ROLLING ALONG ON TOP OF A cloud.
Click-bing.
IF THIS IS DEATH, IT REALLY ISN’T THAT BAD
It was a long way down. Ahead and behind, train tracks curved off through the sky into the distance, looking very thin and precarious.
Kate made her way forward, wondering what was up here in the clouds that could be worth all that. She found herself stepping lightly and carefully, as if she might somehow fall out of the train at any moment.
But now she could see a station ahead of them. It looked like an ordinary country train station—a long, narrow platform with a railing and a little shelter—except that it was floating a mile in the air, and it was completely made of clouds. It was like somebody had decided to build an entire station out of fluffy white cotton wool.
She found the animals in the dining car.
“I wonder whose stop this is,” Kate said.
“Not my natural habitat,” the porcupine said.
“It’s not even mine,” the heron said.
“I think I might know,” the fishing cat said.
She looked over at the baby pangolin, who had survived the rocket ride unscathed and apparently fast asleep, curled up safely in a scaly little ball.
“The pangolin’s?” Kate said. “Pangolini? Whatever? I don’t understand. Where are we?”
“I don’t know,” the snake said. “But it’s somewhere very magic.”