Kate picked up the pangolin, and he opened his wise, dark eyes and looked up at her. He’d definitely grown since that first day when she’d mistaken him for a pine cone, but he still weighed hardly anything. She carried him forward to the passenger car and opened the door.

She felt around with her foot, the way you would with thin ice, but the cloud platform was perfectly solid. Very carefully, she stepped out onto it. It was soft but bouncy, like a firmly stuffed cushion. It would’ve been fun to jump around on it, but for some reason Kate wasn’t in a jumping mood. This was a strangely solemn place.

Tom climbed down after her, followed by the other animals. There was nobody here to meet them. A cool wind blew. It gave Kate a floaty, dizzy feeling to be up this high.

This couldn’t be right. Were they supposed to just leave the little pangolin up here in the middle of the sky all by himself? Alone, like she’d found him? She sat down cross-legged on the platform, in the shadow of the huge train, with the pangolin in her lap. The others stood around her.

Usually there was a sign telling you where the station was, but the sign here just read SOMEDAY.

“What does that mean?” she said. “Someday? That’s not a place.”

“It means there is no place for him,” the fishing cat said. “Not now. Not yet. There’s nowhere in the world we can take him that’s safe enough. He’ll just have to stay up here till things get better.”

Kate looked down at the pangolin in her lap, with his silly, lost little pine-cone face, and a tear fell onto one of his brown scales. He licked Kate’s nose with his weirdly long pink tongue. It seemed incredible to Kate that anybody would ever do anything to hurt him. She wanted to hold him and keep him safe forever.

But it wasn’t that people wanted to hurt him, she thought. Not really. They just weren’t paying attention to him. They didn’t care. They weren’t thinking about baby pangolins, they were just thinking about themselves.

But you have to think about them. You can’t forget them. Kate resolved that always, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, she would remember baby pangolins. She saw now what she was supposed to do. She gave the pangolin a kiss and placed him all by himself on the platform.

“Goodbye,” she said. “I love you.”

The baby pangolin gave her a last look, sniffed, then unrolled and began bumbling around happily, just the way he always did.