Kate stepped back into the passenger car, where the others were already waiting, and even as she did, the cloud station began to change shape. It was softening and melting, turning itself into a soft little island for the pangolin. It would keep him safe till there was somewhere real for him to go.

The train gave a mighty hiss and puff and pulled away from the station in the sky.

Some problems in this world just don’t have answers. Not yet.

23

Never, Ever

KATE KNEW WHAT WAS COMING NEXT, BUT SHE WASN’T sure she was ready for it.

They rode through the sky all day. As the sun set, the track gradually bent down toward the earth until sometime in the night it touched down on a mountain peak. The Silver Arrow was hurrying now—it kept fretting that it was late in the season to be on this route. They didn’t stop till the morning, when they reached a small, neat station with a corrugated-tin roof and vines hanging down all around it. The air was humid and smelled like exotic flowers and growing things. The heat hadn’t come up yet, but you could tell it was going to be a hot day.

Kate stood in front of the open door. A voice spoke close beside her.

“This is me,” the mamba said.

“It is? Where are we?”

“Mozambique. This is the East African coastal forest. Lots of mambas here.”

Kate squatted down to meet the snake’s dark, unblinking eyes. She remembered how frightened of him she’d been when they’d first met. Now when he reared up and slid himself around her neck, she didn’t mind at all.

In fact, the cool, dry smoothness of the mamba felt lovely on her skin. He was as long as she was tall, but so slender that he barely weighed anything.

“We mambas are really very shy, you know,” he said. “But I don’t feel shy with you.”

“I don’t feel shy with you, either.”

“Thank you for getting me here, Kate. I know it wasn’t easy.”

“It was an honor. It was the least I could do. I mean after… you know. Everything else.”

“Don’t feel too bad about what humans have done,” the mamba said with a gentleness in his voice that she’d never quite heard before. “Feeling guilty doesn’t help anything anyway. Humans are animals doing what all animals do: surviving. It’s just that you’ve done it too well, so well that now you have to become a new kind of animal, one who makes sure that all the others survive, too.”

The mamba slid noiselessly out the door and across the platform, a vivid green squiggle, and vanished into the forest.

The next stop was by a wide, shallow, milky-pale river that ran fast over rocks.

“My turn,” the white-bellied heron said.