Authors: Lauren Oliver
Liesl & Po (11 page)
(We will close the box too, on the lost girl Bella. Some stories are meant to stay private.)
Outside Mo’s window, the sky was a lighter gray now. Dawn would come in an hour or so. But it would not be any warmer. No. The air would be like the cold, thin bite of a razor.
Mo redressed quickly and placed the hat in his coat pocket.
“Better now, Lefty?” Mo said, and Lefty, full of milk and tuna fish, purred and rubbed against his ankles. Mo reached down and lifted her carefully into her sling, and placed the sling over his right shoulder and around his neck, and felt the cat’s warmth against his chest, and smiled to himself.
He supposed his meddling didn’t
always
come to no good. His terrible experiment with all the stray dogs and cats had, after all, left him with more than just fleas and a bunch of dog food. He still had Lefty.
Then he stepped out of his apartment and locked it behind him, and went off in search of the alchemist’s assistant, while his imperfect and hole-riddled brain continued sending the same message to his oversized and perfectly functional heart.
The boy should really have a hat.
LIESL STOPPED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TRAIN
station, overwhelmed by an impression of movement and life: people everywhere, and sound, and trains flowing in and out of the station like metal rivers. Life, flowing and flowing and flowing.
“Which way?” Po and Bundle shimmered next to her. In the bright, high lights of the station, they were nothing more than snatches of silvery gray, occasional glimpses, like the quick flash of a fish’s belly moving under a river.
Dirge was a coastal city; south led to the ocean, east led to a single, small fishing town and then to the ocean. That left west and north.
Now that Liesl was out of the attic, it was easier for her to climb down the towers of memory. She closed her eyes and thought of snow peaked high like whipped cream (
ineffable snow, snowy peaked
f
’s
, her mind said). She thought of the taste of ice melting on her tongue, and two spots of red on her father’s cheeks, and the stamping of boots, and the smell of wood fire.
“North,” she said.
Po became more visible for a moment as it studied the departures board intently. “Train 128,” the ghost said. “Leaving from platform 22 in ten minutes. Northbound.”
Liesl suddenly remembered that things cost money in the world. The whole world, in fact, was built on scraps and scrawls of paper. “I have no ticket,” she said, her heart sinking. “And no money for one either.”
“Don’t worry,” Po said. “I will teach you to be invisible. The trick is to think like a ghost.”
Liesl looked unconvinced.
Po explained, “Think of dust and shadows and slippery, slide-y things that no one notices.”
So Liesl did. She thought herself down into the spinning dust on the tiled floor, and away into the shadows, and so she and her ghostly friends passed unnoticed by the large man in an official-looking uniform who was checking tickets at the entrance to platform 22, just behind a large brood of shrieking, squawking children, and a harried-looking mother who kept saying irritably, “I dunno how many there are. Stopped counting after six, and
you
can go on and take one if you’re so interested in ’em.”
Will, meanwhile, was just arriving at the train station, full of hope for the future.
He had woken up an hour earlier, stiff and sore and hungry. His fingers ached with cold and his stomach was growling. But at least the little shed by the underpass had kept him relatively warm, and protected him from the rain and sleet and damp.
When he had arrived the night before, numb with exhaustion, he had seen no sign of Crazy Carl. The shed was swept clean and smelled strongly of wood planks and, strangely, like boiled meat—not altogether an unpleasant combination. He had curled up in a ball in the most deeply shadowed corner and immediately fallen asleep.
All in all, he had slept surprisingly well. The floor was not much harder than his cot at the alchemist’s, and there had been no alarm clocks screaming shrilly and dragging him into consciousness, or nightmares of bulging fish with glassy eyes and disapproving voices calling him useless.
Will had started off for the train station in a very good mood, considering the fact that he was homeless, poor, hungry, and, he figured, a kind of outlaw. His mood improved tenfold when, just before arriving at the station, a carriage spun by him in the street and he was nearly clobbered in the head by a baked potato, which came flying out the window, wrapped neatly in wax paper, still warm and oozing with butter, with only a single bite removed from one of its sides.
Will almost cried as he sank his teeth into its soft, pillowed, buttery flesh. The people in the carriage must have been very rich. No one threw out food anymore.
He arrived at the train station full, and warm from his walk. He would go west, he thought. That’s what people seemed to do. He saw on the departures board a train that was due to leave in an hour and a half. In the meantime he wandered through the train station, enjoying the echo and clatter of so many feet on the tiled floor, and the vast, cavernous ceiling looming far above him, and the flat gray light coming through the windows, and smells of coffee and sweat and perfume and wool and winter, and women sweeping by in elegant coats, and men striding past looking serious and important.
And the trains! The chugging, heaving, huffing, puffing trains, coming in and out of the station, shooting off to places unknown. Will had always loved trains. He felt he could stand there and watch them all day.
One of the trains, a northbound one, was getting ready to take off from platform 22, so Will made his way there to watch it depart. He noticed with pleasure the bitter stink of fire and coal, and the great bellowing of its horn, and the voice of the conductor calling, “All aboard! All aboard!”
Dimly, Will was aware of another voice shouting. This voice said, “You! Hullo! Hi! You there! With the ears!” But he was admiring the train’s shiny red exterior, and handsome polished rails, and did not listen too closely to the other voice.
Then a hand came down heavily on his shoulder, and Will almost jumped out of his skin.
“There—you—are.” Mo was panting heavily. The exertion of running to catch up with Will from the other side of the station had been particularly unpleasant because (1) Mo had not been required to move quickly in a very long time, and (2) Lefty, who was getting jostled by the movement, kept clawing him in dissatisfaction.
Will was struck head to toe by an icy-cold terror. He recognized the guard immediately; it was the man who had been outside the Lady Premiere’s house. Of course he had been sent by her orders. Now Will would be arrested and brought back to the alchemist, to be tortured and killed.
The terror was blackness; and hatred, too. The guard had promised to keep Will’s secret safe. He had seemed like a friend. Now the crushing weight of his hand made Will’s shoulder ache. Will knew he could not hope to fight the guard and win. He was enormous; his forearm was the size of a normal neck.
Mo continued struggling and gasping for breath. Perhaps, he thought, he should lay off the hot chocolate. Or cut down—maybe to three or four cups a day, tops. His uniforms had seemed a bit tight recently. He could barely puff out, “Thought—might—find—here. Runaways—go—train—first.”
“Last call! Laaaast call!” the conductor was hollering, and in that urgent, desperate moment Will imagined himself flying away from the station, soaring off forever in a train fitted with wings. There was a squealing and a screeching as the conductor released the train’s brakes, and the locomotive began grinding forward, out of the station.
“Worried—you—getting—on—train—”
Mo bent over and placed his hands on his knees to help him breathe more easily. In doing so, he let go of Will’s shoulder.
Will did not hesitate for even a fraction of a second. Instantly he spun around and began to run, wildly, ducking and weaving through the crowd.
“Hey!” he heard the guard shout. “Hey! Come back here!”
Will no longer cared about going west, or north, or east, or south into the ocean. All he cared about was getting
away
. He collided with a woman carrying a small, dark poodle in her arms. The poodle let out a yelp, and the lady said, “Excuse you,” but Will didn’t stop. Ahead of him, the northbound train was gathering speed. If he could just make it . . . If he could pull himself up into the last car . . .
“Hey! Hey! Stop it right there!”
“That guard wants a word with you,” said a man with a stiff white mustache, stepping in front of Will. Panicked, Will spun around him, twisting his ankle in the process. Pain ripped through his leg every time he put weight on it, but still he kept running. He was gaining on the train now, gaining on it. . . . Just a few more steps . . .
Sparks flew beneath the train’s grinding wheels. Will could feel heat roaring from its engines.
“Somebody stop that boy!”
If only, if only, if only . . .
Will took two leaping steps forward and swung out wildly with his arm, and found his fingers closing around a door handle. He pulled, and his feet dragged, and then skimmed, and then lifted. And then he was on train 128, and looking back from the door in the very last car at the small, receding shape of the guard, who was standing on platform 22, frantically waving a small piece of fabric—which looked, from a distance, very much like a hat.
IT WAS ALL FINE AND WELL TO PRETEND TO BE
invisible for one minute, or two. But Liesl was not invisible, unlike her ghostly friends, and as soon as she sat down in a comfortable seat in one of the very first cars, resting the heavy wooden box beside her, people began to give her strange looks. She was young to be traveling on her own, they thought. It was unusual. It was Not Right.
It did not help when Liesl began murmuring to herself (or so it seemed to them; for when they saw a flicker or flash or shimmer of light, they thought,
Trick of the eyes
instead of
Ghost
or
Magic
). She said, “I know, I know,” when Po whispered, “People are staring.”
She said, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” when Po suggested she try being less conspicuous.
The other people in the train car—older people with pinched faces and bad tempers—saw a young child all alone, who talked to herself and kept stroking a plain wooden box as though it contained a very powerful magic (which, of course, it did, though even Liesl didn’t know it).
Finally an old woman carrying a cane leaned over and said to Liesl, “Where are your mommy and daddy, little one?”
“They are both dead,” Liesl answered truthfully. “My father is here.” She tapped the wooden box. “I am taking him back to the willow tree, so he can rest.”
This was an honest answer; unfortunately, it did not do anything but convince the old woman that the little girl was quite out of her mind. And if there was one thing the old woman with the cane disapproved of, it was people who were Not Right in the head.