Chapter 7: Swallow

A train

Middle of the night.

A face swam into Sadie Crane's vision, all cosines. It rearranged itself, strand by errant strand, into somebody they knew.

"How you feeling, space cadet?" De'afi asked.

Hir voice anchored Sadie Crane to the present moment in time. They remembered where they were, what they were supposed to be doing. Supposed to be. Funny to think they ever came here with purpose.

They sat up in the leather bench seat they'd taken for a bed, looking around the train's interior.

Viola took from her rucksack the canteen and offered Sadie Crane a drink. She wanted to make tea, but there was nothing to make tea with on the train. And she didn't know how anyway. Mama Sepirot always made tea and sugar cookies when people came over to the house.

"Drink," she urged softly.

They drank greedily, tilting their head back. They'd been asleep for hours, since late afternoon at their latest estimate. They didn't feel like they'd slept, only drifted in and out of their body.

"Like shit," they said in answer to De'afi's question.

Where they were going, danger was sure to follow. It wasn't people they had to be scared of, but things that weren't people. De'afi had a skinning knife, hir bow, and a quiver of arrows, not for an if but for a when. Sadie Crane had their bow and quiver, as well as a knife, for the same reason. Even Viola, her every bone a pacifist, carried a knife on her belt.

Sadie Crane's deerskin pack, Viola's rucksack, and De'afi's basket pack sat within the luggage car, where hardly a soul ventured.

They packed their own food, books, clothes, toothbrushes, soap, and water. It was far from perfect, but would last a few days.

Outside, a screeching animal twaned the windsweep. Inside, passengers snored.

De'afi scribbled in hir notebook. The black fox. Sybil. The old farmhouse where Sadie Crane used to pick berries and swim in the pond. Hir flying machine. This was hir way of keeping order, of forcing sense on a senseless world.

"Never been out this way before," Viola spoke nervously.

She looked out the window, entranced by the landscape. She used to take train rides with her siblings and guardians a long long time ago. They would go see the monuments in Specter or the library in Distant Shore. These memories remained nothing short of blissful, despite what came after and before.

"We gotta start somewhere," they said back. "Figure Black Sparrow has to know something, right? Right? I'm not crazy?"

"Don't make me answer that," De'afi chuckled.

Viola leaned herself forward on the leather bench, taking up the arm in her fist. She seemed smaller, although that wasn't possible. Perhaps staying in the same place, self-appointed collector of tragedies, created this illusion.

"Was it hard?" she asked. "At university, I mean?"

It was crystal clear she'd been waiting to ask. And there was only so much tongue biting she could do.

"Yeah," they replied stiffly. "It's hard everywhere, sunshine. Cuz of the shit I see."

"No, I mean," Viola replied. "Did you like it?"

Sadie Crane regarded her for several moments, their lips pressed together.

"I did," they admitted shamefully. "I loved it. It was--it's a whole world. Like you just gotta see it to believe it's--like, it's real. What they got down there is real. Sybil should have--he should have been here, so he could--fucking have that, fucking have that."

Viola did not speak for a moment.

"You think he'd want it?" she said finally. "Like if you gave him what you got to have--university and all, all that--you think he'd want it?"

"No," Sadie Crane admitted in a whisper. "He wouldn't."

Fellow travelers, those who'd stepped onto the hulking transit beast when it stopped at the little station, regarded them with shameless vitriol. They had not yet left their history. A killer is one thing. But a killer who gets away with it, a seer fated to bring misfortune. That's a lot harder to swallow.

White Doe, Adel, Black Sparrow, and She Follows had to threaten and then beg the town elders to not send their child away. They stuck their necks all the way out. And Sadie Crane, in typical Sadie Crane fashion, ended up leaving anyway just a year later. The irony wasn't and could never be lost on them.

Sadie Crane made eye contact with a few of the more aggressive starers, forcing them to look away. But they chose, for the moment, to remain seated.

A young man in the seat behind them hissed murderer under his breath, just audible enough to be heard.

They turned around to regard the young man, locking him with a stare that could have boiled water at fifteen paces. He appeared to be in his early twenties, short dark curls and a prominent chin freckled in small black hairs.

"You wanna say that again?" they urged. "Louder?"

The young man, sensing he'd fucked up but unwilling to back away, looked them straight in the eye.

"Murderer," he repeated.

Sadie Crane's hand twitched on their barely concealed knife.

Viola grabbed her arms, shaking her head back and forth in furious disapproval.

"Don't," she pleaded.

All six feet of De'afi rose from hir chair.

Perhaps it was hir size, perhaps it was the disconnected three circle scarification mark on hir right arm from almost taking down a wild boar. But the young man sank back into his chair and did not bother them again.