The Width of the World

by David Baldacci

  We set off next night. I wasn’t exactly sure how long it would take to travel to where we were going, but I didn’t want to get there while it was light.

  Pillsbury and Mrs. Jolly saw us off.

  We stepped outside the front door, which Pillsbury firmly closed behind us.

  “Are you ready?” I asked Delph and Petra.

  They both nodded, and Harry Two, who dangled in his harness, licked my hand.

  I tethered all of us together with my Lassado incantation and then reversed my grandfather’s ring, making us invisible.

  “Are you going to use the Pass-pusay spell?” Delph asked.

  I shook my head. “I’ve never done it other than by myself. And Astrea never said it was meant for more than one to use. I’m afraid something might go wrong.”

  We kicked off and soared upward, Delph on my right and Petra on my left, like a pair of wings.

  We all kept our gazes swiveling, looking for any sign of Endemen or his cohorts.

  We flew over the trees, and I tacked back in the direction of where he had been traveling on the train.

  I kept my gaze pointed down searching for it, but Petra saw it first.

  “There,” she said.

  I looked where she was pointing and saw the train tracks.

  I nodded and took a moment to get my bearings.

  I peered around for a landmark that might be helpful to orient me better, and I found it in a bluish hill to my left. We had passed that coming from True. That meant True was to the left and Greater True was located off in the distance to my right.

  I turned to the left, changing our flight path to match the route of the tracks.

  There was no train, so sometimes it was difficult to follow the tracks, particularly when they entered trees or went through tunnels carved in to the hills.

  Finally, after nearly losing the bloody thing a couple of times, I pulled out my wand. I was about to employ the Crystilado magnifica incantation, but then something occurred to me.

  “Petra,” I said. “Use your wand to do the magnification spell.”

  She looked at me strangely but pulled out her wand, pointed it downward and spoke the pair of words.

  Instantly the tracks were right in front of us and we followed them easily.

  Delph looked at me curiously for a moment, but I shook my head. My reasoning was clear enough.

  Endemen had been able to track the wand I had taken from the bloke back at the castle. I wanted to see whether they could detect Petra’s wand too. It might have Maladon elements in it for all I knew.

  When no suited gents with bowler hats showed up, I let out a relieved breath.

  With the magnification spell to lead us, we had no trouble following the train route all the way back to True.

  Although we had traveled quite a ways, it was still nighttime when we arrived in True. However, with the aid of the spell, I could see a couple of people walking and one motor passing down an otherwise quiet street.

  Then True was behind us as we continued to follow the train tracks.

  We passed a number of towns and smaller villages, none near the size of True or Greater True. We kept going until Delph said, “There!”

  Below was a structure where the train tracks ended.

  I descended slowly, scanning the area to see if anyone was around, but the place looked deserted.

  We alighted at a spot about a hundred yards distant from the structure. I could see that it was small and wooden with a metal roof and was open to the elements on all four sides.

  “It’s just a shelter really,” whispered Delph. “For folks to gather under and wait for the train.”

  Still invisible, we drew closer. There was a sign hanging from one of the support posts.

  “Bimbleton Station?” I said. “I wonder what that is?”

  “Must be the name of this here place, I reckon,” said Delph.

  “But I don’t see a place,” I protested. “It’s just this thing in the middle of nowhere.”

  Petra said, “I never saw that name on the schedule sign at True Station.”

  Neither had I.

  A moment later, a young boy dressed shabbily with dirt smudges on his face and no shoes on his feet came out of a nearby copse of trees. He was carrying a wooden basket.

  As we watched from the shadows, he started picking berries off a bush and putting them in his basket. When the basket was fairly full, he walked around the shelter and stopped and gazed up at the sign.

  He reached up on tiptoe and ran his finger along the letters spelling out the station name.

  I looked at the others; they were all staring at this curious spectacle.

  He walked on and soon disappeared from our sight.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Where?” asked Delph.

  “Wherever he’s going,” I replied.

  We made up the ground quickly and soon gained sight of the boy. The walk through the woods took about twenty minutes, and I wondered at the boy’s family allowing him to wander alone at night. Was this place safe?

  Delph noticed it first.

  “The light,” he whispered.

  I looked up ahead, to where the boy was heading. Light was filling the sky there only we didn’t know what the source was.

  I instinctively reached into my pocket and gripped my wand with my gloved hand. I noted from the corner of my eye that Petra did the same.

  We continued to follow the boy and I felt my heart start to beat faster and my breaths quicken as we went.

  He disappeared around a bend in the path and we hurriedly followed.

  When we cleared the curve, I stopped so fast that Delph bumped into me.

  The lights we had glimpsed before were coming from wooden shacks clustered around a small center patch of grass. Smoke was rising from stone chimneys. Maybe a hundred people or more were gathered around porches or walking along paths dimly lit by the shack lights.

  They were of all different ages. Most were dressed poorly, like the boy, who had disappeared into one of the wooden houses with his basket of berries.

  We eased forward and cautiously gazed around.

  Delph put his mouth next to my ear and said, “What now?”

  I whispered back, “Let’s watch and listen a bit.”

  He nodded, and we drew closer to one group clustered on a crumbling porch.

  “But when will it come again?” asked one young woman a little older than me. She wore corduroy pants, a ripped and dirty coat and falling-apart shoes on her feet. An old tuck was slung over her shoulder. Her dirty face was lined well beyond her years.

  An old man in a slouch hat with a droopy mustache was seated on the top step busily whittling down a piece of wood with a small pocketknife.

  “The train, you mean?” said the man.

  The woman and the others nodded. “Well, ’tis hard to say.” He scratched his forehead with a gnarled finger. This pushed his hat back a bit, revealing tangled white hair. “I hear tell that other trains show up in other places, not that I’ve been to those places, but I hear things from folks ambling down the road from time to time.”

  “So there are other trains, then?” asked another man.

  “Guess so,” said the first man. “Lots of people, lots of trains.”

  “Do they all go to the same place?” asked the man.

  The man shook his head. “Dunno. Now, I can tell you that it does show up at odd times. Nothing scheduled about it, you see. But you hear the whistle. Always hear the whistle, you do. And right after that, it appears.”

  “And do they take everyone?” the disheveled young woman asked. “I heard they might.”

  The old man shook his head, as did several others gathered there.

  “No. Look at me. Been here a long time now. And I’m still here. And lots of you folks will still be here when the train leaves next; just the way it is.”

  “How do they decide, then?” asked a young man who was standing next to the young woman.
He held an old battered canvas bag in one hand.

  It then occurred to me that they were traveling together.

  “We just got here and know nothing about it,” he added.

  The old man pointed his whittled stick at the fellow. “No rhyme or reason that I can see. They just pick.”

  “How many?” asked the man.

  “Now, that varies too, don’t it? Sometimes a lot. Sometimes not too many.”

  “And ’tis a good thing?” asked the young woman. “I mean, where they go?”

  Another man said, “No one’s ever come back to complain, I can tell you that.” He added bitterly, “Course I’m still here, just like ’im.” He pointed at the old man.

  “Course it’s better,” bellowed the old man. He looked around. “I mean what wouldn’t be better than what I got? And none of you would be here if your village had enough food and could take care of its folks. Roofs over your heads, medicine when you need it, education for the young ones. Work your fingers to the bone and for what?” He spat on the ground. “Where I’m from it’s dirt poor, it is. And I’m tired of it.” He pointed at various people in the crowd with his knifepoint. “Any different for any of you, eh?”

  I saw folks shaking their heads, their gazes downcast.

  Apparently life for all of them was as hard as it had been for us in Wormwood. When I thought about what I’d seen in True and Greater True it was like two different worlds coexisting somehow. The “have-alls” and the “have-nothings.”

  The old man said, “I thought as much. So I mean to stay here until I gets on that damn train.”

  “Why does the train even come here?” said a young woman.

  “This is the train station,” replied the old man. “ ’Tis where it stops.”

  “What does a train look like?” asked the same young man.

  “Bloody something,” said the old man. “Long and metal and it runs on those little tracks you see at the station. Folks climb on, and off it goes. Fast it is. Gone in a blur.”

  Many people looked around in wonderment, as though they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. But then again, I had never known that a train existed until I got to True.

  Then I wondered why these people didn’t simply walk to True. Why bother with the train? I knew with Greater True you needed to be authorized, but that wasn’t so for True. At least I didn’t think it was.

  The young man slowly nodded, and then he and the young woman withdrew from the group and walked off.

  I said instantly to the others, “I’m going to become visible and follow those two. I want to talk to them.”

  “But should we be giving ourselves away like that?” asked Delph nervously.

  “I’ll only be giving myself away. If something happens we can get away quickly enough. But by their own words they just arrived here and don’t really know anything.”

  “But if they don’t know anything, what can you learn from them?” asked Petra.

  “I can learn where they came from,” I replied.

  “But, Vega Jane,” Delph began to protest.

  “Delph, I’m going to do this, okay?”

  He frowned. And Petra glared at me. But I didn’t care. I was too focused on what I was going to do.

  We moved to a darkened corner of the place and I slipped off the ring and passed it to Petra. She slid it on, making sure to keep the ring turned inward. Petra used her wand to maintain the magical link among the three of us. I looked around and then headed off after the pair while the others, still invisible, followed.

  It didn’t take me long to catch up to them.

  “Hello,” I said.

  They both whirled around to stare at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Where did you come from?” asked the man.

  “A long way away. I just arrived here.”

  “For the train?” asked the woman.

  I nodded. “I’m Vega.”

  The man said, “I’m Russell; this is Daphne.”

  “Have you been here long?” I asked.

  Russell shook his head. “Like you, we just arrived.”

  “And where did you come in from?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual.

  He was about to answer when Daphne said, “Why do you want to know?”

  I glanced at her, saw suspicion on her features and realized that I’d overplayed my hand.

  I quickly regrouped. “No reason. I was just wondering if you had come from the same direction I had.”

  Daphne folded her arms across her chest and just scowled.

  Russell said, “Daph, she’s just curious.”

  Daphne said, “Okay, so am I. So what direction did you come in from?”

  Without really thinking, I immediately pointed to the left. “About five li — days’ journey,” I said.

  “And the name of the place?” she asked, still glaring.

  Now I folded my arms and glared back. “Wormwood. And you?”

  “I’m not telling,” she replied with a smirk.

  “Daph,” said Russell.

  “Shut it, Russ. She just wants to get on the bleedin’ train and doesn’t care how she does it. I bet she’s looking to bump us right off our seats.”

  I gaped. “How would knowing where you came from help me get on the train instead of you?”

  She said stubbornly, “I don’t know, do I? Best reason not to spill the beans. For all I know, they may not let folks where we’re from get on the train.”

  “Well, don’t you think they might ask where you’re from before they let you board, then?” I asked, with more spite than was probably called for.

  “Oh, I’m ready for that, I am,” she shot back. “I’ll convince ’em to take us.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Good luck.” I spun on my heel and walked swiftly away.

  “Oi, wait,” called out Russell.

  But I heard Daphne exclaim, “Oh, let her go. She’s no bleedin’ use to us. And I’m not going back to our village. I’m not, Russ.”

  I walked purposefully back to the group gathered around the porch, knowing full well that Delph, Petra and Harry Two were right behind me under the invisibility shield.

  The people were all standing there, hands in pockets, talking among themselves. The old man whittling before had set down his work and was drinking from a pewter flask.

  They all looked at me for a moment before returning to their conversations. I supposed strangers routinely showed up around here.

  I sat down next to the old gent. He lowered the flask from his lips, and I could smell sweet wine on them.

  “Who be you?” he asked.

  “I be Vega. And you?”

  “Geoff. You just in?”

  I nodded. “And you?”

  He capped the flask and chuckled. “Oh, I’ve been here a while, missy. May be here a while still.”

  “Where does this train thing go?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Nobody knows that ’cept the ones on it. They don’t never come back here, I can tell you that. So wherever they go must be better than what they left behind.”

  Yeah, freedom for slavery.

  He had on woolen gloves with the fingers cut off, revealing strong, thick and dirty fingers. He blew on his hands and stuck them in his pockets along with the flask.

  “But, Geoff, how do you really know the place they’re going to is a good one?”

  He looked at me strangely. “What?”

  “Well, if you don’t know the place they go to and they never come back here, the place might be a bad place, and that’s why they never come back.”

  He laughed, took up his knife and began whittling again. “Whistling in the wind, you are. What rubbish.”

  I could tell that he so very badly wanted to believe that a better life was just a train ride away that no logic I might employ would persuade him otherwise.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Two years.”r />
  “Why did you come here?”

  He shrugged. “Where I come from there ain’t much there. Been hard times for as long as I can remember.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  He shrugged again. “Just has been. Heard tell there was some war or such. Not that I saw or fought in it. I’m old, but t’were long before my time. But it still lingers, you know. People never did get back on their feet. My little village, you can’t rub two coins together. No work, people just getting by. No … hope. If you want to get somewhere you walk. So most folks don’t get nowheres. ’Tis sad, it is.”

  “Well, why do you have to wait for a train?”

  “Eh?” he replied.

  “You said you walked here. Why not just follow the train tracks to wherever the train goes?” I almost said “to True” but caught myself.

  “Oh, right. Well, I’m not stupid, so I tried doing that once after the train left me behind the first time.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was following the tracks like you said, and …” He stopped, and his face took on a confused expression.

  “And what?” I prompted.

  “Well, I got lost. Couldn’t find the bloody tracks. Got turned around and ended up back here. Tried it another time and same thing happened.”

  I looked around at some other people who were listening to this. They were nodding. One man said, “Aye, me too.”

  I didn’t take me long to figure it out. The Maladons had used a spell, maybe something like Transdesa hypnotica. We had encountered that in the Third Circle of the Quag. That meant they would never be able to find their way to True. The train was their only option.

  The destinations we had seen on the schedule board at True Station must be towns that the Maladons let people freely travel back and forth to. But those travelers had already had their minds manipulated and weren’t a threat. So True apparently was the great clearinghouse for all of this.

  “Okay, but that doesn’t explain why you came to this particular place.”

  “Oh, that? Well, word gets around. Want a better life, get yourself to Bimbleton Station. Least what I hears in my village.”

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.