From No Tomorrow

The Future of Capital City

Once she finished writing, Elzbieta pocketed her journal once again and lay down to sleep. Though not tired, and especially in a poor position for a nap, she had nothing else do with her time.

After lying in the container gap for little more than an hour, however, the screaming of the cylinders stopped and she felt the train begin to decelerate. Snapping to her feet, she peeked forward from between the containers, gasping at what she saw.

Ahead, on the same featureless expanse that she had departed in the past stood an imposing Imperial compound. Surrounded by lifeless mud, a concrete wall at least ten feet high and topped with barbed wire encircled the compound in a jagged, irregular shape. Rising from one end of the enclosure was a building vaguely resembling the one she had seen there before, but twice its size. Instead of corrugated metal, flat concrete topped this building, and instead of heavy factory doors, Elzbieta could barely make out a gate guarded by a tunnel of sensor apparatuses. Watch towers, at least twenty feet high and topped with gothic-looking spiked roofs, housed searchlights which stared idly at the ground, their bulbs extinguished.

Shuffling quickly to the other side of the train, Elzbieta saw another colossal crane, identical to the one from the depot before, slowly rotating towards the tracks. A few small vehicles buzzed around the crane and red mars lights flared next to the track.

Stepping back between the containers, Elzbieta weighed her options. Knowing that the train was slowing down, it was obvious to her that it would be stopping at the depot, and she knew it would not be stopping without loading or dropping cargo. One look down the train confirmed to her that all of the cars were filled to capacity.

Elzbieta was about to lose her cover. Realizing quickly that the train could have no more than five cars inside the compound at a time, she ran furiously to the back of the train, hoping to buy herself time. Partway there, however, it occurred to her that the locomotive would be the only portion of the train that would spend the entire offloading process outside the compound.

Sliding to a stop, she switched directions and dashed back up to the locomotive. As she ran low on breath, her lungs began to sting and her muscles began to burn, but she knew what would happen if the train reached the compound before she was hidden away in the locomotive. She would sooner permit herself to collapse from exhaustion than be spotted.

At last, she reached the locomotive, tucking herself in between a metal truss and the massive diesel engine. There, she fought to catch her breath without uncurling, paying no mind to noise while the wheels rumbled and the brakes squealed. For one heart-stopping moment, the locomotive passed through the compound. She heard no indication that she had been spotted.

Pressed against the engine, which radiated the heat of a stove, Elzbieta sweated, still terrified to separate herself from it.

As the train halted, she realized how long she would have to hide on the locomotive before the train departed the station again. Looking back, Elzbieta saw the crane lower its claw to one of the containers with agonizing slowness.

That would take too long. Very slowly, Elzbieta extricated herself from the motor's casing, then slowly crawled up to the front of the locomotive, on the side facing the smaller portion of the compound. Once there, she sat on the forward-facing edge, dangling her feet over the tracks far below. Closing her eyes, she pretended not to hear the machinery behind her and pretended to be on a dock at sea. Inevitably, she envisioned the dock where the steamboat waited on that one fateful day when the Ragyogas were finally driven out of the Empire.

Casting the image from her mind, Elzbieta instead tried to recall the icy dispassion that had come to her so easily when her driver threatened her outside the train depot. She recalled the fresh loneliness that had gnawed at her, with László freshly taken from her. She recalled how puny the man with the knife seemed, less than a day after she had escaped an Imperial death camp. She recalled how inconsolably lost she had felt, dropped into a world a decade removed from her own- a feeling that had still not completely left her.