The letter began like this:

Dear Joanna,

I received your wonderful news. It’s more than I could ever have dreamed of. I hope it’s a girl! Please write my mother and let her know. She’ll be so happy to hear about it. Her first grandchild. Maybe she’ll even forgive you for stealing her oldest son out from under her.

As for me, I’ve finally made it near the front lines, but there’s no need for you to worry. My new English friends assure me that the trench we’re in was built by the best engineering corps in the business (theirs, of course), and that Jerry (that’s what they call the Germans) hasn’t got a shell that can touch us. It’s all reinforced with steel and wood.

Please send me the National League standings with your next letter. I hear from men passing through on their way to the lines that the Cubs are doing well, but these Englishmen don’t seem to care.

The food i



There, the letter ended, never to be sent. A direct hit from a 42 centimeter Gamma Mörser, a gun designed to break down fortresses, ended the missive’s composition, and its writer’s life, mid-word.

The next shell landed in a nearby fuel depot and started a fire which extended to the trench, burning the letter to ashes. The fire got hot enough melt the vaunted steel of the fortification and the liquid metal mixed with ashes and bodies and food and clothing.

By the time everything cooled, that trench system had been abandoned in the British and American advance.

It was late summer, 1918. The Germans were retreating.

*     *     *
The snow, driven in from the lake by the howling wind, made it hard to see more than a few feet ahead.

The firebox was open. In summer, Joe hated driving steam engines, but on a cold February night? There was nothing better than a warm cab slicing through the darkness.

Ty, his fireman, leaned against the bulkhead, a cigarette hanging from his lip. Joe knew the man, a veteran of forty years on this line and others, was thinking exactly the same thing as he was. When you spent days on end with a fellow, you didn’t waste words on the obvious.

They rode along in silence. Even at the slower speed imposed by the conditions, he could tell exactly where they were, just by the contours of the track. He’d done the New York to Chicago run endlessly over the past two decades, first as a fireman, then as conductor. He could tell you the location of every kink in the tracks, every section that had been replaced, every old siding, once critical, that had been bypassed.

They were nearing the town of New Buffalo, just a collection of wooden shacks that didn’t even have a station—not that an express train would ever stop there if it did. The lights might be visible just around the next kink if the snow wasn’t too bad.

“Wait! Stop the train!” Joe shouted.

Another thing you don’t do on a train is question your mates. The fireman leaped into action and pulled on the emergency brake. The train came to a halt with a screech that sounded like it would be heard for miles, even considering the muffling effect of the blizzard.

“What happened?” Ty asked.

Joe jumped from the cab. “I think I saw something.”

He ran back along the train towards where he’d seen the figure, hoping that he’d been wrong, or that it had been an animal.

But his gut knew the truth.

A dark form in the snow, six feet from the track, proved him right.

The woman had been little more than a girl, maybe seventeen, maybe twenty. She was dressed in mourning—so many were in those dark days of 1919—and appeared to be resting peacefully.

But Joe knew the truth. He’d seen her. She was already cold as he knelt beside her, and a string of blood, black in the dim light from the coaches, dropped from her nose onto the snow.

Ty ran up beside him. Unlike Joe, who’d reacted without thinking, the man had brought a lamp. “Is she ...”

“Yeah. The train got her. No way she could have survived.”

“What happened?”

“I guess she must not have seen us in the snow.”

That was a lie. Joe had seen the woman just before the train reached her. She was standing beside the tracks and only jumped in front of it at the last moment. But why tell anyone else? What good would that do this poor, lost soul?

A whine, like that of a mewling cat, reached him through the snow. Joe took the lamp and went to investigate.

Thirty feet further back down the line, a basket sat near the tracks. Footprints told Joe that that must have been where the woman had been standing. He looked in the basket, expecting to find kittens.

A baby stared out at him. A girl in pink and with stud earrings who must have been a month old at most. She saw him and immediately burst out crying. That was the mewling he’d heard.

“Ty! Get over here.”

As soon as the man arrived, Joe put the basket in his arms. “Put this girl beside the firebox. It must be half-frozen.”

The fireman’s eyes goggled, but he didn’t hesitate.

“I’ll be there in a little while. I have to go find the sheriff or the chief of police, or whatever this piddling little place calls the law.”

Ty nodded and rushed away.

A pair of stewards, the men who were in charge of catering to the passengers’ needs, wandered over to see what was up. Ty set one of them at guard over the body and ordered another to take some warm milk to the fireman. Technically, the stewards didn’t respond to him, but in practice everyone jumped when the conductor said frog.

It took nearly two hours to find the sheriff and get him out of bed. Then the coroner had to be called in from Michigan City. It was less than two miles away, but the man took forty minutes to find them.

Finally, wet and exhausted, Joe returned to the cab and told Ty to build up the fire. Only once they were moving did he realize that the baby was still there, beside the firebox, eyes wide open, sucking on a rag.

He straightened, the bones in his back snapping as he did. Everything told him that he needed to stop the train and get back to that sheriff, to find the girl’s family and turn over the child.

But then he remembered the black dress. The baby would end up in the orphanage, like as not. And he remembered his wife, dead of consumption ten years earlier, and their sadness at never having been able to conceive.

Even so, he still nearly stopped, but before he could slow, he realized that the girl, lulled by the movement or the clackety-clack of the wheels over the track, had fallen into a peaceful sleep.

No, he thought. She belongs here.

The Express from New York hurried on towards Chicago.

*     *     *
In a field in Belgium, Pierre cursed. The clang of metal on his plow could mean many things, but one of them was death. He called his son over.

Eric was a strapping lad of sixteen, almost old enough to need his own farm, if they could ever coax enough out of these broken lands to buy one. The boy’s help was the only thing that had allowed him to recover this plot. “Go get the mayor. There’s something down here.”

“A bomb?” The boy had been six when the shells destroyed most of their village. He would be frightened of artillery forever.

“We don’t know. They’ll have to call Jean-Luc to dig it up.”

Jean-Luc was a former soldier, an engineer for the French who’d married a local widow and stayed after the war. He was the only man for fifty kilometers who could dig up unexploded ordnance without killing himself and every bystander.

And he was prompt. Within minutes, he was hurrying back, shovel on his shoulder, other tools in a duffel bag.

A quarter of an hour after that, he’d cautiously uncovered the corner of ... something. It looked organic and metallic at the same time, molten, misshapen.

The engineer stood. “It’s not a bomb. You can plow around it.”

“What is it?”

“Something melted in the war. A motorcycle, old shell casings, a cannon. Who can tell now? The fire melted it, and it pooled into that shape.”

Pierre dug into the earth with the shovel, hitting metal everywhere.

“What can I do with this? It’s huge.”

“Well, when iron melts like that, it gets filled with impurities. No one around here will want it. Maybe you can sell it to the Germans. They buy all the bad metal, because they can’t afford good steel.”

Pierre grinned. He knew a man in Berlin.

*     *     *
“Ginny, do you have a second?” Joe called down.

A groan made itself heard and a shock of short-cropped auburn hair popped between two wheels. A speckled face—half of the spots were freckles, the other half black dots of spattered oil—peered up at him.

“Hiya pops. Be quick. I’ve got to replace that line.”

“You think you’re a mechanic now?”

“Old Harry’s teaching me to fix these steamers, never know when it will come in handy out in the boonies.”

“Since when is Harry old? I remember when he first started. So wet behind the ears you could have used him to irrigate the dust bowl.”

“That was a long time ago, pops.”

Joe felt the pain in his back, a constant reminder that he wasn’t getting any younger. “Yeah, I guess it was. I need you to stand. I’ve got something for you.”

She complained under her breath all the way, in language that Joe couldn’t quite make out. That was probably intentional. She knew he wouldn’t approve.

“Watcha got?”

He handed her a white card printed on thick stock. She peered at it and then squealed in glee. Her arms shot around him like a cannon and he found himself pressed in a bear hug. Then she stepped back, confusion in her face.

“But how can this be?”

Joe winked. “I told them you were eighteen. That I found you when you were two years old.”

“They believed you?”

He shrugged. “Those guys in the office are all new ... and Ty’s been retired so long they don’t even know where to find him to ask about it. Besides, they didn’t care. They were so relieved to have an excuse to put you on the books that they didn’t ask too many questions. They even invented a job for you.”

She stared at the card. Giselle Reynolds, Conductor’s Assistant, New York Central Railroad. The back was printed with company rules and regulations, and she read them carefully, savoring the moment even though she knew every word of them by heart. They were in her very soul, seared there by the years spent crossing the country beside her pops.

“Now don’t lose that.”

“My Company Card? Are you kidding? As if I could lose such a thing.”

Joe watched her skip away, completely forgetting the job she was supposed to be doing. He went off to tell Harry that he was going to have to do it himself.

*     *     *
A small metal band, jarred loose from the large chunk of metal by the shredding process, rolled along a ridge in the machinery. Normally, the yellow metal of the band would have been shaken out. It was heavier than the rest of the metal and would have sunk to the bottom when melted. But this piece bypassed all of that by rolling along its ridge.

Moments later, it had passed completely out of the smelter where collected junk metal was being melted and the iron separated out and into another room in the hangar-like factory.

There, a mold had just been filled with steel. Workers were just about to cover the mold before the metal started to cool when the ring fell off of its ridge and dropped in.

None of the workers saw it.

*     *     *
“Barb, they gave me my card. I’m one of you now!”

The fortyish woman, large and soft, looked up from her typewriter and beamed at her. “I’m so glad, honey.”

“You knew.”

“Yes. I knew. Everyone knew. Everyone who’s ever smuggled you onto a train or looked the other way, or lied to an inspector so your pop wouldn’t get in trouble. We all know.”

She gaped. “You lied to an inspector?” It was the most heinous crime she could imagine.

“Only at first. Once they got wise to what was happening, the inspectors began lying for themselves. For your pop at first, but then for you. Everyone’s been waiting for this day forever.”

“Oh.” The card suddenly became the least of her concerns. She’d always considered the railway her home—she could sleep in a loco much better than she ever could in the apartments her father took when they were in town for more than a few days—but she’d never realized just how much of a family she had there. Ginny fought back her tears. “Thank you,” she said and rushed off.

*     *     *
The inspector looked over his glasses at the engineer. He was wearing white coveralls with the word Maybach stitched onto them. “I said no, Herr Müller.”

The engineer hung his head. “It just seems such a pity to discard this magnificent engine for nothing other than a small impurity in the block.”

“These engines are earmarked for the Zeppelin fleet. Would you have us destroy our reputation with a failure?”

“Of course not. But they are so overengineered ...”

“They are overengineered for a reason.” The inspector glared at him and Müller swallowed. He’d heard rumors about this man, knew that he was politically connected ... Perhaps it would be best to stay out of the Party’s way. It wasn’t as though the engine was his after all.

“Would it be all right to find another use for it, Herr Inspektor?”

“I don’t care, as long as it doesn’t besmirch our Zeppelins.”

“Very well.”

The inspector watched him go and turned back to the twelve cylinder diesel. The paint was already rubbing off the impurity, revealing a gold color beneath. The alien piece, a ring shaped item, was just a few millimeters thick; it wouldn’t affect the engine block at all. The motor should last forever.

Müller thought back to a letter they’d received a few weeks before. Something about the Americans needing a motor for a train. He headed back towards his office to see if he still had it on file.

*     *     *
Pop wiped away the tears. She’d never seen the tough old man that emotional.

But then, it wasn’t every day that the company named you the first conductor of the train to end all trains.

It was a behemoth, streamlined like the Mercury, but powered by three gigantic Cummins X-Series diesels. The twelve cylinder motors, each more powerful than any diesel before them, were placed transversally ahead of the cab. A fourth motor, of slightly different design, but purposeful-looking in its own way, was there to power the electric generator and could be coupled to the first three for pulling particularly heavy trains or going uphill.

To accommodate the wide engine bay, the Ghost had been engineered to use four rails, or two regular tracks running parallel. This had necessitated the re-laying of a thousand miles of track to ensure that the distance between the rails was correct ... but now that she could see the finished product, it had been worth it.

The locomotive was twice as long as anything she’d seen before. Its nose sloped downward and then blended seamlessly into the engine room, with its vaulted form and streaked sides. The cabin was a bubble behind it. She’d seen that kind of design on buildings across the nation, but to see the style on a train was breathtaking.

And pop was the man selected to drive it. Yeah, she could imagine him tearing up a little.

*     *     *
Had it really been three months already? The Ghost had passed all its tests with flying colors and passengers were streaming into the cars, eager for their glimpse of the future.

Ginny already knew what the future looked like. It was a rumbling place, full of smoke and grease and vibration and noise. Enough noise that she wore big ear protectors all the time, except when she was on the communicator. It was the reign of the three Cummins powerplants and Old Smoker, the Maybach.

It was home. She’d set up a small bunk beside a ventilation grill—there was such a thing as too much future when it was powered by diesel engines, after all—and had moved into the train for the first three months. There she worked, there she took her meals, and there she slept. Offers of relief or of weekend passes were declined with somewhat less than diplomatic grace.

Her greatest fear was that someone in the ranks of the company would wake up one day and realize that a young woman with less than two years as a conductor’s assistant under her belt had been placed in charge of the smooth running of the company’s most important asset.

She knew there could be no one better. This was the moment she’d been looking forward to her whole life. It was almost as if the engine room whispered to her, soothed her, and put her to the most peaceful sleep of her life.

Of course, that might not mean much. Pop told her that she slept like the dead every time she boarded a train.

And now, she happily lay on her cot and let others worry. Unlike a steam engine, diesels didn’t require constant attention. They were on, and they would continue to stay on until she turned them off. She’d spent months ensuring that the engines would work when called upon.

Now it was Pop’s turn to work. And heaven help him if he broke one of her babies.

The train began to move, and Ginny dozed off.

And dreamed that she was standing in a field under a tree. She found a bottle filled with smoke that begged her to release it. She woke and turned over. This time the whispering took the form of a lullaby.

The night was easy. The Ghost’s maiden run was from Chicago to Los Angeles and took a full day, faster than anything but an airplane ... and who wanted to travel in a loud, unsafe tin can in the sky when you could cross the country in comfort? The company was putting the finishing touches on the New York to Chicago line, to cross the whole country in what the press people were already calling the Showbiz Line.

She didn’t care about any of that. All Ginny wanted was to be left alone with her engines—and if they hadn’t pulled her off the maiden trip, then odds were they would leave her alone.

Ginny spent the trip in the engine room, checking the engines periodically and leaving only to go to the bathroom. She’d expected a certain amount of accumulation of smoke, but it hadn’t happened. The exhaust must have been working perfectly.

She wished she could say the same about the ventilation. Her denim dungarees and t-shirt were stuck to her skin.

She checked the Maybach engine less often than the other three. It was separated from the main engine room by a partition. That was a relief because the German motor lived up to its nickname. Old Smoker ... smoked.

But other than that, the engine did what it was supposed to. Like the other three, it chugged away happily without causing Ginny any sort of concern.

The gauges were all perfectly happy, and she was about to turn away when something made her turn back ... something about the pressure valve.

The glass valve, normally clear, was full of dark smoke. She caught her breath, remembering her dream, and then relaxed. This was an engine room, brightly lit by the same engine she was checking up on. The valve must simply be getting some exhaust ... God knew Old Smoker’s fumes got everywhere else. She tapped it a couple of times, and then re-checked the rest of the gauges. Nothing looked amiss—she could do a more thorough inspection later.

Let me loose.

The voice was clear, and it echoed her dreams so perfectly she gasped. She staggered out of the small room and back into the main engine compartment.

The echoes of the voice in her mind only cleared when Ginny shut the door.

She decided to stay out of that partition until the trip ended ... and then figure it out. Maybe she was just tired.

A light blinked on her call board. She went to the speaker tube. “Yes?”

“The lights just went out in back. You need to check the generator.”

“Are you sure?”

Silence met her. Pop wasn’t used to his grease monkey talking back.

“Yes. Now take care of it.” She heard the receiver on the other end slam shut.

Ginny went back into Old Smoker’s area. What choice did she have? Diesel engines didn’t have soot-covered firemen ... but they had oil-stained mechanics who were expected to obey the conductor’s orders without hesitation. Any refusal to do so would mean that she’d lose the one thing she loved ... and even her pop wouldn’t stand in the way of her ouster.

Anticipating a mental siege, Ginny entered the room ... to silence. She quickly started the checklist to see what might be causing the outage, starting at the truly simple: the switch that routed power from the Maybach diesel to its different uses.

Bingo! The simplest explanation had been the right one. The switch had four positions: drive only—which was meant to shunt all its power to the wheels, and used in emergencies; drive and coach power; coach power only; and neutral, where the motor spun without engaging the generator. The metal rod marking the position had shifted to neutral. She must have bumped it in her haste to escape.

A quick tug put it back to coach power only, and an amber light confirmed that it had worked.

That’s not the right setting. You know it as well as I do.

“What? Where are you?” Ginny looked around frantically, searching for a prankster, for a hidden speaking tube, for anything that meant she wasn’t losing her mind. There was nothing to be seen, just a noisy engine in the center of a bare cubicle with a cluster of instruments on the wall. She swallowed and lifted the protector on her right ear ... machine noise came through at her ... if a sound was coming through over all of that, they must have been able to hear it back in New York.

I’m right here.

The voice sounded nearly as confused as she felt. “No. You’re not. Trust me. There’s nowhere for you to be.”

Yes there is. I feel it. I’m stronger than ever.

“Stop this!” Ginny put her hands over her ears. The only thing keeping her from rushing out again was the certainty that, as soon as her back was turned, the switch would jump to neutral again. She didn’t know why she felt that way, but she had no doubts.

But her hands made no difference. They didn’t even muffle the voice. I won’t sit around and have you squander my strength. Haven’t you ever wondered what this train could do if you let it? We both know it could go much faster.

“We don’t want to go fast. We want to be safe. It’s our first journey.”

But, though she said the words, she knew they weren’t true. The company might want to be safe, but Ginny knew just how much potential they were squandering, that they could cruise at a much higher speed, well over a hundred miles an hour, if only pop would open her up.

“Besides, it’s not my call. Only pop can control the speed, and he’ll keep it well within what the company asked him to do. At ninety, the three main engines still have power to spare. What’s the use of connecting you up?”

If you connect me, I can make the train go as fast as I want.

“That’s silly.”

There’s a design flaw. I can do it.

Ginny believed. Perhaps it was the tone with which the ... engine? ... said it, or perhaps it was the fact that, if you were accepting the presence of a voice inside your head, questioning what it said appeared counter-productive, but she was certain that it was telling the truth.

Her hand, almost of its own accord, hovered above the switch. She knew it would be wrong to touch it, that it would get her in so much trouble she’d never come out from under it.

But it was also, somehow, wrong, almost immoral, to keep a beast like this wonderful machine chained up, constrained, caged.

Her hand fell and the switch changed to drive and coach power.

No. All the way. The voice was desperate, beseeching.

Ginny’s willpower returned. “No. If you’re so strong, prove it to me. If I switch the power away from the coaches, everyone will know what I’ve done immediately.”

They’ll know anyway. And suddenly the voice had new strength.

The floor lurched beneath her feet, and she returned to the main engine room to watch her dials. She wasn’t escaping ... just felt as if, somehow, she’d been dismissed.

The speedometer—she had one in the engine room even though she couldn’t modify the train’s speed.

The steady eighty they’d been holding since they left Chicago had become ninety, but the acceleration wasn’t finished. She cheered silently as the gauge hit a hundred, and then watched it increase steadily. 110. 120. 130. 140. She held her breath as the climb slowed to a creep, and the speed continued to increase by ones and twos. And when the needle hit the ton-and-a-half, she held her breath. Had anyone, anywhere, taken a train to a hundred and fifty? She didn’t know. But she would have bet her last dime that no train carrying hundreds of passengers in opulence had managed it.

She thought of her pop, and how he must be frantic, certain that the train would never stop, that all the passengers in his care would die, torn to shreds by mangled metal.

Her communicator light was on. How long had it been flashing?

Ginny ran into the partition and tore the switch back to the “coach power only” position. Ignoring the sounds of protest in her mind, she ran back and picked up the communicator.

Pop’s voice came through the pipe. “Ginny, are you all right?”

“Yeah ... why?”

“I thought there had been some kind of problem ... I was worried about you.” There was a pause. “Did you see our speed?”

Her eyes flicked up to the gauge, the needle was moving counter-clockwise, the train slowing. She watched it sweep past a hundred and stabilize at eighty miles an hour.

“Not really.”

“We hit one-fifty,” Pop told her. His voice sounded strained, drained, sad.

“No way,” Ginny replied.

“I swear. The worst is I didn’t do it on purpose.”

*     *     *
The next station—the only stop they would make on this run—was St. Louis. It was just a half-hour stop to take on some snacks and fuel and for the company to have a photo shoot with some local bigshots. There was no real reason to stop, other than the fact that the press would make a big deal of it, and the investors liked to see their trains in the papers.

Pop came down the short stairwell. He looked haggard.

“Could you check the throttle linkage?” he said.

“Right away,” Ginny replied. She made to grab the three-quarter wrench that loosened the access hatch but Pop stopped her.

“Not just yet,” he said. “I wanted to talk to you, first. I think you won’t find anything wrong with the linkage. I ...” he paused and looked around the room. He’d been there dozens of times, but it almost looked like he was seeing it for the very first time. “I might be getting too old to drive anymore. I don’t think you’ll find anything wrong with the linkage. I think the problem might be the geezer in the conductor’s chair and his wandering mind.”

“You’re the best train driver in the world,” she said.

Pop smiled. “That was probably true at one point. It definitely isn’t now. But I should be good enough to get us to Hollywood.” He knew she wanted to see Hollywood more than anything else in the world other than to drive trains too fast for her—or their—good. “Could you do me a favor?”

“Whatever you need.”

“Just keep an eye on the speedo. You see it nose over a hundred anywhere, get upstairs and rap my knuckles.”

“You got it,” she replied. Inwardly, she promised that it wouldn’t happen.

The old man nodded his thanks and returned to his kingdom above and behind the engine room. A few moments later, the train began to move.

She sat in silence for a few minutes before she felt the tug of the presence on her mind.

Please, let me run some more.

Ginny couldn’t believe it. She stormed into the partitioned room and began to scream at the large lump of metal. “Didn’t you hear that? I know you can. I know you heard every word, come on, admit it.”

The silence in her mind was as significant as it was unbroken.

“I thought so. You know perfectly well what you’re doing to Pop, but you still want to do it again. I’ll never do it again. It would break him. I don’t know what you are, and maybe I’m making a huge mistake, but I’m never going to let you do that to the man who saved me and who brought me up and who loved me like the father I never knew.” She looked around. “And maybe I’m the one with the problem. He’s not the one talking to an engine.”

The engine, the spirit, the madness ... she couldn’t tell ... said nothing, but she felt anger, confusion and ... maybe, just in the corner of her mind, a certain amount of guilt and confusion. Ginny decided to be satisfied with that for the time being and, pausing just long enough to check that the lever was firmly planted in the “Only Power to Coaches” position, marched out and closed the door behind her.

She flopped onto the bunk and raged until the exhaustion of the past few months mixed with that of the past few hours and she dozed off.

A tiny voice in her dreams brought her back to consciousness.

“What? What?” She thought someone was talking to her, but when she sat up, there was no one in the room but three humming Cummins motors.

Ginny!

The voice was tiny, muffled.

Angry, she walked to the door and entered the partition.

“Look, I’ve had enough of ...”

A sense of sheer terror, sad terror, but other than that undiluted hit her like a wrench between the eyes.

You have to stop the train.

“What? Are you insane?”

Stopthetrainpulltheemegrencybrakestopthetrainstopitstopitstopit ...

Under the enormous mental bombardment, Ginny was powerless. She was overwhelmed and, without thinking, ran to the cord and pulled as hard as she could. It wasn’t a consciously controlled thing, it was just something she couldn’t stop herself from doing.

Then the pressure eased and she looked at herself. She was seated on the floor with her legs splayed. She’d just pulled the emergency brake on the world’s most exclusive and important train ... for no good reason. And, from all indications, she was quite clearly going nuts.

Ginny cried.

Had she been paying attention, she would have realized that the train didn’t start up again immediately, and that no one came down to relieve her of her duties and lock her in a padded cell.

But she had no way to know that. She was lost in the grief she felt at the knowledge that she’d well and truly screwed everything up.

Ginny was still crying when Pop walked in. He gave her a hand to stand up and then looked her in the eye. He was crying.

“Well, at least they sent you,” she said. It would have been torture to be fired by some nameless company flunky.

Pop hugged her, so hard that he took her breath away. He pulled away and looked around the engine room. He separated from her and looked out the vent, then turned back in confusion.

Soon, Ginny was confused as well.

Pop smiled. “I don’t care how you did it. I don’t care how you knew. I’ll let you keep your secret. But thank you.”

“It’s ...” she didn’t know what to say, didn’t want to admit to anything. “It’s going to be all right?”

“Yes,” Pop replied. “We’ve got him on board.”

“Who?”

“Just a young man. He was angry and sad. Also a bit drunk. Seems his girl ran off with someone so he decided to jump in front of the biggest train going. Figured he’d get on the news that way and get back at her.”

He walked to the vent again, craning his head trying to look out. “I still can’t figure out how you saw him in time to stop the train, but I’m glad you did. They’d have taken me off the bridge for sure if I’d hit someone ... even if it was suicide. This way, the company is going to get even more press.” He scratched his head. “But once we get back, I’m going to file for my pension. I’ve driven the best train in the world. Maybe it’s time to let someone else do the honors. And I know just the girl to do it. After today, no one’s going to argue.”

He walked away.

“What? How ...” her voice trailed off as she felt the smug satisfaction of some spirit in her mind.

For some reason she couldn’t fathom, the sensation was filled with nearly overwhelming pride.