Free All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

she was making it all up as she went along. “Oh, it’s very bad,” she summarized, finally. She allowed the landscape in front of her to direct her thoughts. In the snowy woods, Mars hung low enough to touch. Perhaps through a trembling, handheld telescope you could see the dusty red deserts, the enormous mountains, the deep valleys scoured by ancient torrents, all sifted over with what looked like snow. You could imagine the channels and stone walls, too straight to have been dug or laid by chance, and if you twisted the brass ring you might see movement, and the clouds of dust and vapor raised by powerful machines.
    She closed her eyes. Cold night, deep snow, moon and stars icy and bright. The flare set off an explosion, which illuminated the airship above them, as if in ghostly green cloud. She heard the patter of incendiary grenades, rattling through the naked branches. One after another, they detonated in a muffled blot of flame, a series of concussive jolts that she felt in her body. The grenades released a drizzle of green fire, a spattering of drops that sizzled in the snow.
    Now she described it: “Lizzie was gone, and at first I thought Matthew was hidden in the smoke on the other side of the bonfire and the Karnak pile of boulders. But in the green light I could see he’d gone away, abandoned me. He’d vanished. I turned away and staggered through the snow, searching for a place away from the light. Above me I could hear the harsh, metallic, foreign words, which seemed to come from the machine itself.…”
    â€œYou’re doing this on purpose,” he murmured. “It doesn’t have to be that bad.”
    Paulina stood at the cliff’s edge. “I was in terrible trouble. I was all alone. My coat was unbuttoned and I had lost my gloves. I just knew I had to get away from the fire, the light dripping down from the naked trees. How could those two have left me alone? And as soon as I had stumbled off into the dark, away from the fire, I saw the slinking shadows around me in the trees, white wolves drawn by the bonfire. Now they kept pace with me, their eyes shining with reflected light.”
    â€œOh, come on…”
    Suddenly she was enjoying this. “As I ran, I followed a set of footsteps that turned out to be my sister’s. I found an abandoned stick of dynamite. I picked it up, thinking it might help me with the wolves. But as I stumbled between the trees in the new snow, I thought of a new idea. I thought I would find the Martians where our reconnaissance had shown their base, the station that had come to Earth a few miles south of town, the source of the airships and the steam-powered chariots, the engine that had broken through the dyke as if erupting through the snow. And in that metal nest I’d find the Martian queen. Lizzie and Matthew had deserted me, so I thought at least I could…”
    â€œStop,” he said. “All right. All right. You don’t even know how dynamite explodes.”
    And as if his words had been some kind of signal, the world leapt into motion once again. The steam whistle blew. Paulina opened her eyes to see the train jolt forward. The last of the flatcars, which had seemed empty before, disgorged two of its black dogs.
    â€œThanks for the idea,” Matthew said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s you or not. They’ve got the clothes, they’ve got the diary, they’ve got the doll. The girl doesn’t even have to know she’s going to die. She just has to pretend she’s you for a few minutes, so he can get up close.”
    It was hard for her to listen because she had turned to watch the dogs, still far away. A cloud of dust followed them. “Come,” she said—she didn’t care if he came. She put her toes over the edge and clambered down into the ravine.
    Now all the aching in her body came back, the raw, scorched feeling in her arms and thighs and on the heels