Free Last Train to Jubilee Bay by Kali Wallace Page B

had been waiting for him to scribble his own memories on a scrap of paper and pass them to her. Sooner or later, everyone did.
    A pair of collectors followed Lucy for two blocks as she neared the station: a man and a woman, long haired and sickly gray, their eyes bulging and serum white, their damp skin glistening. With bony fingers like claws, they clung to their capes of woven kelp and steered their overladen cart along the road. Radios with broken wires and crooked antennae, a length of iron railing, shoes tied up in a massive bundle, the frame of a bicycle, dripping clumps of muddy clothing, there was no pattern or meaning to what the collectors took. They were only drifters who never died, addicts who sucked down the serum and shed their memories until there was nothing left in their veins but milky waste, nothing in their minds but a compulsion to strip the city bare and leave empty shells behind.
    When Lucy faced them, the collectors ducked their heads and mumbled in their wet, gargling voices, that made-up language that sounded nothing like the traders they mimicked.
    Lucy turned away and kept walking. The train station emerged from the fog; it was a low rectangular building on a sinking plain of empty city blocks. Collectors had stolen the sign long ago, but Lucy remembered the bold black words on a white board, the call of a train’s whistle and the sun on her face, the hazy warmth of a distant summer morning.
    The broken turnstile shrieked as Lucy pushed the bar down and forced her way through. Her coat caught on the ragged insides of the eviscerated ticket-taker, and she tugged free to examine the damage: a tear, no more than an inch long, red-and-white threads erupting like lashes around a hollow eye. She walked along the platform, her boots crunching on crushed tiles, and startled rats raced away and vanished into the walls. Fog engulfed the tracks at either end of the station, heavy with the salty, rotten scent of the sea. In the distance a signal light shone red, when there was daylight enough to feed it, a single bulb above the one remaining arm of what had once been a black-and-white X. Water shimmered in puddles at its base. There were a few signs hanging above the platform, some attached now by only one strained hook, most of the scrolling destination names unreadable beneath grime and rust. Lucy remembered the faint flutter of noise the signs had made as the destinations changed, and she shivered.
    She touched the packet of memories in her pocket with one hand, the hilt of her knife with the other. She thought of what Olaf had said. The trades weren’t coming through. Riverton had no serum. She paced beneath the sign announcing a northbound train for Jubilee Bay in faded letters webbed with black mold, and she listened for the quiet splash that would announce the traders’ arrival. They could not move silently along the tracks; they weren’t suited to moving on land at all.
    At the sudden clatter of shifting gravel, Lucy froze and slid her knife into her hand. The noise came from the rubble across the tracks, beyond the broken pillars and fallen roof.
    â€œI know you’re there,” said Lucy.
    Footsteps scraped and the shadows took shape: a dark-haired child, about ten years old, small and thin and barefoot, dressed in a jacket and trousers and a too-long scarf that dragged in the water.
    â€œThey aren’t coming,” the child said.
    â€œWhat the hell are you doing here?” Lucy adjusted her grip on the knife and looked around; the child could be a distraction sent by poachers to catch her off guard.
    The kid scowled and tugged the scarf down, revealing a round brown face and two skinny braids curling like snakes under her chin. “Could ask you the same thing, lady,” she said. Her voice was high and light, her accent from somewhere in the city’s muddy northern flats.
    â€œThis is Morningtown’s night,” Lucy said. “You shouldn’t be