Chapter 65 - The Inbound Line

The process of securing townhouse forty-two in the Boilermakers' Village took an hour of meticulous work from Dante.

He didn't rely solely on mechanical cast-iron deadbolts. Across the ground-floor workshop, right in the clearance between the double timber doors and the side street gate, Dante traced three concentric rings of runic containment arrays using his copper-conductive chalk.

The ward was calibrated with [Instant Anchor Scribing] to discharge a forty-damage kinetic shock pulse against anyone attempting to force the bronze latch without disarming the proper rune sequence along the jamb.

The heavy tool chest, the oak workbench, and spare supplies were draped in heavy-duty tarps bound with wire twists to keep off the soot drifting from neighboring smokestacks.

At six o'clock on Saturday morning, the three stepped out onto the gray street of the Third District.

Dante carried his customary mountain rucksack packed with his notebooks, chalk kits, and the satchel holding over twelve thousand scrip in Central Bank notes buckled beneath his waterproof canvas duster.

Maria carried her new six-and-a-half-foot Black Boiler Steel Greatsword strapped diagonally across her back, the forty-eight-pound blade seated firmly in the reinforced mount of her brigandine cuirass.

Nicole took the center, wearing her black-scaled coat with the cowl drawn to her brow, her narrow pack holding Elen's brass lockbox lashed across her chest with double straps.

They caught the elevated tram heading north, riding across the awakening city beneath the cold glare of arc-lamp posts.

The North Classification Yard was a sprawling two-hundred-and-fifty-acre expanse of black gravel and parallel tracks stretching to the base of the sixty-foot steel wall.

Traffic moved in the exact opposite direction from the day of their arrival.

While the queue to enter the Capital demanded stringent scrutiny from quartermaster sergeants and cargo inspections to intercept unregistered weapons, departure from the metropolis was treated with total bureaucratic indifference by the Legion guard.

To the empire's military command, anyone heading out toward the wastelands and the eastern mines was merely discarded labor running out of scrip to pay rent in the central rings.

Dante walked up to the sector three boarding checkpoint.

The duty sentry, a gaunt demon in an iron helmet with a chin stained by chewing tobacco, barely glanced at their faces.

He took Goran's three lead medallions Dante laid on the counter, checked the mechanical eagle with a quick tap of his stamp, and pointed his bayonet tip toward the train maneuvering on track four.

"Outbound Freight Four-Oh-Five," the guard muttered without removing the cigarette stub from his lips. "Departing seven-fifteen. Get into the middle gondolas and don't go jumping between couplings unless you want to end up under the coal treads."

They walked along the gravel of track four to the thirty-fourth car of the manifest.

The train was identical to Express 404 that had brought them, led by the same three titanic steam engines upfront and fifty heavy freight cars coupled in series.

Yet the interior of car thirty-four was entirely different.

There were no mounds of crushed iron ore and no coal dust coating the floor. The car was an empty naval-steel gondola, its floor clean metal plate and its seven-foot walls completely bare of cargo, en route back to the southern supply silos.

Best of all, it was completely deserted.

No late-shift laborers, no coughing miner families, and no stowaways sharing the corners.

Maria planted her palms on the lip of the steel plate, flexed her arms, and vaulted into the car with the effortless ease of thirty-three Strength.

The soles of her boots hit the bare deck with a flat clang.

Unlimbering her greatsword, she rested the weapon against the iron corner of the forward bulkhead and surveyed the two-hundred-square-foot expanse of the metal bay with a wide grin.

"There's room enough to sprint in here," Maria remarked, unlashing the vulcanized tarp they brought to shelter the roof. "No flour sacks in the aisle, and nobody eyeing the blade out of the corner of their vision."

Dante and Nicole vaulted in right behind her.

The huntress looked around with guarded scrutiny, checking the angle-iron welds and the gauge of the side walls before setting her narrow pack down in a dry corner.

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"Nobody searches this car before departure?" Nicole asked softly, keeping her coat collar raised.

"Nobody," Dante answered, pulling sisal ropes to stretch the tarp across the forward half of the gondola, raising the same shelter against the biting wind they had used on the inbound run. "The Legion only searches inbound freight from the border. Empty cars rolling back to the Low Ember coal pits are of zero interest to Citadel quartermasters. To them, this manifest is just scrap rolling on rails."

At seven-fifteen sharp, the lead engine's long whistle tore through the morning air with three deafening blasts.

FONNN. FONNN. FONNN.

The coupling chains snapped taut in sequence, iron crashing into iron in a sonic ripple rolling through all fifty cars until the steel deck under their boots groaned.

The heavy wheels began turning over the triple-gauge tracks.

Train 405 gave its opening lurch forward, banked along the sweeping curve of the north yard, and took to the main trunk line, accelerating toward the east.

The sixty-foot wall of the Central Bastion of Iron Souls shrank in the gondola's rear wake, its artillery batteries and watchtowers narrowing into a flat, dark silhouette against the foundry smoke until dropping completely behind the first ridge line.

They were outbound.

And the atmosphere inside the metal car felt almost disarmingly tranquil.

Traveling in reverse proved infinitely simpler than the fraught inbound journey weeks earlier.

Dante sat on the tarp spread over the clean floor, leaning back against the cold iron plate, opening his notebook across his lap.

He no longer had to worry about the agonizing spasms that had nearly snapped his spine on the previous run.

As the train drew away from the Capital's high-density Mana core and descended the geological shelves toward the desert plateau, the continent's atmospheric pressure thinned out steadily.

The air grew noticeably lighter in Dante's acclimatized lungs.

The basilisk bone plate housing the Primordial Iron Core across his spine rested flat and cold against his vertebrae, free of muscle spasms or pinions straining against the skin. The [Ash Veil] operated at a hundred percent stability, without draining a solitary point from his five-hundred-and-ten Mana pool.

Maria lay sprawled on her back across the steel deck, arms folded behind her head and one knee bent over the other, humming softly as she gazed up at the canvas roof.

She no longer had to shroud her new black boiler steel blade or worry about clipping an old miner's flour sack with the tip. The empty gondola belonged entirely to the three of them.

Nicole sat in the opposite corner, drawing her knees to her chest and resting her chin over her denim trousers.

The huntress spent the first three days in guarded silence, repeating crossbow clamped to her thigh and Elen's lockbox pack held against her ribs day and night, waiting for a shock patrol to rip through the canvas at any moment.

But the freight train simply kept rolling.

The train cleared Furnace Gorge on the fourth day without an unscheduled stop.

It crossed the Black Chasm Trestle on the seventh day with the same monotonous cadence of steel on rail: clack-clack, clack-clack, clack-clack.

On the eighth day, when the freight halted at the concrete water tower in the Slag Desert for its fifteen-minute service stop, Dante didn't even have to step down onto the ballast to sweep the perimeter.

Maria merely peeked through the tarp slit, spotted the same Legion sentries chewing lizard skewers with their backs to the track, and settled back onto her mat while cold water flooded the front tenders with its familiar gush.

No sulfur hounds ascended the ladder of car thirty-four.

No sergeant demanded lead medallions.

The return was an open, desolate highway for anyone possessing the raw force not to fear roadside predators and the patience to endure the unending roll of steel.

Nicole began unwinding from day nine onward.

She peeled off her lizard-leather gloves, letting her bare fingertips rest on the crude table they had rigged from two tool crates.

Her questions over meals grew longer.

She asked about the layout of Earth homes, how motorcars traversed asphalt streets without rails, and the taste of fruit that carried neither metallic seeds nor bitter sulfur pulp.

Maria answered with her usual unvarnished gusto, throwing her large hands around as she detailed barbecue cuts, saltwater beaches, and ice-cold sodas with so much vivid color that Nicole's chitin mandibles clicked in culinary wonder.

Dante chimed in to break down municipal infrastructure, the absence of martial law in civilian life, and the bureaucratic ease of living in a nation where nobody needed a permit from a Council of Forges just to move between towns.

Life inside that iron box found a rhythm of its own, almost familial, forged in the trust of people who had watched each other's blood spill into aqueduct muck.

On the sixteenth day of travel, the black dunes of the desert gave way to the first basalt outcrops and the distant chimneys of the Fourth Minor Continent's peripheral foundries.

The air regained that familiar scent of common coal soot and dry volcanic loam.

Dante closed the notebook on his lap, pocketed his pencil, and rose from the tarp with steady legs.

He looked out through the upper gap of the gondola wall.

In the distance, rising over the slag plain thirty miles out, the black mountain of Coal Depot Twelve breached the horizon's gray clouds.

"We hit the yard curve in two hours," Dante said, turning toward the two girls.

Maria sprang up, unbuckling the harness of her six-and-a-half-foot greatsword and securing it firm against her iron cuirass with an audible snap.

Nicole pulled her black-scaled hood over her crown, settled the narrow pack with Elen's brass box across her chest, and checked the locks on her daggers with a resolute glint in her amber eyes.

Eighteen days riding the rails had elapsed without a single bolt loosed or blade drawn.

The outbound leg of the journey was an absolute success.

The stone redoubt of the Ash Wastes waited for them a few hours' march from the line, and behind that dark fissure lay the open door to the world where this entire story had been born.