It was no use. Mo knew he would not be able to sleep. He pushed away his thin blanket and stood. His room was very bare. There was just the small single bed, and a wooden table, and two chairs, and a narrow closet. Mo went to the closet and pushed aside all three of his uniforms, each neatly pressed, and extracted a small wooden box, with faded pink and blue flowers stenciled all around its side.
Inside this box was a necklace made of seashells (clasp broken), and a small yellow-haired doll (one eye missing), and a single mitten, and a large knit hat, and the smell—faint; faint, but still there—of raspberries.
Mo removed the hat that had once belonged to his sister, closed the box, and replaced it in the closet.
(We will close the box too, on the lost girl Bella. Some stories are meant to stay private.)
Outside Mo’s window, the sky was a lighter gray now. Dawn would come in an hour or so. But it would not be any warmer. No. The air would be like the cold, thin bite of a razor.
Mo redressed quickly and placed the hat in his coat pocket.
“Better now, Lefty?” Mo said, and Lefty, full of milk and tuna fish, purred and rubbed against his ankles. Mo reached down and lifted her carefully into her sling, and placed the sling over his right shoulder and around his neck, and felt the cat’s warmth against his chest, and smiled to himself.
He supposed his meddling didn’t always come to no good. His terrible experiment with all the stray dogs and cats had, after all, left him with more than just fleas and a bunch of dog food. He still had Lefty.
Then he stepped out of his apartment and locked it behind him, and went off in search of the alchemist’s assistant, while his imperfect and hole-riddled brain continued sending the same message to his oversized and perfectly functional heart.
The boy should really have a hat.
Chapter Thirteen
LIESL STOPPED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TRAIN station, overwhelmed by an impression of movement and life: people everywhere, and sound, and trains flowing in and out of the station like metal rivers. Life, flowing and flowing and flowing.
“Which way?” Po and Bundle shimmered next to her. In the bright, high lights of the station, they were nothing more than snatches of silvery gray, occasional glimpses, like the quick flash of a fish’s belly moving under a river.
Dirge was a coastal city; south led to the ocean, east led to a single, small fishing town and then to the ocean. That left west and north.
Now that Liesl was out of the attic, it was easier for her to climb down the towers of memory. She closed her eyes and thought of snow peaked high like whipped cream (ineffable snow, snowy peaked f’s, her mind said). She thought of the taste of ice melting on her tongue, and two spots of red on her father’s cheeks, and the stamping of boots, and the smell of wood fire.
“North,” she said.
Po became more visible for a moment as it studied the departures board intently. “Train 128,” the ghost said. “Leaving from platform 22 in ten minutes. Northbound.”
Liesl suddenly remembered that things cost money in the world. The whole world, in fact, was built on scraps and scrawls of paper. “I have no ticket,” she said, her heart sinking. “And no money for one either.”
“Don’t worry,” Po said. “I will teach you to be invisible. The trick is to think like a ghost.”
Liesl looked unconvinced.
Po explained, “Think of dust and shadows and slippery, slide-y things that no one notices.”
So Liesl did. She thought herself down into the spinning dust on the tiled floor, and away into the shadows, and so she and her ghostly friends passed unnoticed by the large man in an official-looking uniform who was checking tickets at the entrance to platform 22, just behind a large brood of shrieking, squawking children, and a harried-looking mother who kept saying irritably, “I dunno how many there are. Stopped counting after six, and you can go on and take one if you’re so interested in ’em.”
Will, meanwhile, was just arriving at the train station, full of hope for the future.
He had woken up an hour earlier, stiff and sore and hungry. His fingers ached with cold and his stomach was growling. But at least the little shed by the underpass had kept him relatively warm, and protected him from the rain and sleet and damp.
When he had arrived the night before, numb with exhaustion, he had seen no sign of Crazy Carl. The shed was swept clean and smelled strongly of wood planks and, strangely, like boiled meat—not altogether an unpleasant combination. He had curled up in a ball in the most deeply shadowed corner and immediately fallen asleep.