At that moment the train began to slow; the lurching began to lessen. A sign flashed briefly in the darkness. It read CLOVERSTOWN, 2 MILES.
“Yes.” Liesl gripped the windowsill tightly, keeping her eyes on those leaping chimneys of flame and trying not to think of the safety and the closeness of the attic. “That is our stop.”
Will had balled up his jacket to serve as a makeshift pillow and had slept most of the night with his head resting against the window. He woke up as the train was drawing into a station.
The conductor moved through the aisles, ringing a bell, bellowing, “Cloverstown! First stop, Cloverstown! This is Cloverstown!”
“He doesn’t have to shout,” someone muttered. Will started. He had not seen anyone sit down. An old woman, working a finger irritably in one ear and tapping her steel-tipped cane agitatedly, was seated across the aisle from him, next to an enormous police officer who continued to sleep, head to chest, snoring.
Will turned back to the window. He knew of Cloverstown. It was a factory and mining town. In the hills that surrounded it were the mines, where boys from the orphanage who had not found families or employment were ultimately sent, to work forever underground in those dark and terrible tunnels, burrowing like insects and living with the constant crushing fear of all that stone and earth over their heads, ready to come crashing down.
The girls went to work in the Cloverstown factories, sewing day in and day out, stitching cheap linens and hat linings until their eyes gave out and they went blind, or stirring large vats of poisonous chemicals until, one day, their minds went as soft as cheese that has been left too long in the heat. The end result was always the same: They ended up beggars, endlessly walking the filthy, teeming streets, begging money from people hardly richer or better off than they were.
For the first time, as Will stared at the awful black buildings—so coated with coal dust they looked like they’d been crafted from smoke—and heard the roar of the furnaces, he began to question his decision to leave the alchemist’s. At least at the alchemist’s he had had food (most of the time) and a roof over his head. He thought about the boys who had gone into the mines. He thought about the way they had shivered when the cart came to retrieve them from the orphanage, and the look of their sad, pale, defeated faces, as though they were already ghosts.
“Cloverstown! Cloverstown! First stop, Cloverstown! Next stop, Howard’s Glen!”
“Enough to take your ear off,” the old woman muttered, this time working her finger in her other ear.
Well, he would most certainly not get off in Cloverstown. He would keep going, he decided. He would go all the way north, to the last stop. Perhaps he could build a snow hut and live in it for a time.
And then the unthinkable, the unbelievable, the impossible happened: As Will was staring at the grimy Cloverstown station, the girl from the attic passed underneath his window, walking neatly and deliberately down the platform, carrying a small wooden box.
Will let out a cry of surprise and jumped up from his seat.
“It’s her!” He was filled with such a tremendous, tumbling sense of joy he could not help but exclaim out loud, to no one in particular. “It’s the girl in the attic. Only she’s not in the attic anymore. She’s here. Or, um, there.”
“What are you babbling on about now?” demanded the old woman irritably, thinking that no one had the decency to speak at a normal volume. But she stumped to her feet and leaned toward the window to see what the scraggly boy was so excited about.
Liesl had at that moment paused outside to get her bearings, and as she turned and looked around her, both Will and the old woman, staring down, got a nice long look at her face. Will thought, Angel, precisely as the old woman thought, Devil, and let out a wicked howl.
(That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.)
“It’s her!” the old woman screeched. “The batty one!” She prodded the policeman forcefully awake with her cane. “Come on, now. Move it.”
Will had already darted around her and was pushing his way toward the door, threading past the other passengers who were disembarking. His heart pounded painfully in his ribs. It was a sign! She was a sign—a sign he had made the right decision. He must, he absolutely must, find her.
The old woman and the police officer came clomping along behind him, but he took no notice of them.
“Excuse me, excuse me.” He ducked past a frail man carrying an empty birdcage and burst onto the platform.
The spot where Liesl had been standing was empty. She was gone.