Read this story On ArchiveofOurOwn or Royal Road
Charlie should have known they were never going to succeed the next morning, when Ozzy brought her a cup of strong black coffee, and said, “I know what I said last night, but I want you to consider that going to Freetown wouldn’t be the end of the world.”
Charlie took a long sip of the coffee. “I know it won’t be the end of the world,” She said, “but it could be the end of our lives. I don’t want to wait another 20 years to find out who we are.”
“You think they’d kill us?” His voice was disbelieving already.
“No,” Charlie said, “but I think they would hurt us, or imprison us. I think they could torture us, if they think we’re the Mage and we aren’t telling them. Then they might kill us after they find the right person.”
Ozzy gave her a look like she was insane. “The King wouldn’t do that. If he wanted to, the guard wouldn’t let him.”
“They would,” Charlie said, “The King pays the guard from his coffers, and the King would do anything to be free of his prison.”
Ozzy went quiet. He sat down beside Charlie on the bed. “Being trapped for twenty years would drive anyone mad,” He said, “even King Regalton.”
Charlie nodded, “I know it would drive me to madness.”
Ozzy nodded, “I think I would try to kill myself if I couldn’t get out.”
“Me too,” Charlie admitted. “But then I’m not a king who might ascend and never be reborn again.”
“You might be,” Ozzy said. “Wouldn’t that be something: if one of us turned out to be royalty.”
“Ozzy, please. We’re trying to solve a problem here.”
“Right. The other that I wanted to talk about: that tracking brand.” He pointed at Charlie’s wrist.
“I don’t think it will be an issue,” Charlie said. “He won’t be able to focus on the tracking brand all the time, and if he’s branded anyone else with that same glove, it will ping all of us at once.” That was how tracking runes worked: to track the object, you had to be holding the stamp that made it, and you had to be focusing on the item. Charlie had only used a tracking rune once: to find a lost wrench in the railyard. The tools were expensive enough that each one was given its own unique rune. She had held the small metal stamp in her hand and known with certainty that the missing wrench was laying on the floor of an out-of-service engine in the railyard. It wasn’t like she could see it there, but like she could feel the metal and the dust settling over her, as she lay abandoned on the floor.
Ozzy kicked open the storage box at the end of his bed. “So you want to try to get out of the kingdom even with the tracker?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “That guard captain is long gone by now.”
Ozzy hummed, “Okay, so what, we just buy tickets out of the Kingdom?”.
“No. We should sneak aboard a train. A boxcar would be best.” Charlie folded her legs beneath her. “We know when the trains run. We just have to sneak into the railyard and board a car.”
“You want to spend days in a boxcar?” Ozzy asked. “Like vagabonds?”
Charlie nodded and clenched her jaw.
Ozzy looked at her despairingly. He said, “The things I do for love.”
***
They waited five days for the next freight train to make their escape.
The first day, Ozzy went back to the railyard and tried to get back into the company store, but the clerk told him to leave as soon as he came in. Former employees of the Regalis Railroad Company were not allowed to shop in the company store, even if they hadn’t been fired for wrongdoing. That meant that the almost 400 Company bucks that Ozzy had been saving up was now just useless paper. He ended up exchanging it with a new porter for less than a quarter of its value. But some money was better than no money, and it was enough to cover his rent for the one more week they needed to stay in Precipice.
Charlie watched the railyard most of the day. She had a suspicion that the Royal Police were still in the city. Sure enough, she saw two of them in the ticket booth at the station late that day, giving orders to a man she recognized as the station manager. He was nodding furiously and wringing his hands.
She was glad Ozzy had agreed not to try and purchase passenger tickets out of Regalis.
The day the Freight Train was due to pass through Precipice, they packed two messenger bags full of food, blankets, and clothing.
“Let me take a few more cans than you,” Ozzy said, “I’m bigger than you are so I can carry more.”
Charlie couldn’t argue with that.
When she left Ozzy’s tenement with her bag that afternoon, she looked all around the street, trying to be discreet about it, but she saw nothing. No one was watching her, and there was nothing strange going on.
Charlie began to feel a prickling on the back of her neck the longer she looked. She took a breath and walked on. She was just being paranoid.
That night, they met up outside the railyard, but not too close. There were patrols of the city guards and the railroad company’s hired security to worry about. Instead, they walked through the woods until they met the track again, and then walked along it until they came to a long, sharp turn.
“What do you think?” Ozzy asked, “Is this one sharp enough?”
Charlie squinted. Luckily the moon was nearly full, and they could see a long way, even in the darkness. “I think so,” She said.
Train hopping was, in theory, simple and, in reality, incredibly dangerous. Not only was it illegal: one wrong move could mean having your body crushed under the wheels of a train car. The best place to hop onto a train was in a railyard, which they didn’t want to risk sneaking into. The next best place was somewhere along the tracks where the train had to slow down almost to a stop. The sharp turn in the tracks where they were standing now was, hopefully, one of those places. Any train, especially a heavy one, would have to slow down significantly to make this turn without derailing. When it slowed down enough for them to run alongside and keep up, they would find an open boxcar and jump into it. If they couldn’t find an open car, then they would climb up a ladder on the side of a car and either walk across the top of the train to find a car with some shelter, or until the train slowed down again on another turn or at the next railyard.
Ozzy ran his eyes over the tracks. He set his bag aside and started clearing the side of the track of debris. Charlie joined him, but she kept her bag on. She wanted to be able to jump on the train at a moment’s notice.
They cleared a runway, and settled in to wait with their packs on their backs. Now they were standing still, Charlie became aware of how cold the air was. It was just the beginning of fall, and summer heat still lingered, but at night the temperature plummeted. Soon, Charlie was shivering.
She took off her bag and dug through it until she found a knitted hat. She twisted her hair up for extra insulation and pulled the hat over it. It wasn’t exactly comfortable, but it was a lot warmer than she had been before. Especially when she pulled the hat down over her ears.
Because the world was muffled for her, it was Ozzy who heard the train first. He straightened up, and Charlie pulled the hat up to listen. The faint whistle of a steam engine called over the treetops.
They exchanged a glance before they both wordlessly walked to the start of the long, sharp turn. They stood close together behind a tree so the headlight would be blind them. It strobed through the trees like a rapidly blinking eye trying to warn them of a coming beast.
Then the freight train thundered out of the darkness. Massive and loud. It shattered the tentative silence of the night with its symphony of growls and white and chugs. For a single, breathless moment, Charlie thought it was going to fly past them without even slowing.
The brakes engaged with a metallic grinding, and the train began to slow as it approached the turn. The engine chugged past at just above a running pace, and hot wind blasted Charlie and Ozzy. Then the blinding light and the thunder of the engine passed by them, and they were blind while the parade of freight cars and box cars began to roll past.
“Shit,” Ozzy blinked his eyes hard, trying to recover his night vision. Charlie was blind too: vision full of strange floating shapes and swirls.
A sudden desperation seized her. This was their last chance. In two days, they would be due to leave for the Freetown Estate, and if they did not turn up, they would be hunted down. They had to get out of Regalis tonight. She blinked hard, and her vision cleared at last.
In the colorless light of the moon, the freight cars were squares of textureless shadow. She looked up and down the line of them desperately, trying to see the shape of an open door or, failing that, a ladder. She stared for what felt like hours until a square of trees caught her eye.
“There!” She yelled over the noise, and pointed at the open door.
Ozzy saw it too. He took off at once, keeping pace with Charlie as they gained speed. The train was a little faster than they were, and the open box car was approaching fast.
“Jump for it!” Ozzy yelled.
Charlie took two more steps and then did, throwing herself at the side of the moving train against all her instincts. Below her feet, the wheels churned, waiting to catch her legs and drag her down.
She landed hard on her stomach, and the breath rushed out of her. Her feet kicked in the wind.
Charlie rolled aside. Her knees banged against the metal door, and she struggled to get them under her.
Ozzy was still running. As she turned to look at him, he jumped for the open door. He landed hard on his stomach, like Charlie had, and had to hold his longer legs out straight from the train car.
Charlie grabbed the straps of his bag and hauled him into the train car. When his knees were in, Ozzy gained traction and crawled the rest of the way in on his own.
Charlie finally took a breath in. Her lungs ached from the impact, and she coughed hard. Ozzy gasped too, and then he began to laugh in a strange wheezing way as air re-entered his lungs.
“That was great!” He said, grinning. “Like jumping off trees into the lake.”
Charlie grinned back, but she was shaking. She could not stop picturing the wheels catching her flesh and crushing her bones. The train wouldn’t even slow if one of them was beneath the wheels. The driver probably wouldn’t even notice a bump.
Ozzy sat up and pulled her in for a kiss. His mouth felt warm in the cold night.
They both found their footing awkwardly, and surveyed their new surroundings. The box car was empty except for a few open crates and empty burlap sacks. That was why the door had been left open. They chose a corner, facing towards the engine, and set down their bags. Both of them had brought blankets, but the wind of the train sucked all the warmth out of the air, and neither of them were thick, so they ended up both curled up under a pile of all the blankets, plus a couple of the burlap sacks. Only then were they warm and comfortable enough to relax.
Charlie sipped some of her supply of water. She was worried she hadn’t brought enough to last to the next city. She had been so worried about making it into the train, it hadn’t occurred to her they might need supplies for the actual journey. They had food, but water was expensive and heavy. They each had a large bottle, but that was all. They would have to be careful not to drink it too quickly.
Charlie wasn’t even sure where the next nearest city was. They could be in this boxcar for days or weeks. Really their best chance was to wait for the train to stop, and then find the driver or one of the coal shovelers. They couldn’t exactly turn the train around just to take a couple stowaways back to Regalis.
The train wouldn’t stop until morning anyway, and by then they would be out of Regalis, the radius of the Guardian of Souls that would suck them back into the kingdom after they died, and safe.
She smiled to herself as she sat back against the side of the box car. The forest flashed by outside, and the train swayed gently as it clunked over the tracks. Despite all the time she had spent working on them, it was the first time Charlie had actually ridden on a train for more than a few minutes. There was something magic about riding the iron beast as chugged along, unstoppable by man or beast.
Charlie rested her head against her pack and watched the world go by.
***
They woke to the sound of the brakes shrieking as the train slowed. Charlie sat up first. The sky outside was still dark, but a hint of red crept along the horizon.
Ozzy groaned as he sat up, “how do people sleep on these things?”
Charlie was already on her feet, hand against the wall to support herself as the train slowed. She approached the open side of the boxcar and peered out. They had left the dense trees of Precipice. When she looked back, she could see the mountain that they had descended from, the drop of which was so severe that trees grew out of it sideways in some places and twisted upwards towards the sun from their bases. When she looked forward, she saw a slope downward over rolling green hills, fields of crops. There was a city down there too, half-lost in the blue haze of the horizon. It seemed vast and strange to Charlie. She could have sworn some of the distant buildings were very tall, taller than any building in Precipice, or the ones she had seen in photographs of Freetown or Soothington.
But closer, much closer, there was another building of brick and stone, and flying above it was the Regalis Flag: a red crown in a blue circle on a field of white.
Charlie swore. She recoiled into the train. “Get up,” She said to Ozzy, “we have to go.”
“What?” He said sleepily, “why?”
“The border guard is here,” Charlie was stuffing supplies back into her bag. “they’re going to check the train.”
“Shit,” Ozzy tried to get to his feet, but the train jerking beneath him threw him off balance, and he tripped on his blanket and his own feet. He fell to the floor with a yelp and a bang.
Charlie gasped his name and rushed over. She took Ozzy’s shoulders and helped him sit up. “Are you okay?” She asked him, “did you hit your head?”
“I don’t think so,” He said, “this damn train—”
The train braked hard again, as if it could hear them. Charlie held Ozzy steady, and when it had stopped moving, pulled him to his feet.
“We have to run,” She said, “now.”
They grabbed their bags, but hesitated to hop out of the boxcar. There was no thick treeline here, no place to go to hide from view until they reached a small hill maybe a quarter of a mile away. If they ran, they would truly have to run.
Ozzy leaned out of the car and saw the border guard were already making their way down the train, inspecting each car as they went. They carried lit lanterns, and every car with so much as a shadow was inspected to see if anything or anyone was hidden inside.
“Maybe we should turn ourselves in,” Ozzy suggested.
Charlie stared at him. They both knew how harsh the punishment was for trying to smuggle people into Regalis: imprisonment for the smuggler and the immigrants for the rest of their lives. Going the other way must have been just as bad.
“Yeah,” Ozzy said, “I know. Wishful thinking.”
They waited by the door, and when two of the three guards had climbed into another boxcar, Charlie said, “Now!” They jumped out of the car and ran, away from the train and out into the open field.
Someone shouted behind them. A whistle blew, and more shouting joined the first one.
She took only two steps before something huge and heavy hit her from the side. Arms wrapped around her, deftly pinning her hands by her sides and holding tight. Charlie kicked at the legs of the person, connected with a shin. “Let go!” She yelled.
Ozzy skidded to a stop a few feet away and turned back towards her.
“No!” Charlie screamed at him, “Run! Get away!”
But it was too late. Another guard that had been working from the back of the train to the front was on him. Ozzy was big, but he was bigger, and he had backup.
The guard pinning Charlie down forced her head to the ground, and she took a bite of grass and grit. Pebbles threatened to break her teeth before she turned her head and spat them out.
The guard sitting on her leaned forward. He blew stinking breath into her face, “I recognize this one. She was on the list of possible runaways.”
“This one too,” The guard pinning Ozzy said. “Hold still, you bastard.” He smacked Ozzy smartly in the back of the head before he brought out a pair of handcuffs and began fastening them around Ozzy’s wrists.
Charlie wanted to cry out, but she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs.
“You two just hold still,” The guard on her back said, “We don’t wanna hurt’cha, and you don’t want to be late to your party, do ya’?”
Charlie slumped down, limp in the grass. Cold metal closed around her wrists. Ozzy glared at her, anger in his eyes that she had gotten them into this mess.
