Aska took the creature's hand. He had big hands, but soft and without claws, not a blunt hand like the taur, but clever. He looked a bit like a cross between domen and hunska, though bald all over and a head taller than the tallest hunska she'd ever seen, thicker too, powerful, not like a taur, not nearly so big or heavy, but strong even so.

"Come on, Lilly," he said.

Aska couldn't understand the words, but his thoughts spilled out. At first she caught just images. She had shaped herself to copy the females in those flashes of memory, changing the texture and colour of her skin, and pushing his own pictures back into his eyes to cover what she couldn't copy.

The man, yes – he called himself a man – led her from the stone platform. Sykes, he also called himself Sykes. She tried to shape her mouth around the sound of it. He paused to look into the space at the front of the shining . . . thing . . . from which he had stepped.

Aska had been lost, beaten down by the sun, the sands burning her feet. She first saw the place distant, through a wobbling veil of heated air, and took it for a strange house. She aimed for it for no better reason than that it made a single point of difference in the white blindness of the desert. A little voice at the back of her heat-sick mind whispered that it was a house on the edge of the green lands where Mutti and Da and Hakka waited for her, cool in the shade. Water shimmered all around it. She knew she hadn't crossed the desert in a day and a night, but a small smile twisted her dry lips even so.

Aska had come sick and shivering to the strange house, her feet sinking in the dunes, the sand sucking away the last of her strength. Two bright lines led from the house, two straight lines side by side, vanishing in the distance, challenging the desert to swallow them.

The place was like no house Aska had ever seen, vast and open, a high roof held on tall posts. She climbed up steps from the hot sand onto a long stone platform beneath the roof. The gleaming lines ran alongside the structure and ended as they reached a huge rock that seemed no part of the platform with its high roof and hard straight edges. Each silvery line was as thick as a roof support in a hunska's hut and rested on many wooden beams laid one after the other on the ground atop crushed stone, the desert sand below. But the lines weren't wood, or stone . . . Metal! Aska had seen iron before, polished disks of it around the thick neck of a taur merchant. Her Da told her the taur would swap a whole cow for one disk. Just the lines alongside the platform would buy all the cows in the world! And they stretched off as far as she could see. If she followed them, where would they lead?

Aska had drawn a deep breath and the scent of water hooked her. She turned, following her nose, and there, against the planking of the back wall a barrel, bound with hoops --more metal – and filled with water. She drank, vomited, drank more slowly, rested, and drank again.

As she sat, her mouth wet, the fur on her neck heavy with water, she saw the carvings. Precise lines etched into the stone wall above the barrel. A taur, a domen, a hunska, all tall and strong and proud. She stared in wonder, stood, ran her fingers along the lines of the images.

This is a place of the lost gods.

But if the gods built this place in the world's dawn . . . who filled the barrel?

She had been lying in the shade, belly full of water, when the monster arrived, rushing along the metal lines faster than a diving eagle. It was on her and screeching to a halt before she could run. Terror overwhelmed her, taking the strength from her limbs, and she could do nothing but squeeze Leelee as the gleaming metal beast stood panting steam and shuddering beside the platform.

Aska had crouched trembling, breathing in the scent of the thing, fire and water and oil. The monster was a thing, a made thing. And then the door opened and she saw that all along its flanks were doors. The man had stepped out, Sykes, and she forgot about the monster that had carried him.

Aska watched now while Sykes drunk from the barrel. He plunged his whole head and shoulders into the water and rose, shaking, scattering drops, dripping, and with a snarl that showed all his cow-teeth and held no threat. He snarled like that a lot and from his mind Aska took that this showed happiness, like a hunska purr.

He saw the carvings as he wiped water from his eyes. "Well what's this? That's a minotaur for sure. Someone's got the stage sets mixed up. Or I got the train to ancient Greece." He laughed at that but when the laughter left him the puzzled look remained. "This one's some kind of werewolf. Only more friendly looking. A dogman then. And a cat woman? Meow." He shrugged and looked away.

"Come on. The driver's gone, but maybe I can make it go. How hard can it be?" He reached for her hand again and she let him take it. In just a few minutes Aska had been touched more times than in weeks before, more than in the whole of the dust season. Hunska grow apart. Aska knew how it was with grown-ups, but she couldn't imagine how it would be with her, what would change in her so she no longer wanted to hold and to snuggle. Hakka had known though. He lost his taste for closeness. She thought of the red sand and squeezed Sykes's hand. He looked down at her and showed his teeth again. A grin. Yes, that is how he would call it. A grin.

***

Sykes turned back toward the engine, Lilly's hand in his. The girl had sharp little nails. The tracks only led one way, ending with the engine just a yard from a huge piece of stone, smooth curves on one side, fractured rock on the other, like a chunk from some vast pillar. He would have to reverse out across the desert. No choices there. Sometimes it's good not to have too many choices.

They passed the last of the three carriages. He had travelled in the first. First class? He glanced into the second car to see if it looked as grand as the first.

"Jesus!" He flung himself back. The thing that hit the windows rocked the train. Not a violent shaking, but a perceptible wobble, and the carriage must have weighed twenty tons on its own.

"Jesus!" Issac spat and shook himself. A confusion of thin black limbs thrashed at the window. Shiny black limbs. When they withdrew they left the pane smeared with something green. Ichor. The word floated into his mind. Bugsplat. He felt invisible spiders crawling on him, under his clothes. He scrambled back against the platform wall. Lilly clung to him, and for a heartbeat the child felt more like a beetle hooked to his shirt, or a tick burrowing in. He fought the urge to shake her off, to dash her on the ground. She's just a little girl.

Issac's eyes returned to the train and the smeared windows.

Has to be bulletproof. Any normal glass would have shattered.

He glanced down at his hand. It hurt. Blood welled from four dark little slots where Lilly must have dug her nails in.

Be the man, Sykes, or just let everyone call you Issac and be done with it. This thing's given you the screaming heebies and she's just a little girl.

He scooped Lilly up and ran. She weighed nothing, just bones and fear. "Don't worry little lady, we'll be long gone before that thing learns how to open doors."

It might not even fit through one, please God.

                                                                                                 ***

The terror engulfed Aska, a wave of horror lifting her from flesh and sweeping her to a dark place where she started to drown, choking on bile. The thing in the train vomited images, a flood of alien sights and feelings, a cold impersonal hatred, violet skies, and a land of black rocks that crawled more than it was still, insects, in endless profusion, eating, killing, breeding.

Sykes hit the sand running. They set off along the lines. The tracks Sykes called them. He ran in the blazing heat as far as his fear would carry him. She could taste his fear, as deep as hers, but locked in battle with other emotions that she didn't understand.

At last, gasping and staggering, he set her down. He looked back, cupping his hands around his eyes. "We'll walk a ways. I can't see it following."

Aska felt better. Still dizzy with hunger and dirty with memories of the creature's thoughts, but better. She didn't think it would follow. She couldn't imagine the thing out on the blank and sterile sands. The desert wouldn't accept its filth and strangeness.

They walked following the tracks, close enough to touch them, drawing comfort from the presence of purpose and direction amongst the vastness of the wasteland. Sykes took her hand and talked. She let the sounds wash over her, considering the flashes that reached her from his thoughts. Images, colours, interesting scents. The smell of his blood where her claws cut him made her stomach rumble. The hunska always say that hunger has no friends.

She watched him as they walked. Sly glances. She had seen clothes before. The taur chieftains wore leather capes, but Sykes's clothes weren't hide, they were soft, moving with him, patterned, beautiful, his legs wrapped in a blue like the faded sky.

A mile on and the platform made a small and wavering dot in the distance. The heat wrapped them both, tight like a noose, and the dry air stole every bead of sweat as it formed.

                                                                                          ***

"This is crazy," Sykes said. "It's a real desert. A damn desert. And it's gonna kill us quick enough if we don't get some water and shade. Surer than the critter on the train." A clean death though – a small voice spoke at the back of his mind – better to die clean. "We gotta go back, Lilly, and wait it out. Someone will come for us. If that thing hasn't got out yet, it won't do in a hurry." He turned and started to trudge back, hat pulled low against the glare off the rails. But he didn't want to go back, his feet didn't want to take him, not even with that barrel of water waiting there in the shade.

                                                                                          ***

When the man turned, Aska turned with him, but vertigo took her and she fell, pitching into the sand, her vision darkening.

A strange humming woke her, high and unnatural. The hum and the shaking conspired to remind Aska she wasn't dead. Not quite. She managed to open her eyes and found herself in shade. Her parched tongue couldn't shape a question.

"Better get back, something's coming." It was Sykes. Why had he stayed? Did he mean to eat her? Chew her up with those cow teeth?

He moved to pick her up and his shadow left her. She screwed her eyes against the sun. Two arms lifted her and hauled her back as something huge thundered past so quick that the air snapped behind it with a loud crack.

"Well that's the train gone ... faster'n any train I ever saw," Sykes said, setting her down again. "Even so, there's still water back there, and we can get out of the sun." He stood, towering above her, staring after the train. "What's that I wonder." Sykes cupped his hands around his eyes again as if it would help him make sense of it. Aska tried to see what he saw, but either his eyes were sharper or his height offered him a better vantage, for she could make nothing but distant dunes behind the wobbling haze.

"Shit," he said. He sagged, something going out of him. Aska could smell his fear rise. "Pardon my French."

He picked her up again, still strong, still not ready to abandon her. Aska didn't understand why.

"We've got to move," he said. His lips were blistered, his skin red with the sun. "Get away from the tracks, into the dunes."

Sykes trekked away from the tracks. The dunes lay further off than the eye told it. From the tracks they looked no taller than trees. Close to they towered like mountains. Aska knew how huge they were, how much crossing just one sapped from a body.

                                                                                        ***

Issac had thought he'd grown tough as he grew tall but the dunes were teaching him different. He'd heard that in Death Valley a man without water would be lucky to last an hour. This place felt hotter, drier, bigger. He staggered down the far side of the first dune, his feet moved by grim determination. A light wind set sand grains hissing across the surface, the only sound other than his breath.

A lifetime later he toiled to the crest of the next and larger dune. He set the girl down, Lilly, Lilliana. For a moment he saw his aunt sat in that rocker in her parlour. The heat was getting to him. Lilly lay stiff, as if mummified by the heat. Issac looked back. In the distance the tracks made a glittering thread, like spider silk. And along that gossamer line . . . a black dot moved.

"Gotta go." His lips cracked and bled as he spoke.