9. The Road Less Travelled
The train cut a diagonal swathe through the eastern suburbs, thousands of quarter-acre plots cut into the rolling hills. The mist still hung low on the fields, the pale sun struggling to cast its rays through it. It was a sign it would be a clear pleasant day later on, as his parents seemed to never tire of saying. They seemed to like the fog.
Brendan was not going into Briarleaf today, which lay a few kilometres to the southwest. In fact, he was bypassing the inner city entirely. He had a day off work, and the internship was only on odd days, so he was free. Usually he just stayed at home or he would head for the university library during his uni days, but today's itineary was very different from that.
Once upon a time, in the early years of high school, he had had the time to explore the network. Then as the magic got harder and harder he had to devote more time to it until it eventually took over his life. It had been so many years since he had dropped out but more times than he cared to admit, he still found himself feeling like he was still catching up the time lost. It felt so freeing, having a couple of hours to himself, with only a vague idea of where to go and no firm deadline.
The Bramble Glen line was one of the oldest lines in the network, built in the days when packs ruled the land, when the wealthier packs tried to outdo each other with grandiose projects inspired by human feats of engineering far across the sea that they had vaguely heard of before. Many of the lines had gone nowhere and closed not long after opening. The surviving ones had been combined into the national rail network after Liberation. The result of this was that Corviston had a very weird looking suburban rail network, This line had connected the Raven Cliff Pack to the Bronze Moon Pack, through the territory of the Bramble Glen Pack, hence the name. The Bramble Glen pack had a coal mine, and the other packs had foundries and mills that needed the fuel, so it was a mutually beneficial exercise, although the details had taken a lot of negotiations. That was long gone now: The only remnants of the packs were a few heritage-listed buildings, and some odd quirks in the topography that only a well-seasoned historian would be able to spot. And only their memory lived on through the stories of some of the elder citizens. Most of the woods where the wolves had roamed had been filled in with suburbs.
Brendan's usual train line was the eastern main line up north, of which this was a sort of relief line. Being quadruplicated most trains on the main line skipped at least a few stations from Diggory onwards, and he was not used to the sensation of stop-start slogging through featureless suburbia. This was not helped by the fact that the set he was riding was one of the older sets that used recycled running gear from the 1960s, and it took its sweet time accelerating up to line speed.
He passed the leafy streets and McMansions of Feyreau. The apartment blocks of Denzieville, then back to the single-family houses of Ravenview Heights. They were very similar to what you would find in any sprawly city, except the houses were arranged back to front to what a normal suburban subdivision would have, with the back of the house facing the street and the front facing a communal green space cut off from the street. This was the Crestwood model which became a magnet for crime in so many human cities. There had been no such effect here in New Carinthia where it had been the default suburban configuration since the 1960s, for the easy access to green space it provided, which was useful on the twelve times each year when people heeded the call of nature. Some of the more lavish subdivisions had fenced-off woods stocked with deer and rabbits; most suburbs made do with a more modest green space, just enough lawn and trees to run around on, and enough trees to make you feel like you were in a forest. The one that the backyard of his house led into was just like any park in a suburb of a human city: lawn, some trees, a playground with suspicious bite marks on the equipment.
His own abode had a somewhat different layout: a row of townhouses backed out onto a finger of greenery that led into a central park. Then there were the apartment blocks in the city centre with dogflaps in the fire escape doors that were officially for ventilation purposes. Things got a bit hectic during full moon. There were others with ramped passageways on the outside of the tower that led down to the communal areas. He had lived in one of those briefly when he was very small.
Sometimes wolves came into the backyard at night. The fence was high enough, but occasionally one would jump over. Until their fence was extended a few years ago, his dad slept in the back room on full moon nights with a baseball bat.
Brendan took the time to think about what had happened two nights before. The ghosts he thought he left behind were coming back. The thoughts going around his head were getting too intrusive to ignore. Something was about to happen.
A burst of static with some barely intelligible words mixed into it erupted from the intercom. They were approaching Ravenview North, the big interchange. To the right was a big stabling yard.
The train rattled across the flat junction into platform 3 at Ravenview North to join the main peripheral line. He could see the tram line stretching in a straight line through the apartment blocks, all the way down to Briarleaf and beyond.
Further ahead the line to Riverside would diverge to the left and curve under them to join the line along the river that passed under them. Most trains from Diggory would follow that route to Riverside. but this was one of the very few trains that crossed the river to Corviston West. This particular service ran hourly as most services on the corridor ran either to Riverside or came from up north, and only a few people were waiting to board.
The half-century old bogies rattled and creaked as they left the embankment and entered the long trestle over the river, to the other side of Corviston. He felt the hum of metal on metal reverberating off the structure of the bridge, the low growl of the worn spur gears as it accelerated to line speed.
A half mile downstream, parallel to the trestle, the bridge carrying the Ring Road was clogged with cars moving at walking pace, as usual. A tram cut through the traffic down the median, heading into town. The apartment blocks of Fernside peeked out from behind the bridge, plate glass glinting in the sun.
The Great Crow River was swollen with rain, its depths an inscrutable shade of grey. Maybe it had rained recently upstream, but he couldn't be sure, as the mood of the river rarely seemed to match the weather. Maybe they had decided to open the dam upstream. A freight train passed them, heading for one of the container terminals on the distant plain, rocking the train slightly.
He got a good view of the city, the treelined slope leading down to the beach at Margate, the adminstrative buildings above, the skyscrapers of the business district behind, the tightly packed roofs of the Old town further down the river.
The hills on the other side were lush, houses perched precariously on stilts on top. Then the windows went dark and the wheel flanges squealed and screeched as the train entered the tunnel under the hill, where the triangle junction leading into Edenvale was situated.
They emerged out of the tunnel into Edenvale Station, which was a collection of quaint wooden station buildings in a deep verdant gully, a throwback to how most train stations around Corviston had looked like before modernisation had got to them. There were gnats flying in the rays of light from above that cut through the soupy air. It was nearly getting too cold for there to be gnats still buzzing around. A few more weeks.
Departing Edenvale, the train threaded through a cutting, passing under the Ring Road. The grass growing down the walls of the cutting slowly turned to brambles and veins of clay, and the neat backyards of houses slowly morphed into the ugly corrugated posteriors of factories sticking out from the top, at some places almost overhanging the steep ridge. The stations were simple island platforms, with a shelter, ticket machine and nothing else. Some of them had a barricaded ticket office, a throwback to the days when they were staffed.
This was a part of the city where tourists rarely ventured. Most of the passengers getting on and off seemed to be factory workers.
The cutting leveled out as they travelled further east, skirting the edge of the industrial district. Beyond the timber frames of new houses under construction dotted a maze of cul-de-sacs that marked a new development. On the other side was a classification yard. Thousands of assorted freight cars stood waiting to be sorted into trains.
The low-rise industrial estates cleared away for a moment where the narrow-gauge line to the southern plains joined. They were getting near Corviston West. Brendan's destination.
***
Corviston West was the least prominent of the three main railway terminals in Corviston, being situated in a dingy industrial area. and the only one with through services, though this was set to change in the near future. Most train services going in Brendan's direction terminated there as there was little beyond but fish farms and mudflats. Here the few remaining narrow-gauge services also terminated, since the northern lines were converted to tram in the 1970s. That was a story for another time...
Brendan found his way out of the dated 1970s concourse, through the Silvercard turnstiles and into the open, past hordes of burly factory workers coming off their shift. The air smelled faintly of sulfur. Behind the ring of apartments around the station, smokestacks belched clouds of various shades of grey and off-white into the air. His dad had worked here when they first landed. Their first house had been one of the apartments around the station, on the tenth floor, according to his parents. Brendan was too young to remember anything but he had seen the photos they had taken. He looked at the washing hanging off the balconies. He wondered if there was someone living there in similar circumstances today. A young family from abroad or maybe the Independent Territories, starting a new life here.
Passing the taxis and buses waiting for passengers, Brendan switched to a Route 18 tram. This was one of the weirder footnotes, a circumferential line that connected industrial areas in the southern margins of Corviston. The tram was also an anomaly in the fleet, a Super PCC, based on a Belgian design, originally procured when the interurban lines opened in 1975. Now they had been pensioned off here to the only city route quiet enough that their relative dearth of doors wouldn't be a hindrance to boarding.
The tram moved off almost as Brendan got on. The only other passengers on board were some more factory workers. The interior was an odd blend of having obviously more modern bones than a standard PCC, which was a 1940s design, but also being more dated in look and feel, as it had not been updated in years. Sometimes he wondered if Corviston Transport had forgotten they still had these in the fleet.
After taking a shortcut through an open field the tram plunged into the grimy backstreets of southern Corviston, running parallel to the train line a few blocks to the north. People sat on the porches of crumbling rowhouses. Junked cars sat on blocks behind cyclone wire fences.
Brendan got off the tram after a few stops. The house was two storeys, honey-brick. It had seen better days, by the looks of the paint flaking off the window frames. There was washing hanging out of a side window. He wondered if he had come to the right address. He would have preferred meeting at someplace more neutral, like a cafe, but all he had was Johnny's address, so this was the best he could do. Oh well. He was only asking for advice.
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