"The train is dead."
Marshal Dain gave the verdict twenty minutes later, inside the gutted dining carriage that had become their command center. The car lay on its side, so its old wall now served as an uneven floor. Frost was already creeping across every bare surface.
"Rails ahead destroyed for a hundred meters minimum. The coupling between the locomotive and the surviving carriages is sheared. Even with full equipment and a repair crew, we'd need two days of work. We have neither."
Those words hung in the air while everyone took them in.
Against the overturned bar sat Mirael, her splinted arm in her lap. With her good hand she was writing in a leather field journal she had rescued from her carriage, so focused that it looked like an obsession. A strip of medical tape held her cracked spectacles together.
