The tracker on Sister's phone was completely dead. This wasn't really surprising to Orion as the clan's phones typically turned to stone along with them whenever the dawn found them in their pocket. What was surprising is that when he back-tracked to the last time her phone's tracker was online, it showed her at a location miles away in New Jersey. It didn't seem possible to Orion that Sister could have gotten so far away so quickly. Nonetheless, it was the only lead he had to follow, so he and his sisters took the elevator down through the tallest building in the world, to the lobby, past the knowledgeable security officer who gave them a curt nod, and scores of curious Xanatos Enterprise employers who mostly noticed the children with surprised smiles.
At the far corner of the lobby was the heavy door to a broad tunnel with marble walls and floor, where many people were spilling out into the lobby. This was the company's private connection to the closest subway platform, and at this hour of the day, they were pouring off the platform like a hurried tidal wave. The unaccompanied children were out of place in this crowd of briefcase hauling professionals, but no one gave them more than a slightly judgemental glance as they boarded the southbound train. As they glided through the dark, underground level of the city, Lyra was silent and pensive, only whispering occasional comments to Bonnie, who bounced excitedly in her older sister's lap. As she clung to the window, she made faces at her own reflection and waved emphatically at the indifferent commuters in the trains they passed.
Orion passed the time, anxiously searching on his phone for any clues he could find as to where they were going, why Sister had ended up there, and what they might face when they arrived. The pinpoint where Sister's phone had last been operational was in a highly industrialized area, near a large harbor and a freight yard. Orion scowled as he viewed the scores of massive rectangles on the map that indicated a huge field of mostly warehouses. Sister could be in any of those, he realized. Worse yet, Coldsteel could be with her. He tried not to dwell too much on this fact. Locating Sister was his priority.
As they rode along, a grim-looking figure approached them. He was a thin, hunched, ashen-faced man dressed in a very worn suit, with a look of chronic confusion in his eyes. As he made his way awkwardly through the car, he scratched relentlessly at a thin spot in his graying hair.
"Hi!" Bonnie greeted him unconcernedly, "You're bleeding."
Indeed, a dark red trail dripped from his broken scalp and both fresh and dried blood covered his dirty fingernails , but the man didn't acknowledge Bonnie. In fact, he appeared to have not even heard her.
"He's bleeding!" Bonnie repeated apprehensively to Orion.
"Hush, Bonnie," Lyra whispered to her as they watched the confused gentleman pass by and settle himself in the opposite corner of the car. A woman who was listening to her phone through earbuds gave him a concerned glance, but went back to her phone.
At the next station, a security officer came into the car and stood near the door, eyeing the elderly man disapprovingly before addressing the unaccompanied children.
"Are you on your way to school?" he asked them in a stern voice.
"Yes, sir," Orion answered him, showing him his ID card, "We're late because we had a dentist appointment."
Lyra and Bonnie exchanged glances, then flashed the officer broad, Cheshire cat smiles that they hoped had no obvious food in them. The officer chuckled and gave Orion a nod before returning to his place at the door. Orion breathed a sigh of relief.
"Why are you worried?" Lyra asked him, "You're old enough to ride the train."
"I'm not twelve yet, remember?" he whispered back to her, "Not according to the record. And Bonnie is only 'three'."
"Three and a half, in human years!" Bonnie corrected.
"Shh!" Orion hissed, glancing at the security guard, who now had his eyes on the bloody fingerprints being left of the plastic seat on the end of the car.
"There's no rule that says we can't," Lyra reminded him, clearly annoyed at his anxiety.
"But security can stop kids if they think we're skipping school or doing something…weird," he explained, "And we don't have time to be stopped!"
Lyra nodded her head in understanding, her eyes still watching the security guard and the elderly man with a curious and almost suspicious look.
"Sir, begging is illegal on the train," the security officer said in a loud, authoritative tone, "I'm going to have to ask you to deboard."
The man's eyes grew wide, clearly frustrated over the officer's attentions, but he whined incoherently in response.
"Did you hear me, sir?" he demanded. Two ladies seated nearby seemed to sense that they were in too close proximity to drama and discreetly gathered their bags and moved toward the exit at the other end of the car. Lyra had gotten to her knees, peering over the back of their seat at the situation. The officer had taken the elderly man by the arm, and he looked back at him with a wild gaze. Orion drew a tense breath. He suspected the man was about to get belligerent and he hoped nothing horrible would happen before they got off at the next station.
"He wasn't begging!" Lyra said softly, but incredulously.
"Sir, come on!" the officer insisted, and as they pulled into the station, Orion noted that two more officers were waiting on the platform. Suddenly, he was startled by a shout that came from his younger sister.
"Hey! He didn't ask anyone for anything! He wasn't begging!" Lyra said in a very loud voice. The officer turned around and looked at them and Orion held his breath.
"His head is hurt!" Bonnie added anxiously, "Maybe he's going to the doctor?"
"Right, honey," one of the other officers consoled her as she opened a plastic tote of hazmat equipment to clean off the bloody seat, "They'll take him there."
"He said the man was begging," Lyra told the female officer with the hazmat box, "But he wasn't. He never asked anyone for money."
The first officer overheard Lyra and was beginning to look quite annoyed at being questioned by a little girl. Orion grabbed Bonnie and quickly said,
"Come on, Lyra! We only have a couple minutes to get to make our connection!"
Begrudgingly, Lyra exited the train with them and Orion all but dragged her through the station to the walkway that would take them to the bus stop at street level.
"Are you crazy?" he scolded her, "Don't you know when to be quiet?"
"But he wasn't doing anything wrong! What if he got arrested?"
"Lyra, the guy clearly didn't know where he even was! The officer probably just said that to get him off the train. If anything, they'll probably get him to a hospital or something. But you're going to get us locked up in the Security Office while they try to call our parents, who won't wake up until sunset! What's going to happen to Sister in the meantime?"
"I guess you're right," she said a little sheepishly, "I just didn't want him to get into trouble."
"Well, use a little judgment, will you? We've already got Bonnie, who doesn't know when to shut up. We don't need to call attention to ourselves!"
Fortunately, they made the bus and were soon zipping along the highway.
"Ori?" Lyra asked hesitantly and Orion looked up from his phone with a troubled expression.
"Do you think that Sister might have run away, like Fleet was saying?"
"No way!" Orion insisted, "I don't think Sister would ever run away from anything!"
"Then where do you think she went?" Bonnie asked him.
Orion shrugged.
"I'm not sure," he admitted, and it was the truth. His gut instinct told him that Sister was looking for a way to solve the clan's problems, and that she was probably in search of something she could use as a talisman. But it was hard for him to imagine her attempting such a mission without telling him first. They usually confided in one another about everything, and Orion had never given her reason not to trust him. He had to admit, the idea of her not wanting him in on her plan was a little hurtful. He reasoned that whatever she was up to, it had to be pretty reckless if she was that certain that Orion would not be game. Those thoughts led him to even darker suspicions, which he didn't care to linger on.
"Listen, Lyra," Orion told her suddenly, "If we see Coldsteel, don't worry about me. You take Bonnie and you get out of there, do you understand?"
"I'm not going to just leave you!" Lyra protested.
"Don't worry!" he assured her, though he didn't feel nearly as confident as he hoped he sounded, "Brooklyn and Angela have been training me on patrol for months now! I know what to do."
"You know what to do?" she repeated incredulously, "They taught you how to defeat a dangerous, traitorous robot warrior by yourself?"
"You're not a grownup, Ori!" Bonnie chastised him with a stern shake of her curly head.
"Maybe not, but as a warrior-in-training, I've managed to learn some tricks while out on patrol," he insisted, "And Coldsteel probably won't be expecting me to be coming during the day, in human form, so I'll have the element of surprise."
"He'll be surprised, all right," Lyra agreed, "Then he'll blast you to pieces!"
"I know what I'm doing," Orion lied, "But I can't do it with you two under foot. Promise you'll get away if he's there."
Lyra was clearly not inclined to make any such promise.
"Please!" Ori begged, "Keep Bonnie safe."
"Alright," Lyra agreed reluctantly, "I'll get Bonnie out and you get Sister."
Orion sat back, only a little bit relieved. Of course, he hoped they would not encounter Coldsteel at all, and that Sister had simply gone on a mission by herself, to seek some sort of power that could help them. She should know better, he thought to himself, but he couldn't bring himself to believe that she would have formed an alliance with a criminal or intentionally set him free. Even as upset as she was with the clan, such a betrayal would have been unthinkable. As their bus ran along the shoreline, Orion tried to focus his mind on the task at hand and get as much information about the area as possible. If he was going to get all his sisters home in one piece, he had to be prepared for anything!
They got off the bus at the edge of an industrial park. Looking through the tall fence that was crowned with heavy barbed wire, they saw a large parking garage next to a smelly drainage ditch.
"Is she in there?" Lyra asked with confusion. There really didn't seem to be anything of interest in this facility.
"Her phone last pinged on the other side of this place," Orion explained, pointing in the general direction, "Come on!". The industrial park was adjacent to a large railyard, which was a place that Bonnie found fascinating.
"Ooooh! Look at the trains!" Bonnie squealed excitedly.
"You've seen trains before," Lyra pointed out, and she had, but the train yard was very different from the organized and predictable commuter lines that ran beneath the Eyrie Building. These small engines were shunting and arranging a wide variety of different kinds of freight cars, taking them from the factories, warehouses, and shipping yards and reorganizing them into mile-long trains that would journey out west. It was an exciting, active place and one in which young children were certainly not expected to be.
"Why do you think Sister went in there?" Lyra asked, uneasily watching scores of workers quickly moving heavy machinery.
"Maybe there was something in there she wanted?" Orion guessed, "Besides, it was probably a lot quieter in the middle of the night!"
"Well, why couldn't she use Amazon like a normal person?" she groaned, "We're never going to be able to find her in there! I don't even know how we're going to get inside to look for her!"
"Hi, Lyra!" Bonnie called from inside the fence.
"Bonnie!" Orion hissed in surprise, "What are you doing in there? How did you get through the fence?"
Bonnie smiled and jabbed her thumb back over her shoulder There's a huge hole under the fence where it goes over the creek. Orion glanced over and saw that the drainage ditch inside the industrial park continued under the fence and into the railyard.
"Stay right there!" he demanded and he and Lyra ran toward the opening and climbed down into the foul-smelling gulch, which thankfully had very low water that day, exposing the opening into the railyard. They hurried up the other side and met Bonnie behind a white shed.
"Now listen," he said, "Kids are definitely not supposed to be in here. If any of those workers sees or hears us, we're in big trouble, and then we can't help Sister. Do you understand?"
The two young girls both nodded their heads. Resolutely, Orion led them around the back of the shed to an open window, where they could climb up a discarded pallet and peek inside. The shed was filled with more workers, all doing maintenance on different cars and sending them back out into the yard. With all the roaring and shrieking of mechanical equipment and the various engines and machines hurrying cars of freight around the yard, the children were amazed that there seemed to be no collisions. It was a well-managed form of chaos. They crept around the front of the building, trying to stay out of sight in a place that was not meant to hide anyone, as they watched the busy workings of the yard,
Orion realized he had no idea where to begin. His phone suggested that Sister had been in or near the shed when her phone went dead, but it was hard for him to imagine that a gargoyle statue suddenly appearing one morning in a mechanic's shed wouldn't cause some surprise. No, Sister would have found a safe place to hide during the day.
"She could be anywhere," he muttered, "In a shipping crate, in a box car…"
"What if she got on a train?" Lyra asked in horror, "She could be halfway to Panama by now!"
Orion hadn't considered the possibility that Sister might have come here to get on a freight train and travel somewhere outside the city. Orion had only been on two trips, his entire life. One had been to Maine to attend Xantatos' father's funeral. The other had been to Scotland, to see the cliffside where his parents and their ancestors had been born. The notion that Sister could be, at that moment, riding unconsciously in a boxcar to any North American point in the whole vast world filled him with both excitement and a little uncharacteristic dread.
Orion knew from his lessons that his home was the largest city in the United States of America. It was a massive metropolis. He knew this better than any member of his class, as he glided above it on a regular basis, seeing the endless blanket of street and car lights that covered the land as far as the eye could see. Its illuminated harbor extended into the water, past islands great and small, far past the sound, and into the darkness of the sea. Yet beyond that animated glow of united lights, was the outside world.
Charlotte, a girl in his class, was an exceptionally well-traveled child. Her parents were photographers and often worked for National Geographic Magazine. She had flown with them to the coasts of Mexico and the glaciers of Alaska. She had seen the Great Barrier Reef and met the Navajo people who lived on terrifying terrain that looked quite like the very surface of Mars. She had been to India many times and shown the class photographs of both powerful waterfalls in remote jungles and ancient temples surrounded by bustling cities. Orion and the other students had met these photos with gasps of amazement and a bit of respect for the typically quiet and reserved girl's prowess and courage in visiting such an exotic and faraway place.
All except Joseph, who scoffed at the photos and snidely commented that New York was the biggest city in the world and his family owned and ruled over a respectable chunk of it. Why would he ever want to go to a place like India, where he'd probably just get malaria, if he wasn't kidnapped? Charlotte had gently informed him that there were vaccines for malaria and New York was only the 50th largest city in the world.
Orion had been honestly surprised to hear this and had googled it to see that it was quite true. Now he knew that there were so many other cities with their own glows of light, and beyond those, vast, remote woodlands, jungles, prairies, mountains, islands, and tundra. Even Charlotte and her family, who spent much of their time traveling the world, had only ever seen a fraction of it. Orion and Sister had spent a lot of time reading and watching videos about these faraway places and imagining what it would be like to see them in real life. The idea of such adventures had intrigued and intimidated them and they had made childish vows of one day traveling together to see at least a little bit of the world.
Of course, this was before they had been made warriors-in-training. Since then, Orion had thought only of his future as a great defended of his clan and his city and he and Sister hadn't discussed the idea of traveling together in a long time. Had Sister really gone off on an adventure without him? He doubted it, especially with the clan in the state it was. He was certain that she would never have abandoned them. But what if Coldsteel had taken her against her will? Orion shook his head in frustration.
"We're never going to find her here," he muttered disheartedly.
"Bonnie!" Lyra cried suddenly, and Orion looked down to find that, while he'd been daydreaming, his youngest sister had apparently gotten bored and taken off.
"Bonnie?!" he hissed, trying not to call attention to them, "Where are you?"
"Ori, look!" Lyra cried, pointing at a boxcar that had been shunted into a side rail not far from them. A flash of red pigtails and blue dress was visible, running back and forth across the opening of the sliding door.
"Oh no!" Orion grumbled. He took a quick look to either side, hoping no one was watching, and he and Lyra darted toward the open side of the box car.
"Bonnie! Get down from there!" Orion ordered sternly.
"Friend wants a train ride," she told him matter-of-factly.
"But we have to keep looking for Sister!" Orion reminded her as they climbed inside the car. Defiantly, Bonnie backed away from them and scrambled to the top of some stacked shipping pallets, placing Friend at the top.
"The train can take us to Sister!" she insisted.
"Bonnie, that isn't how trains work! Get down here right now!" Orion ordered, but suddenly they were all nearly knocked off their feet by a jolt.
"The car is moving!" Lyra cried hysterically, "We're going to end up in Panama!"
"Hold on!" Orion commanded Bonnie, who looked not the least bit uneasy, riding atop her tower of bottled water and canned beans. The car didn't move very quickly, and there was no sense of acceleration. Orion hoped they were simply being shunted into a new line so the rest of the freight could be loaded. Indeed, after a few minutes of gentle rolling, the car stopped with a slam, hard enough to knock Bonnie off her tower to the floor.
"Are you okay?" Orion asked frantically as he helped her to her feet, but she looked up and gave him a cheeky smile. Suddenly, they were startled by loud voices with colorful language coming from outside and they all ducked behind a crate.
A large man in overalls pulled himself up onto the car and began to direct another man driving a forklift full of more pallets. To their dismay, the man turned and caught sight of them and shouted,
"Hey! There's goddamn kids in here!"
"What?" cried the other man incredulously and he hurried down from the seat of his forklift, peering furiously across the floor of the boxcar at them.
"There's three of them back here!" the first man yelled, grabbing Orion by the arm, "Go call security!"
"No!" Orion cried, "We weren't doing anything wrong. We're just looking for a statue."
"Boy, you're going to be looking for an ass-beating when the police call your parents. Did you know you broke the law, sneaking in here?"
"Broke the law?" Lyra repeated.
"Trespassing on railroad property is a state crime," the man replied sternly, "Now come on, you're going straight to the security office."
The man reached to take ahold of Bonnie as well, but she backed away fretfully.
"My friend!" she wailed, and she leaped for the tower of pallets, upon which her gargoyle doll was still perched.
"Oh, no you don't!" the man bellowed, grabbing her around the waist and trying to pull her off the tower. He was quickly surprised by the strength of the young girl, who had no intention of leaving without her doll. As he yanked her again, Orion grabbed the man's other arm.
"Stop! You're hurting her!" he cried.
"Let go of me!" Bonnie demanded, turning red in the face as she gritted her teeth and kicked at her attacker.
"Bonnie, calm down!" Lyra tried to reason with her, "We'll get your Friend down. It'll be okay."
"Let go, you little brat!" the man bellowed furiously, giving her another tug.
"You let go! You're making me really mad!" Bonnie warned in her sopranino growl and the man snorted sarcastically.
"Bonnie…" Orion began in what was meant to be a threatening tone, but came out as more of a plea.
"Girl, if you don't let go of that pallet, so help me, I'm gonna-
But the man didn't get the chance to say what he intended to do, as a wildly thrashing tail shot out of the little girl and smacked him cold, in the face.
"Bonnie, no!" Lyra cried, but it was too late. Bonnie had begun her transformation and the man screamed in terror as the child he had been bullying took on talons and fangs with a ferocious shriek.
Uttering a barrage of profanity, the man stumbled from the dark boxcar into the bright daylight. Orion heard a satisfying thud, followed by a yelp as the man fell several feet to the ground, probably doing his joints no favors, and then fled in terror.
"They'll be back!" Lyra warned him, "What do we do?"
Desperately, Orion strained to lift Bonnie's petrified form, but the best he could do in his human form was slide it awkwardly across the floor. Lyra quickly joined him, but they got no further. There was no way they could safely lower her to the ground, much less move her across the busy trainyard unseen by the railroad workers.
"We can't leave her!" Lyra wailed.
"Of course not!" Orion replied frustratedly, "She's our sister! What's in this crate?"
Using a metal tool that had been left by the door, they pried open the crate, which, to their surprise, was filled with three, fully assembled mountain bikes.
"Help me pull those out of here," Orion directed Lyra and together, they removed the bikes and most of the packing materials. They hid the bikes behind the tower of pallets and turned the heavy crate over. Then they lifted it over Bonnie and joined her underneath, just in time to hear more voices approaching.
"What the hell happened in here?" one voice demanded, presumably eyeing the packing materials littering the boxcar.
"Elfink said, 'three kids and a monster'," came another voice.
"A monster? He drunk as a fiddler's bitch!" The two men laughed loudly in their gruff voices.
"Hey! Maybe it was a gargoyle?"
"Fool, you crazy!" the man replied, "You know they turn to stone during the day!" They both laughed again.
"Just kids playing around as usual," one of the men concluded, "You want to clean this up and write the report, or finish loading the freight?"
Orion and Lyra heard the men departing and soon after, the sounds of more freight being added to the car. With a sickening thud, they felt a load being placed on top of their crate and then they realized that they were trapped. Lyra curled up next to Orion, who placed his arm around her shoulder to comfort the both of them.
"We're moving," Lyra observed in a frightened whisper.
"I know."
"Where are we going?"
"I have no idea."