The Golden Swift by LEV GROSSMAN

Author:LEV GROSSMAN [GROSSMAN, LEV]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526647634
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

‘You’ll just have to explain to Mr Zhang that sometimes the present is more urgent than the past. The Civil War was bad but we have more pressing problems right now.’

‘You really think he’ll accept that?’

‘As a great woman once observed,’ Kate said, ‘sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.’

With that, she went to maths.

The Hero and the Villain

A COUPLE OF DAYS LATER KATE FOUND A FOLDED-UP piece of paper in her locker – it must have been slipped in through the slots in the door. Her heart clenched when she saw it. It was that same kind of thick creamy paper that Uncle Herbert always left for her …

But it wasn’t from Uncle Herbert. It was an official timetable for the Great Secret Intercontinental Railway, but it wasn’t for the Silver Arrow. It was for the Golden Swift.

She tracked Jag down during lunch. He was sitting by himself, as usual, eating an apple.

‘I thought maybe you would want to make the stops instead of me,’ he explained, with his usual maddening calm.

‘Why would you think that?’ Kate didn’t see why Jag thought he was in the business of knowing anything about her or what she might or might not want.

‘Because I know how much you care about the work that the railway does.’

‘And why would you think that?’

‘Because when you caught me releasing lynx at Achnashellach, you chased me all the way to Namibia. That’s why. But I can do the stops myself if you’d rather.’

He was right, she really did want that timetable. She wanted to get back out on the Silver Arrow. She didn’t like the idea of being in debt to him, but she guessed he was in debt to her already, so this would just make it even.

‘Fine. I’ll do it.’

She turned to go. Then she turned back.

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome,’ Jag said.

‘What did you get on your Civil War project?’

‘An A. Also Mr Zhang cancelled the Civil War unit and is making everybody do a project on the social consequences of climate change instead.’

As it turned out, Kate was glad she took the timetable. She’d forgotten how much she loved all the little technical details of running the train, and the pleasure of being precisely on time, and of meeting an absurd variety of bizarre animals. She loved just reading the place names: the Miombo woodlands; the Sundarbans, which was the world’s biggest mangrove forest; the Monteverde cloud forest; the Yellow River mudflats. In the Valdivian rainforest, a tiny wildcat called a kodkod boarded the train. It was no bigger than a house cat.

In a quiet meadow in Belgium, she picked up an animal that she would’ve thought was an unusually athletic-looking guinea pig but who indignantly identified herself as a critically endangered European hamster instead. Kate hadn’t realised there were actual, real non-pet hamsters out there living in the wild; her surprise prompted an operatic speech on the eighteen(!) different species of hamster, of which the European hamster was proud to be the

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