Railroad: Part 6

Unwanted revelations

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Detective Lola Styles has stopped the transit of illegal migrants through the portal to London. Having visited the refugees in their new prison cell, she’s wondering if she made the right call…

Bruglia.
3202. Leafless.

A small lizard, barely the length of Lola’s hand, had made its home in her apartment towards the end of the summer and had since claimed a spot on the wall by the door. Always perfectly still, never seeming to move from that position, ready to greet her when she returned. Presumably it ventured out to find food when she wasn’t looking. Operating behind her back. Seemed about right.

She closed the door behind her. Her clothes stank. She slipped off her shoes, trying her best to not touch them with her hands. They might even be a lost cause, they were so encrusted with god knows what. She removed her coat, which was sodden at the back, as were the ends of her trousers. Tiptoeing through to the bathroom, she hopped out of them and dumped it all into the bath. There was no such thing as a washing machine in Bruglia and the kitchen sink was too small. She knelt on the floor while she filled the bath - running water was a thing, though it was expensive. Fortunately she had an allowance from the SDC that would cover it. She felt the evening chill on her bare legs as she scrubbed at the dirty clothing.

On her way back from the prison she’d found her way to the Baltine palace instead of her apartment, turning corners without thinking as the sun dipped behind the buildings. Drauk, the koth on the gate, had stared at her incredulously. “Is everything alright, Detective Styles?”

She’d looked down at her dishevelled appearance, remembering it for the first time since leaving the prison, and grimaced. “Oh,” she’d said, “I came straight from the prison. I’m a mess.”

“That you are,” Drauk had said, a little reproachfully. “I know you’re good people, detective, but I can’t allow you in when you’re dressed like this.” Their nose wrinkled. “It’s the smell, you see. People would talk.”

Lola gazed through the metal gates at the palace, raised up on the hill. Daryla was likely in there somewhere. She sighed. Her little office building was nestled in the grounds off to one side—

She squinted. “Drauk, there’s a light on in my office,” she said, pointing.

“What?” They spun around, always more agile than they looked. There was indeed a small light moving around inside, visible through the windows.

“There shouldn’t be anyone in there,” Lola said. “Let me in, somebody is breaking in.”

“Nobody’s come through,” Drauk grumbled, unlocking the gate and allowing her through.

“Then somebody’s hopped the fence!” It was unlikely, she knew - the palace had a sensor spell all the way around its outer wall. As she ran through the gardens towards her office, a gust of wind behind her launched Drauk into the air on outstretched wings, each twice as wide as she was tall, and the koth landed at the door. Lola was still twenty feet away.

In the evening gloom she saw Drauk extend a hand to the handle, then they slumped to the ground. A moment later she was there, and found Drauk unconscious but seemingly unharmed. Turning the handle and finding the door unlocked, she burst inside, unsure of what she’d do if anyone was still there. There were a lot of things on Palinor that were a lot tougher than she was.

The office was empty.

“What happened?” Drauk said, getting to their feet. “I passed out. Did something hit me?”

“Not that I saw,” Lola said. “There’s nobody here.” She sniffed the air. There was a smell, cutting through even the stench from her clothing.

Drauk shook their head in confusion. “I’ve been doing too many late shifts. How about you get back home and treat yourself to a change of clothes. I’ll keep an eye out for anything strange here, don’t you worry.”

Lola had said nothing about the odour.

She squeezed water through her filthy clothes, the bathwater immediately turning to a thick brown sludge. Furiously rubbing a bar of soap across them didn’t seem to make much difference. Returning home and washing her clothes was a luxury not afforded to the refugees, who would be spending another night in the pit. The shortest and youngest struggling to sleep without drowning in the slop during the night. That tiny skylight was the only hint of sun, and she’d noticed a hinged covering hanging from it - if the guards wished, they could block all natural light and hide any notion of day and night.

Sure, they’d chosen to pay for passage. They’d chosen to get into the container and try to cross illegally to Mid-Earth. But she’d been the one to find them and stop them. She’d put them into that pit. What she’d said to the koth was true, though: getting through the portal would only have resulted in them sold to terrible people on the other side. Would that really have been worse? At least they might have had a chance of escaping and finding a life somewhere else. There was no escaping that prison.

And she was bullshitting herself. None of them had chosen, not in the real meaning of the word. It wasn’t like they’d had actual options to weigh up. For some of them it was leave or die. For others it was escaping a life of servitude in the hope of something better. Nobody would actually choose to step into one of those containers and go for a ride.

Well, except maybe Kaminski, but he was weird.

The trousers and coat didn’t look much cleaner, but she had succeeded in spreading the muck up her hands and arms, her shirt now also ruined. She let out a little moan and resisted the habit of running her hands through her hair. Her inability to get the clothes clean was like every other problem she was unable to fix. They kept piling up on top of each other.

She pulled her shirt over her head and dumped it into the bath, then padded through to the kitchen where she found a large sack that could be used to take rubbish to the nearby tip. Back in the bathroom she shoved the spoiled clothes into the sack and tied it tight, before kicking it towards the doorway. Discarding the rest of her clothing, she ran the water in the bath and scrubbed at the metal tub until it started to regain its mottled sheen. Filling a wash cup she poured it over herself and scrubbed and scrubbed, peeling away the shame of the past 48 hours.

Finally she felt clean, at least on the surface, and hopped out, grabbing at the robe from the back of the door and tying it tight. The water had been hot but she still felt chilled.

She heard the front door to the apartment open and close, then the jangle of keys. Daryla was back from wherever she’d been all day. Lola took a deep breath and walked out to greet her.

Daryla’s smile was as wide as ever, and she hurried over with a kiss and a hug. Taking a step back, she frowned. “You OK? What happened to your shoes? It looks like they died.”

“Yeah,” Lola said, unable to muster a smile in return. “And the rest of my clothes.”

“Oh, really? How efficient of you.”

Lola moved away from her and put her arm out, touching a hand to Daryla’s shoulder. “Stop.” She swallowed. “Stop pretending everything is fine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why were you in my office earlier?”

Daryla’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about?” She tried to come closer.

“No. What were you looking for?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Lola!”

Lola took a deep breath. “I saw someone searching through the place with a light. Drauk went to investigate but collapsed momentarily. Just long enough for someone to escape out the back. Koth don’t just collapse. Unless someone’s working a spell. Maybe pinching an artery to the brain?”

“That’s terrible!” Daryla looked genuinely shocked. “If that’s the case we need to get a full security detail on it. I’m relieved you’re both OK. But why are you accusing me? I’m not the only micrologist in Bruglia.”

So she was going to deny it right to the end, then. Lola felt a rage building inside. “Daryla, I smelled your perfume. I know you were in there.”

Daryla’s face ran through a series of emotions: stricken, then anger, then despair. “Lola. It’s not what you think. I can explain.”

---

Thank you for reading!

I’ve been trying to get back into doing regular sketches. Something I’ve really noticed is that I don’t really have a style. Every time I draw something it’s slightly different, and highly reliant on references. Some recent examples:

A selection of recent sketches.

It’s useful for me to be pushing at the edges of something I’m not very good at, and lack confidence in. I desperately want to improve, because I want to make my own comic. But that lack of a discernible style is a fiddly thing. In my writing I have no such hesitations: I know what my writing voice is and can summon it whenever needed, or play with it and warp it in new directions.

To develop a style requires a mix of skill and time, I think. I don’t have enough of the former (yet!) and I haven’t committed enough of the latter. Thing is, I was in the same position with my writing a decade ago. Sure, I could write, but I didn’t know what my writing was supposed to be. I only figured that out by doing a ridiculous amount of it over a long period of time.

The point of this long-winded ramble is, I suppose, to say keep going. If you’re not where you want to be with your art, don’t worry…you’ll get there eventually. I’ve signed up to Proko to see if that can move me along.

Back on Triverse, did you notice that there are now proper voiceovers available on chapters? I’m doing this for all new chapters, and I’m also going back to the very beginning and starting to record voiceovers for previous chapters. There’s over 100 to get through, so it’ll take a while, but hopefully it makes it easier to keep up with the story even if you’re commuting or busy with housework.

MEANWHILE. Monday’s discussion was lively! Do check it out if you missed it, as it’s full of inspiring positivity and ambition:

What is your 2024 writing goal?

Shifting gears, I’m quite a nervous traveller. I like being places, but I don’t enjoy getting to them. Flight in particular I’m not good with these days. Which meant I thoroughly appreciated this post from

Brent Hartinger

:

Plane Crashes Are Suddenly Everywhere. It Doesn't Mean What You Think.

A good reminder of context and a clever bit of writing, pulling something affirming from recent tragedies.

AI continues to be a weird one. It currently feels very similar to the NFT/crypto/blockchain hype bubbles of the last few years, albeit on a much grander scale. This from

Gary Marcus

caught my eye:

The desperate race to save Generative AI

There are many really exciting uses for AI, and we can hopefully get past the current daft obsession with generative AI and onto more useful things soon.

Emma Gannon

had a brilliant quote in her latest:

“can we get some A.I. to pick plastic out of the ocean or do all the robots need to be screenwriters?”

Finally, don’t forget that a bunch of us are doing a rewatch of classic 1990s scifi Babylon 5. If you’d like to join us - and especially if you’ve never seen it before! - you can find out more here or jump to the latest episode:

Photo reference by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

Author notes

I nearly walked straight into a plot hole in this one. The first draft opened with the scene in Lola’s apartment, but didn’t go into the flashback at the palace gardens. I was ploughing ahead with the apartment, intending to have Daryla arrive and a conversation ensue. Lola would work out that something was amiss during that conversation.

I was concerned that the conversation would be a bit static, and wasn’t sure where to go with it. Then I realised that the previous chapter ended with Lola’s letter to Clarke stating that she went to see Daryla before going home.

Oops. Fortunately I caught it in time. But then what? What was the solution? Rewrite the whole chapter? Add a new scene to the front? I really liked what I already had, with Lola arriving home filthy and trying to deal with that and her conflicted thoughts. Also: she was filthy. It didn’t really make sense for her to go see Daryla and arrive at the palace covered in muck.

Problems on problems! The solution I landed on was to insert the flashback scene mid-way through, breaking up the apartment scene. That way I could avoid contradicting the previous (already published) chapter. By having Drauk refuse Lola entry, I could also resolve that issue of her visiting the palace in a state. Then another idea appeared: what if she saw someone in her office, witnessing a break-in from the gate? That could be interesting.

After the flashback, we come back to the apartment. It recontextualises her frantic cleaning of her clothes. We now know that the plot has thickened and she has suspicions about Daryla. I love recontextualising in a non-linear way. It enabled me to avoid a drawn-out conversation and skip straight to the accusations in a more interesting way, and by Lola exercising her detective skills.

I thought that was a good example of a problem turning into something good. In terms of a problem, it’s also quite specific to the way I write: if this was a traditionally published novel, I could have gone back and edited the end of Lola’s letter to Clarke, before anybody read it. That would have been the easy solution. But then I wouldn’t have ended up with the new ideas for how this chapter played out. The restrictions of writing and publishing as I go forced me into finding creative solutions.

Right, that’s enough of me. I think it’ll be the final chapter of this storyline next week.