Shadow Train by J. Gabriel Gates Page B

he said aloud. “But where am I going?”
    Of course, there was no one to answer him. He was alone in the cab of the train, and judging from the terrain around him, he might be alone in some strange world or dimension that he’d somehow been blasted into when the train hit him.
    He left the window, went back to the control panel, and looked down at it. There were six gauges, each one with a dial and a red needle. But the markings on the gauges were not numbers or letters—to Raphael, they looked like the nonsense squiggles a child would make up before they learned how to write for real.
    â€œOh, great,” he said to himself, “we’re going squiggly-mark, lopsided-circle, leaning-triangle miles per hour.”
    A brass lever extended from the side of the panel, similar to the slot machine–type lever that operated the Wheel of Illusion. Raphael considered pulling on it to see what would happen, then thought better of it. For all he knew it would make the train blast off into space. No, he decided, the train had started moving by itself. It would stop by itself. But he was worried. Where would he be when it stopped? Where was it taking him?
    If the Wheel that was meant to turn the trains in different directions could take its operator to different times, what could the trains themselves do? Wherever he was going, was it a round-trip or a one-way ticket? How long had he been gone? He had this weird feeling that he’d been sleeping for a week. What was happening back in Middleburg? Was his mom worried about him? How would she survive if he never came back? She could barely take care of herself, much less a new baby. And what about Aimee? He had to get back to Aimee and find a way to get her away from Orias.
    He reached into his pocket and took out his cell phone, but when he looked down at the screen, he wasn’t surprised to find that it was dead. He held down the power button and waited for the screen to light up. Nothing.
    When he put the phone back into his pocket, he felt something else there and took it out. There, in the palm of his hand, was a jagged shard of crystal about three inches long. It was flat and rounded. It took him a long moment before he realized what it was: a piece of the crystal ring, the treasure he and his friends had searched so hard for. It must’ve broken when the train hit him. The light that had once shone through it had disappeared now, and it looked dead in his hands, like nothing but a piece of broken glass.
    Just as this thought crossed his mind, however, a blink of greenish white light winked through the shard, as if reassuring him: oh, no, my friend. I am alive.
    But whether it was alive or not, Raphael doubted it would do any good. He stuck it back in his pocket.
    Questions swarmed through his mind, thick and fast, but he realized quickly that none of them had answers. Whatever was happening in Middleburg, he couldn’t do anything about it. As for where he was going, the track had already been laid. He had no choice but to follow it.
    With a sigh of surrender, Raphael settled into the surprisingly comfortable, old-fashioned leather armchair and gazed out the windshield. Soon, his thoughts were as featureless and serene as the fog that roiled past.
    * * *
    â€œThere is no need for anyone to get hurt, Chin. All I require are the pieces of the ring.”
    Feng Xu’s words gave Zhai a moment of hope. If the Obies were after the shards, then maybe there really was some Shen magic left in them, and maybe they could use them to get Raphael back—but they’d have to get out of here alive first.
    Master Chin’s eyes traced the forms of Feng Xu, the five Obies, and the indistinct, looming shape of the Black Snake God, and Zhai knew from his years of training that his sifu’s brain was racing like a Pentagon computer, calculating whether or not this was a battle they could win—and if so, how.
    After a moment, Chin replied,