I had insisted on accompanying Violet on the Searoad Line train from Sunmount up to the place where she would meet the convent girls. She initially told me that one of the temple priests would do it, to not put me out in the little time I had left to spend with my parents before I set off for the Army Engineering Labs. I insisted, though, and explained I could head straight back from dropping her off to my new job and new accommodations. I insisted for the sake of getting the time with her alone.

  It was hard to find time alone with Violet, not because of her constraints, but because my family in Sunmount was quite demanding of my time whenever I appeared in Sunmount. Normally I might have been flattered by the attention, but at the start of ‘36, I had only Violet Shrineborne on my mind.

  We sat side-by-side in a plain wooden compartment in a second class car on the Sea Road Line, heading north. It was a steam engine, I remember. I remember the smoke billowing above us, the scent just faintly coming in through the open window. I remember staring out the window with her beside me, watching the countryside pass.

  She wore a formal gownrobe for travel, and I wore a suit. Rail travel was rare for us then. It was an occasion, something to be celebrated and treated with respect. The very sight of a train always thrilled me before the war.

  Violet was quiet, pensive, with her hands placed on her lap, one over the other. I didn’t always know what to say to her when she was quiet, whether or not to break her spell of concentration with some idle remark. When the countryside view grew monotonous to me, I returned to scratching arithmetic in my notebook and plotting out itineraries.

  We were almost alone in the car. I say almost because, opposite the two of us, an old man snored with a cane in his hand and a newspaper on his lap. He’d been asleep when we boarded, and the jolts of the line did not seem capable of waking him.

  “Wow,” I said, without realizing I was speaking aloud. It was a figure in my own arithmetic that had spurred the remark.

  “What?” said Violet beside me.

  I set my pen down in the crook of the journal and looked up at her. “This would have taken us fifteen hours just ten years ago. Now we can make it in eleven.”

  “They made a faster train?” she asked.

  “Not just that,” I said. I felt the ramble of locomotive passion warming up within me. “I mean, the PNR C51 does have a slightly better mainline speed than the C50 class. But a lot of this route has been upgraded to double track, so we don’t have to wait for trains coming south to pass through. We can just go straight up, almost nonstop.”

  Violet always listened when I talked, even when the talk was about machinery. She was patient that way. She was kind. She opened her mouth, about to ask a clarifying question, when I caught sight of a somewhat miraculous machine charging down a nearby line across the meadow.

  “Look at that,” I said, pointing to the train and its cars. “That’s a TM 3.”

  “The funny box?” Violet asked, following my pointing out the window.

  “You see how it’s moving with no steam engine? It pulls power right from the cables on top, the things that look like telegraph lines. No smoke, no nothing.”

  “I’ve seen those in Grandhill,” said Violet.

  “You probably saw the TM 2. Very similar, but there’s one big difference. The TM 2s we bought from the Almenreich. The TM 3s we made right here in Paxana with our own hands.”

  Violet laughed at me. I wasn’t expecting her to laugh. I looked over at her, letting the TM 3 disappear, and saw her smiling broadly. Her face was a woman’s face now, a miraculous face, and I could have pulled it out of a crowd of ten thousand in an instant. It was the first and last face I thought about any given day.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you love trains, and you love our country, and you love me.”

  I never understood why she found my love of trains so charming—just as she probably never understood my love of trains.

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  “I do love all those things,” I said.

  “Equally?” she asked me.

  After a moment of trepidation, I saw she was only teasing. Smiling back at her, I gave her a kiss. “Don’t make me choose.”

  At my teasing back, she smacked me lightly on the chest. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding,” I laughed.

  I tried to kiss her again, but saw the hesitation in her eyes and stopped short.

  “We’re going to get in trouble if they see we’re not chaperoned,” she said.

  As many times as I tried to tell her Paxana was changing, she still felt beholden to the old ways. A young man and woman in love, unwed, were not generally allowed to cavort alone through the countryside.

  I looked over at the snoring man, who had slumped to the side. “I don’t think anyone cares,” I whispered, and pecked her cheek.

  The way the train lines and stations were laid out, we arrived at the Paxlight City headquarters of the Army Engineering Laboratories late in the afternoon. Her own destination, the convent, was far across the city and almost to Archcove. I walked with Violet through the laboratory gardens, which were public, and carried our things. On the street, I noticed many a young couple walking together without being wed. The culture in the city of Paxlight, I could already tell, was far more Western than in Sunmount.

  At the quieter end of the garden, in the shadow of the proud laboratory, I set both our trunks down on a stone bench. “Here it is,” I said to her, raising a hand to show off my new workplace. “I have a few hours before I need to report. I just figured you could come and see it with me before we go to the convent, since it’s on the way.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to the convent,” said Violet, to my surprise. “Together, I mean.”

  I scoffed. “You can’t cross Eastwall alone. You’re not a shop girl.”

  “No, they’re sending a sister out to escort me. I wrote the headmother with our itinerary and I think she’s sending someone here.”

  “Here? To the Army Engineering Labs?” I asked.

  “I imagine,” said Violet.

  I stepped back. Suddenly, my throat was tense and my chest was stiff with the feeling that I was about to lose her. It wasn’t a matter of losing her for good, of course, but even a few months apart felt like an impossible chasm to cross in my present state of lovesickness.

  I looked her up and down and she scowled.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m putting every detail to memory so I can draw you in the margins of my blueprints.”

  She blushed, as I had hoped she would. “Awh,” she murmured.

  Determined to leave a lingering impression on my sweetheart, I continued my charm offensive. “We’ve passed a couple thousand girls just this past hour, Violet Shrineborne, and there hasn’t been a one a half as lovely as you.”

  “That’s your professional opinion?” she asked, teasing fondly again. “Might you need to jot down some equations, run a statistical analysis just to be sure?”

  “I’m only saying,” I chuckled, “I have enough of a sample size now to say for sure.”

  She came close to me, seemingly less afraid now of being chided for a lack of chaperone. “For sure?” she asked, and I felt the moment coming when she would kiss me of her own initiation. Then a young woman’s voice interrupted us.

  The girl was a slim figure I would come to know as Josephine Wistree, a sister of the National Sorceress Corps. She was perhaps two years our senior, but still seemed young. To my shock, she wore black trousers with a modified black gownrobe and coat. I think she may well have been the first woman in trousers I had ever seen outside of a Western motion picture.

  “Violet?” she asked, ignoring me.

  Violet took a step back from me just as quickly as she had neared. She turned to Josephine Wistree and gave a deep bow. “Sister,” she said.

  Josephine introduced herself and said she was from the Eastwall convent. Placing a black-gloved hand to her belly, she bowed back at Violet.

  “This is my chaperone,” said Violet, meaning me, and it was disappointing to hear her say it. Chaperone. How pedestrian.

  “Thomas Trussford, Army Engineering Labs,” I said, though in truth I would not be officially inducted for a few hours yet. I thought presenting myself by occupation would give me some semblance of legitimacy. Along with the statement, I gave a slight bow, and to my annoyance Wistree did not return it.

  “I see,” said the sister. “Well. Come on then, Violet. You’ll be hungry if we don’t get back for dinner.”

  Violet looked surprised, but she did not resist the sudden and unglamorous parting of ways. “All right. Well, goodbye, Tom.”

  I wanted to hug or kiss her, but I held back. I could tell from the way she had called me her chaperone that she didn’t want such affection in front of a convent sister. It pained me to watch her pick up her own heavy valise, and for a moment I thought of offering to accompany the women just to carry the luggage. It was clear, though, from Josephine Wistree’s brusqueness that she did not want me tagging along.

  “If they keep me here in Paxlight, I can visit on the weekends,” I told her.

  “That wouldn’t be proper, Mr. Trussford,” said Josephine. “She can write you, and visit when she’s on leave.”

  To my further annoyance, I saw Josephine Wistree’s gloved hand press against Violet’s back as she guided the new inductee toward a streetcar. “Goodbye. Goodbye!” I shouted, suddenly scared that I had wasted our moment of farewell by being cross. “I’ll write you, Violet.”

  And she was gone.