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a constant storm. Its fenders were hooked around like mandibles. The braying of its harsh steamwhistle shivered along her neck like a warcry.
    The air felt suddenly thick with electricity. It tasted burnt. Beth turned and ran, plunging back through the driver’s door. She lurching up the gangway between the fidgeting memories—
    Move, Beth, move—
    ‘Too slow,’ she cried out loud, ‘too slow!’
    Christ, Beth, you’re too slo—
    Screeeeeeech!
    There was a piercing scream of metal and the shudder of impact. The train slammed to a halt, hurling Beth backwards. Her stomach flipped over as she hit the floor hard. The chill mist of the train-thing’s wraith-like front wall coated for a second and she rolled out onto the tracks.
    No air! Her lungs clawed at vacuum for a moment, and then she erupted into a hacking cough. Her arms were scraped raw and hot blood was smeared over her brow. She pushed herself up on her elbow—
    —and gazed up at the impossible.
    There was no wreckage, no twisted, smoking, white-hot steel. The trains were above her: she was lying on the tracksand they were forty feet above her. Their front carriages were rearing up off the rails like snakes and …
    And they were fighting .
    They butted and grappled with each other, their fenders interlocked like horns. They emitted hisses and screeches of sheer machine effort. But the freight train was bigger and heavier. Its carriages bunched together like muscle as it hurled her train to the earth. The ground quaked, and Beth quaked with it as the freight train lashed down, cobranimble, chewing at the undercarriage of its enemy with its wheels.
    Sparks and something like oily blood gushed from Beth’s engine, and it screamed.
    ‘ Stop it! ’ Beth yelled, stumbling forward, waving her hands as if she was trying to ward off a wild animal. She was coughing, half-mad with impact and smoke, but she clambered over the ruined body of her train, hollering like an idiot. ‘ Get off it! ’ she screamed again, smoke scratching at her throat until it was fit to bleed. ‘Get away !’
    The vast freight train arched backwards, cocooned in blue lightning, ready to strike. It flickered, and blurred, leaving strange after-images: a steam-engine, a squat underground train, a trail of memories, as though it couldn’t remember what it was. Its steamwhistle brayed like a tormented thing.
    The cold white beam of its eye fixed on Beth. It snorted steam-breath. She felt its weight over her like a promise.
    ‘For Thames’ sake – get the crap out of the way! ’
    She staggered as something shoved her aside. Out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed a figure: a skinny boy wearing only a pair of filthy ripped jeans. His skin was as grey as concrete and his face was taut with fear.
    And then the freight train crashed down, its fender-jaws tearing at the tracks. The shock of it wrenched the world out of focus. The figure vanished. Beth shook her head, trying to clear it, bewildered by the din. Had she imagined—?
    No, there he was, on top of the monster, somehow. His ribs pressed through his chest with each heaved breath. He gripped what looked like an iron railing in one hand and as Beth watched he stabbed it down, again and again, into the train-beast’s metal skin. The makeshift weapon punctured the steel like tinfoil, and every time it went in the beast shrieked .
    Wheels whirred into motion, squealing against the tracks, and Beth rolled sharply out of their path. Her ears popped as the freight train clattered past her, the grey boy still clinging to its roof. The carriages it dragged behind it faded into insubstantial nothingness as it gathered speed.
    Beth shook herself like a dog, trying to get some feeling back into her stunned limbs, some sense into her head. She pushed herself up and ran to her train’s side.
    It mewled pitifully at her with its whistle.
    ‘Hey,’ she whispered, ‘hey, you okay?’ She patted and stroked it, though the metal around its wounds