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painted white. “They can be, see. No coal smuts. And it reflects heat best in the couple of bits the clanker comes out.”
    â€œBut where is the engine?” She was puzzled by the lack of coal smuts. Soot and smuts were a way of life in a world that ran on coal.
    â€œOh, the clankers don’t have ’em. Can’t burn coal down here. The carriages have clamps on them that snag on the belt, see.”
    Clara didn’t, but they were happy to explain, if a little surprised that she didn’t know. There were power stations along the route, outside the tunnels, that wound huge drums of continuous cables. Ten miles was the practical limit, so every twenty miles there was a power station, providing a cable to haul the trains along ten miles to either side of them. It meant, of course, that the segments were mostly straight. They could do curves, but that started to get more complicated than Clara was following, or wanted to. Submarines and navigation interested her. Cable cars in tunnels, not so much. But the carriages were so flat because for every one running north, there was another coming south. The tunnels were round, and they had to fit.
    â€œWhy not just make them bigger?” she asked. “The tunnels I mean.”
    â€œCause the drill heads on the steam moles are round. So the tunnels are round.”
    He hauled out his pocket watch. “We’re crossing the gap soon. You’ll get to see it.”
    â€œShe’s a lovely sight. Never get tired of it,” said one of the other, older men, with a smile. “There’s a few other aerial sections, but the gap’s the biggest. Mind you, it can get hot out there.”
    â€œYeah, but Power Seven is just the other side of her. She blows good cool air into the tunnels.”
    They came out into late-afternoon daylight, the shadows long across the landscape of reds, browns, and ochre below the cable-train,as she hung on a silver rail above the rocky valley below. The rail was suspended between enormous pylons, coming up from the dry valley. Looking carefully Clara could see there was some sparse vegetation. “It’s so beautiful. But I thought it was all desert.”
    â€œMy word, I seen her in flood once,” said one of the older northbound workers. “Was nothing but water as far as the eye could see. It runs into Lake Eyre. That’s not been full for a while, but when we get a wet, here, Missy, we get a real wet.” He looked at the entry to the tunnel on the valley wall ahead. “Better tuck you under the seats again. The conductor comes around to check no one’s drunk and starting fights, and the food-sellers on the platform might rat on you.”
    And so Clara’s journey into the red heart of Australia continued. She ate with them—they wouldn’t take her money—and talked, and eventually dosed, learning more about the miners and rail workers heading into the north, a part the British Empire considered virtually uninhabited and uninhabitable. And they were even running cattle up there.
    The one thing that was even stranger was how many of these young men had come from the Dominion of Australia, and how many were planning to head back there, with good Westralian gold in their pockets. If they could go to-and-fro, surely she could?

    Linda had just picked up a message from Nicky—hidden in the hedge in their secret spot—when she heard her stepmother scream.
    She barely had time to tuck the note up her sleeve before her stepmother bustled in. “Do say you know where Clara is. Her bed…her bed had a pillow in it. I thought she must still be asleep,” she said, her speech fast and voice a little shrill. “I thought with her mother being so unwell it was best to leave her…”
    â€œNo, Mother,” said Linda, feeling sure her face must betray her as an absolute liar. But fortunately her stepmother was neither observant,at the best of times, nor