For: Kabal42 (Yuletide gift exchange)
Thank you: minim_calibre for the beta!

"I've been cold since the day I was born," Timmy-Tim-now says. His breath thickens the air with white vapor even here, in his rightful place at the fire's edge. "Because I was born on the snow."

Yona rolls her eyes and considers both the distance to the fur-draped doorway and the wind outside. Whether stuffing snow down Tim-now's back is worth either.

No. Not yet. Later. When his hunters are watching. She'll laugh harder.

Rashid nods, shaven head jerking too high and then too low. "Exactly," he rasps from Tim-now's side. "Exactly, man. Exactly. I mean. Exactly."

Yona snorts: as if he knows. Their Engineer is too old for a train baby; he is a piece of what came before. If he was born on the snow, it wasn't this snow. Maybe his mother was careless. Maybe she was brave.

Rashid's twitching fingers are stained green where they aren't raw with chemical burns, and calloused with scars. So many years and there's still no shortage of Chronole in the wreckage they've made their nation.

Of the few that survived the end of the world, of the ones and twos that dribbled to the front of the train, the addicts were the first to die. Some with smiles on their faces, some with knives in their throats.

What's inside Rashid's head, they fight freeze and thaw to keep: he reads the stars and counts the days.

From time to time, Yona crumbles Chronole under her nose and breathes deep. Mostly when she wants to remember her father. She takes the waste inside and smiles fondly, but it has no hold on her, not anymore.

Her drug is curiosity. It burns without comfort; its rush is short lived. It's a family affliction and maybe one day it will kill her too.

But she doesn't know it will.

They call her the psychic. Out of respect they save her a space beside the eternal fire, which burns in the not-so-eternal engine's crumpled core. She isn't. Psychic. Like most of the train babies, she hears better. What she doesn't hear, she sees.

But like Rashid knows the stars and Tim-now knows the snow, she knows the train: in her bones. She knows what's behind the endless, buried doors of the carriages – which are worth the energy to crack open, which are tombs to stay sealed.

Day and night and even in her dreams, she follows two glinting metal tracks. Down gorges, over mounds of twisted metal, stealing little bits of life back from the remains.

It keeps her busy and it keeps her warm, but this – Rashid tells them – is a New Year and so, by tradition, she must stay for the telling.

The fire is warm, but it feels as though the snow has slipped under her skin; she shivers under her furs.

"A thousand and one carriages," Tim-now says into the waiting silence. "It was a thousand and one, wasn't it?"

She grunts and shrugs, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. "Yes," she nods. "Or sixty," she adds perversely.

Tim-now's daughter – perhaps granddaughter, Rashid would know – giggles. Ebbie? Yes. Ebbie: a bundle of fur and laughter and words Yona doesn't know. Like Timmy, she is the cog that will keep them moving.

"A thousand and one," Tim-now insists.

"Yes," she relents. "A thousand and one."

"Yes," parrots Rashid, as if he counted.

"My mother walked the whole way, from the tail to the jaws, to find me."

Walked, stumbled, crawled and bled. She told Timmy how Tanya died, trying – failing – to reach him. How her father and the other man became a shell around them. Tim-now remembers differently. Tanya is become Ahwang Kongju, become Chungkyun Moju; become his word for many gods.

Become his Min-soo, Yona admits to herself, with a wry twist of her lips.

They worship their ancestors with every frostbitten breath they take; they are dutiful children, in the end.

And she is long since past reminding him that Tanya was real, that she was flesh and blood and rage, and that was very nearly enough. What does it matter? There are so few of them left that perhaps faith is somehow stronger now: distilled.

They could do worse than pray to a determined mother.

"Just so," says the old man on her left, nodding as if he reads her thoughts. He's familiar, but she doesn't know his name, or at least she didn't care to remember it.

He holds one hand towards the flames, it shakes, but not with cold. He's very old, older even than her: perhaps fifty or seventy or more. The lines of his face are shadowed folds; his eyes are deep in their sockets, the pupils barely catching the firelight.

They study each other frankly as the fire pops and hisses. She supposes he's waiting for a reply, but she has no words to give him. In the face of her disinterest, he smiles gently. "Your mother was a remarkable woman," he says, and Yona isn't sure whether he's speaking to her, or to Tim-now. "She never gave up."

Tim-now stares through the old man, expression creased with the same question. He won't ask, though. He learned quickly that to be right was best, but to be sure was almost as good.

For all he's proven his worth, it's hard for him, Yona knows. In the two hundred and thirteen who orbit the engine, there are older, and there are wiser, and there are stronger. But as soon as he was old enough for hair to shadow thin cheeks, for his voice to deepen, she told them she had seen that only he could keep the fire alight.

Because while it is her right to tease, the truth is that the winter loves him best. The first night, the wind piled snow around the carriages like a warm blanket to cover him, and when that snow thawed it revealed the carcasses of frozen creatures, whose meat they both gnawed on until they started the fire.

"She never gave up," Tim-now echoes, and then focuses on Yona. "Tell us the story?"

It's the ritual. They speak of the dead; they tell the stories they remember – bits and pieces, fact and fiction. Fantastic cities that almost no one actually remembers, fragments of their history distorting day by night by day and no one quite caring.

It makes her tired and she feels herself drifting; her legs ache as if she's been climbing.

"Did you know," the old man says, "that Yona means 'dove?' There's a very old story that, after a terrible flood, the dove was sent to find land. That's in Hebrew of course," he admits. "Not Korean. Or Inuit."

Perhaps seeing her expression, Tim and Rashid ignore the old man. "Please, Yona," Tim-now cajoles. "You tell the best stories."

"There is a snake," she says, fingers weaving a serpent from the shadow of the fire. "That eats its own tail."

Ebbie leans forward; she likes this one best. "Why do?"

"Because it's fucking crazy, that's why." A man-boy with sharp features and a half-wicked smile picks Ebbie up and seats himself in her place, pulling her onto his lap while she laughs. He rolls his eyes and shakes his head as he settles. "Renewal my arse - it's worse than protein blocks."

She had been about to say renewal, as usual, but to spite the boy she smirks. "Entropy." She likes the taste of the word, but doesn't know where it came from. Couldn't define it if she tried. But she knows what it means; it was part of the train.

Rashid blinks. "Exactly," he says, uncertainly. He doesn't like change.

"Their world ended in ice," Yona tells Ebbie. "Ours ended in fire. But both ended – the snake is always hungry."

"I hold with those who favor fire," the old man murmurs with a secretive smile.

The boy, whose name she'll remember in a moment, shoots him a flat glare that seems made as much of pain as anger, as much of contempt as love. "You would," he spits.

The old man accepts the venom with a calm nod, but Yona shifts away. She doesn't like this one. This one ate the world.

The boy laughs like ground glass, but his eyes are softer when he looks back. He's sharing a joke – dark as it is – and, as he rubs at his shoulder, she tentatively smiles. The corners of his eyes crinkle happily, but when he speaks his voice is stilted. Breathless. "Nice night … for a walk," he manages.

Automatically, she twists towards the broken, half buried tracks. The urge to stand, to follow them crawls into her throat; it makes her heart ache and her hands shake as badly as any Chronohead's.

Her fingers in tight fists, she stays where she is. "The fire is warmer," she lies.

"Is it?" There's a nudge at her right side and this man – she knows this man. The scruff of beard and a dark hat jammed tightly on his head. "Doesn't feel that warm."

The boy's eyes harden again. "Wondered when you'd show up."

There's a flash of shame in the other man's expression, but he'll never say the words.

The boy seems to understand. "Knew you would, though," he concedes. Forgives.

The smile that the bearded man returns is shy; the expression jars with wrongness that she can feel at her frozen center. This one was fire and desperation; this one burned so she and Timmy could rise.

Her shoulder bumps with a third man, bare chested under an old coat, skin scrawled with – with –

Wordless, intent, he holds up an arm. 'Surrender,' she recognizes. 'Die.'

"No," she says, scowling. Her survival was a promise to do neither.

"Of course not," soothes a generous-toned woman as she inches closer to the fire, slowly displacing Ebbie and the boy. "You don't want to do that. Unless it would be the best thing, of course – would it be for the best?"

The woman's voice is cloying, not sweet; her huge eyes blink slowly behind thick lenses.

"You failed the Sacred Engine," she intones with somber disappointment. "But the Engine won't fail you. You'll see. Have a bit of shut eye, you'll feel right as rain."

Rain. Yona touches a hand to her cheek. It feels wet, but there is no rain here, not inside the core.

"Yona," a voice says and strong hands grip her shoulders so tightly it hurts. "Brainless child. Wake up!"

The wind howls; the train rattles on the rails. Its motion is a relentless beat and her heart beats with it.

"You must wake," her father growls, his face so close to her own she can feel the stinging heat of his breath; she recoils. "Gana's daughter. Wake up!" Under her back the ground shudders and jolts in the rhythm of the train.

"Yona?" Timmy is leaning over her as her eyes creak open, what weight a half-starved five year old has full across her chest. Little hands push and pull and push against her ribs as they try to replace some part gone extinct.

His eyes are huge and young, and they are alone. It's that first night, she remembers. That first night, before the fire, when she'd been too long searching for food and, tiny child, he'd dragged her into the shelter of the snow.

Frozen tears streak his cheeks. "Yona, come back."

The dream evaporates; the future fades away. All she knows, all she is sure of, is that they have one.

And if she closes her eyes, just for a moment, just for a moment, the wheels still move.