“No way to see, no way to speak- it's as if the world around Echo simply doesn't exist. She reckons if she simply wasn't so comfortable with her own companionship, she would blend into the relentless grit and the hissing wind and be lost forevermore. What a sad, sad way to go. Yet there is no way to go but forward, with a lamplighter's request on her mind. She continues trekking forward, her sights set on that singular stone, until she gets close enough to bend down and inspect it further.”

“The stone is a milestone, and it has been made to lie. Its dressed face is right — she can read the chisel-work under the grit, the shallow groove where a number used to sit — but the number is gone, and where it should be there is a fence of little scratches, each one a tall stroke, each one the same height and the same spacing, as if a hand had counted something out here and never stopped. Somebody has been marking this mile. Not carving it. Tallying it. She finds this with her fingers, which is the only way to find anything on the Windward Mile: the wind has filled the groove with cinder, and the cinder moves in the groove, and the groove is shallower than it was a moment ago. The wind is filling it in. Whatever the count was, the mile is eating it. And what she knows now that she did not, kneeling with her braid beaded in fog and the road a rumour forty feet in every direction: the stone she passed before was not the same stone. The tally is different. The mile has been walked twice and paid twice, and the Charter stopped paying because they stopped being able to prove which walk was the real one. She has come far enough that going back is the same distance as going on — and the fog has closed behind her, quietly, the way fog does, with the road simply becoming the place the road was.”

“It becomes clear, now, as her fingers find the tallies, that she could keep walking this road forever and never make it a single inch closer to her destination. A Wandering Mile, they call it... maybe? It's been a while since she studied up on her supernatural phenomena. But the name matters little in the sense of having to find her way out of it, lest she be like any other unfortunate soul who wandered into its midst and had not the skills to get themself free. Pulling her spellbook from her hip, she thumbs through her spells with a furrowed brow. This sort of thing is not her specialty, after all, but she can at least try. Here- a spell to illuminate all possibilities. She closes her eyes, takes a breath, and lets her magic unfurl.”

“There is a way the Windward Mile gives itself up, and it is not to light. She lets the spell out anyway — a thin colourless brightness that runs out along the ballast in front of her and stops, cut clean, at forty feet. She turns her head; the brightness turns with her, and where it crosses the cinder it finds nothing, because there is nothing to find, and the wind takes the light apart the way it takes a shout. But the spell is not looking for the road. It is looking for the inside of her own casting, and there it finds the thing that matters: the light is going out and coming back, out and back, and each time it comes back it is a fraction older than the last. Somewhere ahead of her the same brightness is already arriving, ahead of the brightness she is making now. The mile is not a loop. It is a fold, and she is standing on the inside of it, and her own spell has just shown her which way the fold runs. So she stops casting outward and casts instead along the groove — down into the tally, into the little fence of scratches, and the light lies in them like water in a furrow and runs the whole length of it, every stroke lit at once, and the tally is longer than a hand could make in a night. Longer than a hand could make at all. It goes on until the fog cuts it off, and past where the fog cuts it off she can feel it still going. The wind fills the furrow in while the light is still in it. She rises with grit in every fold of her robes and fog beading cold along her braid, and she knows two things at once: that the count was never finished, and that whoever was counting is still somewhere on this mile, because the scratches are fresh at the end she has not reached. Her balance is good. Her footing is good. The road, for the first time since she stepped onto it, is pointing.”

“Echo rises, cursing the grit and the way it's wedged itself into every free crevice- it's even behind her ears, somehow, gods be damned- and even as her spell fades, she is moving ahead. The road is pointing indeed, and perhaps the Mile will set her free if she makes it to whatever it is pointing to. And then, beyond that, hopefully, a warm meal and a hot shower. She'll be damned if she has to spend the night feeling like a cheap piece of sandpaper.”

“The fold runs ahead of her and the mile lets her walk it, and for a while that is all it asks: the ballast hard under her boots, the wind shouldering sideways into the same fold of her robes it always finds, the fog keeping its forty feet and no more. Then the gravel gives up something it has been holding — a plate-layers' hut, low and grey, its door standing open on a dark that the lantern-light has not reached and will not. Something inside is drying: canvas, or salt, or the tar of a sleeper's coat, and the smell of it is the first new thing on this mile. She goes in. Whoever walked this mile last slept here and left the hut tidy in the way of people who mean to come back — the shavings swept, the fire laid but unlit, the tally on the door-frame cut fresh and shallow, and stopping, mid-stroke, as if the hand had been called away. Past that last scratch the wood is bare, and the bare wood is where the counting ends. She can read that much. She cannot read whether the hand stopped because it was finished with the mile, or because the mile was finished with it. Outside, the fog has not moved and the wind has not let up, and the rut down the centre of the road has already filled itself in behind her. Her braid is beaded white and cold against her neck, and the grit has got in everywhere a person can have an everywhere. But she knows the direction now, and the direction is the same one the road was pointing, and the hut stood facing it — whoever built it built it to watch the way she is going.”

“Echo reaches for a flask of lamp oil, and uses it, here and now.”

“The flask goes out from her hand in a flat arc, rag flaring before it lands, and the oil takes along the rut in a long low tongue of light — orange, then yellow, then a white that the fog swallows whole at forty feet. It does not catch the ballast; it only lies there burning on top of it, bright as a dropped coal, and the heat comes back off the cinders against her shins. What it shows her is that the road does not end. The rut runs on past where the lantern stopped, filled and refilling, and the light gets maybe a hundred paces down the mile before the fog closes over it like water over a stone. In that light she can finally see the hut from the outside. It is smaller than it felt inside, and it leans, and it faces the way she is going, and it has been repaired — the same fresh, shallow work as the tally, patched boards on the windward side where the cinder has been eating everything else. Somebody maintains this. Somebody walks the mile often enough to keep a roof on it. The oil burns down. When the flare sinks she hears the walking, and it is not hers — a step, and a pause, and a step, coming up the mile behind her at the speed of someone who knows exactly how long the fog lasts. Then a shape resolves in the grey at the edge of the dying light: a person, upright, unhurried, carrying something flat and broad against their chest like a tray or a board, and the wind that fills her mouth with grit does not seem to be touching them at all. The flame gutters. She has the road, and she has the direction, and she has about as long as the last of the oil to decide what the mile is going to do with both of them.”

“Echo stands in the wind, letting it toss her robes about while her eyes narrow against the encroaching gloom. Something this way comes, and wish as she might that it be wicked (for she has plenty of experience with wicked things) there is all the chance that the figure coming towards her may yet be *human*... and that sets her heartbeat thumping. "Hello there!" she calls, hoping that the wind doesn't snatch her words away, "Do your travels treat you well?"”

“She comes up the ballast with her hands full — a shallow basket of risen dough balanced against one hip, a cloth over it weighted with a stone — and she is walking too fast for the load, the way a person walks when they have already been out here longer than they wanted. The wind takes her apron strings and lays them flat, and it takes Echo's greeting and folds it in half before it reaches her, so that what lands is a shape of sound: a voice, a question, no words left in it. She stops anyway. Stops dead, six paces off, and her shoulders come up around her ears. Then she does the thing that people do in the Mile, which is look past you to check whether you are alone. Her gaze goes over Echo's shoulder, left, right, and comes back and catches — horns, the braid, the pale eyes with nothing in them — and her grip shifts on the basket, both thumbs hooking under the rim like she might have to throw it or set it down fast. Colour climbs her throat. She has flour on one cheek and a burn scar on the wrist that shows when the sleeve rides back. "It's — sorry. It's loud, isn't it," she says, and it is not a question about the wind. "You're not from the huts." She sets the basket down on the ballast, deliberately, both hands, and straightens with them still spread as if she has just put down something hot. "You'll want to be off this mile before the light goes flat. There's no shelter till the cutting." Her voice is steady and her hands are not, and she keeps looking at the horns and then away, and then back.”

“"Wish that I could leave, ma'am," Echo replies, drawing her hood up a bit more about her ears to keep the grit out. "But something's keeping me here. Keeps unmarking the tallies left on the waymarkers. Don't suppose you know the way to get free? I need to get to Slowmoor- let them know the spur is lit."”

“"Free." She says it the way you'd say a word in a language you only half remember. Her thumbs work at the basket rim, in and out, in and out. "There's no free in it, is the trouble. You walk the Mile, you come out where it wants. My gran walked it four days running and came back to her own door each time, and she swore she never turned. So I'd not trust the markers, ma'am. Not the tallies, not the stones. They're not lying to you on purpose. They just don't hold." She glances down the road, both ways, quick, the way you check a kettle you've already taken off the fire. "Slowmoor I know of. Two days east if the wind's behind and a man's not stopping for you. But I'll not walk you out, so don't ask it — I've a bake to get back to and a mouth at home that eats it." Her jaw sets, and then, quieter, almost to the basket rather than to Echo: "Spur's lit, you said." She lets that sit. "Then it's not me you want. It's somebody who'll put it in writing." She stoops for the basket, slow, watching Echo's hands the whole way down, and lifts it back to her hip without offering the loaf after all.”

“At the mention of home, Echo's eyes drift towards the platelayer's house. She half-wonders how many souls are out there, just out of sight, traveling 'alone' in the grit and the dark. How many train travellers got stuck here and decided it wasn't worth trying to leave? Such an existence sounds... depressing. Echo offers the woman a sympathetic smile. She's been on edge ever since she stepped out of the dark, and likely just wants this traveler gone without violence. Echo's all too happy to oblige. "I wouldn't dare impede on your time. Directions will do me just fine."”

“The Breadwright doesn't smile back, but something in her shoulders comes down a notch, and she shifts the basket to her other hip so her right hand is free. "Two days east," she says, and this time it's for Echo and not for the basket. "You'll hold the rail side of the Mile till the ballast runs out at the crossing, then it's the old drover's line over the tops and down into the slow country. Slowmoor's the first place with a roof and a man who keeps a ledger." She looks at Echo's hands once more, quick, and then at the horns, and doesn't flinch from either. The wind takes a run at the hut and gives up. Somewhere off past the rail a bird goes up out of nothing at all, and the woman tracks it with her eyes the way you'd track a wasp in a kitchen — not afraid, just noting where it went. "There's a platehouse at the crossing. Roof's mostly there." She hitches the basket up and takes two steps back the way she came, then stops, half turned, and says it flat, like a bill settled: "If you meet the Twins on the road, don't give them your name. They'll ask. Everyone says they ask." Then she's walking, and the grit is already erasing her prints.”