All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

Intercepting it lazily, the flare burst high on the flank of the torpedo-like balloon, and for a moment I could see the cage of metal struts, a tracery of green, electric fire.
    Oh, I thought, oh God. How could you fight against these creatures? Was she trying to get us killed? In my mind, half-seen, half-heard, the clone leaned down over Paulina’s head, showing her stained teeth. “God knows what the empress wants to do with me now she’s got you back. Me or the other dolls she’s growing. My great idea was to inject you while you slept, drop you from the car, take your place.”
    She nodded toward the syringe-case on the table. “That was my plan. But I can’t, because the colonel would know. He could tell—he’d know. Damn it, he’d know. He saw the bandages.”
    She smiled a defeated smile. “Those cuts kept you alive. You can thank that broken glass, not me.”

3. T HE S ECOND H INGE
    You’d have to brush your teeth, Paulina thought. And wash—you smell like smoke. And change the way you speak. It’s not so easy to become someone else, with someone else’s memories. What did the stranger know about the house on Marshall Street?
    She closed her eyes and turned away from Lizzie’s smiling face, her wine-soaked breath. Eyes closed, Paulina pictured the little scene she’d created in her mind, the exploding fire, and the two girls running away through the snow, out of the firelight and the questing lantern. Matthew stayed where he was in the little dell on Christmas Hill—why didn’t he move? Why didn’t he try to save himself?
    His eyes, also, were closed, the lids pressed together. He wore the wire-framed National Health spectacles that he had gotten when his father was at Cambridge in 1962. They’d called him “four-eyes,” and tied him to a fence. He had light curls and darkish skin. In the future, the boys still wore their hair long, she was glad to see.
    A tear ran sideways down her cheek and dripped onto the white enamel. She imagined the “clones” erupting from their vats, their faces blank. Liz, Lizzie, Beth, Bethy—holding hands like paper dolls they formed a line, the last one reaching toward her with a stubby, unformed finger. As if in response to this fantasy, she heard the scream of the air brake, and the car shuddered and convulsed. She couldn’t tell whether the Martians had released some kind of shell or bomb, or else whether the flare from the signal gun had managed to ignite the hydrogen in the balloon. She felt the concussion, and a rattling, metallic hail in the branches of the trees. The car swerved, then slowed along the straightaway, shuddering as if it might break apart. Paulina held on to the sides of the bed, and Lizzie fell back against the window, grasping the curtain to stay upright. The wineglass tumbled from the little table, rolled along the floor.
    Beside those at either end of the car, opposing doors led from the middle of the compartment, down to the tracks on either side. As the train squealed to a stop, Lizzie staggered backward to the left-hand steps and unlocked the door. She turned back to emit some kind of barking command, lost in the steam whistle. Then she was gone.
    Paulina tumbled to her feet. Just like her namesake, running away into the snowy woods to escape the men from Mars, she didn’t ask herself where she was going. Legs aching, she hurried backward through the stalled train, through a series of identical, empty compartments, each with its massy curtains and leather seats along the sides, framing the long Oriental carpet, a line of red medallions.
    Each with its hospital bed set into brackets on the floor—she turned her face away. Fourth in the sequence was the library car, and at the end of it, hunched over the fried egg on his supper tray, lit from overhead as if in a circle of gold, sat Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA, in a gray dress uniform only