"Yes," James said. It was the first lie he had told on the job in ten years. He had told it so fast he barely felt it.
Behind him, across the concourse, he heard Ron bellow his name.
"Ruby," he said, crouching. "Stay with Petra. Right here. I mean it this time. Right here, at this podium, with Petra and with this lady, and you don't move."
"But I know about the owl," Ruby said.
"Rube—"
"I'll stay," she said. "But I know about the owl. You should know that I know."
He did not understand. There wasn't time to understand. He put his hand on her purple hat for one second, and stood up, and went through the gate and down the ramp at a run.
The platforms of Union Station are not beautiful. Whoever dreamed the Great Hall had not bothered to dream the tracks; they ran in a long, low cavern under the office buildings, all concrete columns and pigeon wire and yellow sodium light, and the cold down there was damp and mineral and smelled of diesel and brake dust. The Zephyr stood on Twenty-Six, a two-story wall of stainless steel stretching off into the gloom, the locomotives at the far end grumbling, the whole thing ticking and exhaling the way a train does when it has been given every reason to leave and is only waiting for permission.
The Red Cap cart was parked halfway down, empty. The Red Cap himself was out of it, handing a cane up to a white-haired man in the door of a sleeping car. There was no Iris beside him. There was no Iris anywhere.
A conductor was walking toward James from the rear of the train, the way conductors walk toward a man running on their platform. She was a short, square woman in her fifties with a gray wool coat over her uniform, a radio on one shoulder and a lanyard full of keys, and she had a face that had stopped being impressed by things around the Reagan administration. Her name tag said DOBREV.
"Help you?"