Chapter Text
Gandy Dancer doesn’t remember life before the railroad. Oh, she’s been told about it- the ship to Guadalupe Territory, the bustle of Yerba Buena. But her earliest memories are of elegant trestles bridging chasms, the crack! of dynamite against snow-topped granite, the miles upon miles of gleaming rail. She would wander the crew camps while her parents worked, excitedly babbling to them later about what new things she’d seen that day. Her childhood was constantly in motion, marching ever eastward, steps marked out by the even placement of railroad ties.
It was a march that came to a crashing halt when she was five years old. It was a day like any other - her parents were out working, she was exploring and had just found a berry bush, life was good. And then there was a rumbling through the ground, and a plume of smoke and dust coming from the side of the mountain. From the tunnel her parents had been excavating.
Gandy ran.
But five year olds are slow and stumbling, and by the time she finally staggered to the scene the dust had settled, both literally and metaphorically. The entire camp had converged on this spot, around twelve of the tunnel crew who were battered and bruised, but alive. Twelve, not the fourteen who had been in the tunnel. Gandy was told that her parents were heroes, that they saved everyone else. But she just knew they were gone.
There have been many turning points in Gandy’s life, but that was one of the larger ones. Her wandering days are brought to a halt, as she’s removed from the crews and brought to the railroad town of Santissimo, where she meets Emil Moche. Moche is the director of the Ocean-to-Ocean railroad, and by extension responsible for the safety of his workers. Responsible for her parent’s death. She doesn’t quite see it like that, but he and the general public do. So half to smooth over the negative press, and half out of guilt and responsibility, he takes her under his wing. It’s not adoption, it’s not a new family. But he supports her financially, gives her a place to live and the resources she needs to do more than survive.
Her life in Dry River is a good one, all things considered. She starts attending a school, one with teachers and curriculum and not run by any adult with free time and useful knowledge to impart. Though there’s that as well - a lot of interesting people come through the town, and she’s become quite adept at convincing them to tell her stories of travels and magic and the unknown. A year after her arrival, she accompanies Moche to the Headland Summit and the long-awaited completion of the railroad. Moche drives the final spike into the ties to great acclaim, but Gandy doesn’t even watch. She’s studying the endless stretch of tracks to the west, and thinking of life, and death, and legacy.
That’s when it starts, really. The death thing. The magic thing. Or maybe they’re one idea, so intertwined with one another that the lines begin to blur. Because Gandy knows many things about the world, but two contradictory yet universally accepted facts are by far the most important. One, death is inevitable. An irreversible end to all existence, creeping in after decades or sneaking in to slash a life too short. Gandy knows death, knows loss and pain and fear. But she also knows one more thing.
This is a world with unimaginable potential. She lives in a town with ghosts, vampires, and all forms of undead beings. So clearly, there are ways to come back from death, though not necessarily pleasant ones. More pertinently, though, is another type of individual in town: the magic users. Magic is a puzzle, with knowledge and mysteries tucked away in various corners of the globe, no one person knowing even a tenth of what’s out there. But it can be learned. So Gandy sets her sights on this. If there’s a way to cheat death, it’s going to be through magic.
Of course, no one’s going to tell a six year old girl the secrets of life and death. She’s got to work her way up to that, build a base of knowledge and skills and a little bit of reputation. For now, she can use her perceived weaknesses to her advantage - no one is going to teach a little kid magic, but they also won’t suspect one of eavesdropping, of sneaking into back alleys to learn about the black markets of the city, of watching in seedy taverns and quietly learning how to count cards. She’s good at keeping up appearances, covering her tracks. In the day she’s a little orphan girl in gingham dresses who is always so polite in class. But at night, she pulls on some practical pants and her vest and goes out to really learn.
It’s there, in her strange new life in Santissimo, where she meets Kravitz. His story in many ways is much like hers, though in the opposite direction. After the Internal War, his parents moved out west, taking their baby on the wagon trails that expanded westward like tracks of ants. The family eventually settled in the Crescent Territory, took up silver mining, and lived a happy and prosperous life. But that had been shattered, three years ago now. Kravitz’s parents had been killed in a freak mine accident, and he was left adrift at four years old. Through luck, cleverness, and a little serendipity, he managed to find his way to Santissimo much like she had, but without a guilt-ridden benefactor he was having a harder time of things. He lives down by the railyard now, running errands and helping out the massive teams of people required to keep the great steam locomotives running.
Trains are to Kravitz what the rails are to Gandy - a promise, a history, a past and a future all at once. Someday, he tells Gandy, he’s going to be a conductor. He’s going to travel across the country, seeing all there is to see from the shining rails and black iron engines. He may just be an errand boy now, but just you wait.
Gandy understands his urge to travel, to learn, to follow the paths of the rails. After all, she’s much the same. But Kravitz wants to see how the world works, to observe and watch, and views death as an event that has to happen sometime. Meanwhile, Gandy wants to subvert the world’s fundamental laws. They don’t argue over this, exactly. But neither really understands the other’s stance on the matter.
They grow up together, Gandy and Kravitz. It’s not a normal childhood, but it works for them. They’re nearly inseparable - Gandy’s nighttime adventures go much better with a partner in crime, a friend, a brother. She teaches Kravitz to bluff, and he teaches her some of his charisma. And when she learns that Kravitz lost his parents at such a young age that he doesn’t even remember his own last name, the obvious solution is to share. So that’s how Kravitz becomes a Dancer.
Ten years go by, in the bustle of Santissimo. Kravitz works his way up through the railyard hierarchy, working real, paid jobs and inching ever closer to becoming a conductor. He’s growing into a stable, responsible young man on whom others know they can rely. Gandy, on the other hand, rises up through the city’s underworld. She’s making a name for herself, the teenage girl who you can’t afford to underestimate. Together, they’re an unstoppable team.
And then Gandy’s life is shattered all over again. There’s an accident at the railyard, a boiler explosion, sending shrapnel flying and a massive plume of steam into the sky. For the second time in her short life, she hears an explosion and races to save her family. Sixteen year old Gandy is much faster, now, but still not fast enough. She arrives just in time to watch Kravitz bleed out into the dirt, the iron of machines he’d loved so much pierced through his heart.
There’s nothing tying her to Santissimo anymore. She drifted away from Moche long ago, and the town is full of contacts, connections, but not friends. All Gandy has left is emptiness in her chest and a reignited drive to conquer death. It’s time for her to take the next steps on that quest.
Instead of rails, Gandy takes to the sea. She sails across endless oceans, hitchhikes across continents, hops on achingly not-familiar trains around the globe. And everywhere she travels, she seeks out answers. She finds hints, clues, in corners of ancient forests, caves in ocean cliffs, dusty libraries standing for millennia. She makes allies - some poker players in Constantinople, the creepiest doll she’s ever seen, a gaggle of maybe-witches in Prussia. But even they only have hints, scraps of knowledge. No one has the answers she wants.
But she keeps trying.
She’s not sure what draws her back to to the West. Maybe she’s tired, maybe she’s homesick, maybe she hasn’t explored it enough yet. She honestly doesn’t know. But she knows why, when she steps off that ship in Yerba Buena, she immediately books a ticket to Crescent Territory. Kravitz is gone. But maybe she can find something else there.
The third turning point in Gandy’s life isn’t like the others. It’s not a death, not a dramatic shattering of daily life. Rather, it’s a meeting. She’s been in the Crescent Territory for about a year now, and picked up a job as a detective with the Graysons. She doesn’t really care too much about it, but it’s another path of discovery, another means to her mission. An assignment leads her to the mining town of Dry River, and two new coworkers. They seem fine enough. That opinion grows through a night of chaos, of secrets and undead and unjust murder. And the three of them do something that Gandy has been trying to do for eighteen years.
They save a man’s life.