The Boundless

Set in a fictionalized version of late 19th-century Canada during the era of transcontinental railway construction, the story follows William Everett, a young teenager whose life is transformed by adventures aboard the Boundless, the world's longest train.

Three years before the main events, Will waits at Farewell Station, a remote mountain town, for his father, James Everett, a steel layer who has spent three years building the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). While sketching, he meets a girl his age, a wire walker with the Klack Bros. Circus. She examines his prized sasquatch tooth, a relic from a large ape-like creature said to inhabit the mountains, but vanishes before returning it. When a company train arrives, Will meets Cornelius Van Horne, the CPR's general manager, who invites him to ride to the mountain camp. On board, he encounters a tall, dark-eyed man named Mr. Dorian, a circus impresario who expresses interest in a painting Van Horne owns. During the journey, a sasquatch attacks the train, and Mr. Dorian kills it with a single shot.

At the camp, Will reunites with his father and witnesses the last spike ceremony. Van Horne invites Will to drive the gold spike, encrusted with diamonds and worth over $200,000, after Donald Smith, the CPR's president, bends it on his first attempt. Celebratory gunfire triggers an avalanche, and Will's father frees him from a jammed boot just before the snow hits. Both survive by clinging to trees. A worker named Brogan steals the spike and threatens to kill Will, but a young sasquatch attacks Brogan, and its mother hurls him into a gorge, where he is presumed dead. The spike lands near Will, who seizes it. Mr. Dorian arrives with men and a net, capturing the young sasquatch alive.

Three years later, James has risen to general manager of the railway's Pacific steamship line. Will and his father board the Boundless, a 987-car, seven-mile-long train, for its maiden voyage. The train carries Van Horne's funeral car, a steel-plated carriage holding the late rail baron's remains and the gold spike. Over dinner, Will reveals his dream of attending art school in San Francisco, but his father dismisses art as impractical and forbids the plan. That evening, Mr. Dorian, now ringmaster of the renowned Zirkus Dante, performs a mesmerism act during which he pickpockets James's key to the funeral car. He introduces "the Miraculous Maren," an escape artist whom Will recognizes as the girl from Farewell Station. James later reveals that the funeral car's walls carry a lethal high-voltage current, deactivated only by a special key; he has one key, and a guard has the other.

At the Junction, a temporary shantytown beside the tracks, Will buys a vial of sasquatch urine and cloth "muskeg spectacles" said to protect against a supernatural bog hag. He finds a key the funeral car guard has drunkenly dropped and pockets it. Moments later, he witnesses Brogan, who survived the gorge and now uses the alias "Brinley," stab the guard to death. Brogan chases Will, who escapes by splashing the urine into Brogan's eyes and barely catches the departing train.

Paul "Sticks" Chan, a Chinese guard in the caboose, takes Will in, but his brakeman, Brian Mackie, secretly works with Brogan and delivers Will to him during an unscheduled stop. Will fights free and flees across freight car rooftops until he reaches the Zirkus Dante cars. Mr. Dorian hides him in a mirror-lined steamer trunk that fools Brogan when he searches it. Maren returns Will's sasquatch tooth, admitting she stole it years ago.

Mr. Dorian proposes disguising Will as "Amit Sen," an Indian spirit artist, so Will can perform through each passenger class and walk safely past Brogan's men to first class. Maren devises his act: Will draws portraits while apparently blindfolded, using a reversible scarf and a small mirror on her dress. Among the colonist passengers, the poorest travelers crammed into squalid cars, Will buys medicine for a sick boy whom a profiteer is trying to extort. His act thrills the audience, and afterward Will and Maren dance at a celebration.

That night, Mr. Dorian reveals his true motive: He wants to rob the funeral car to obtain the painting Van Horne owned, a Krieghoff depicting a house in winter. He believes the canvas was soaked in the waters of the fountain of youth. Every male in his family has died of a heart seizure at age 39, and he is two weeks from that birthday; if his portrait is painted on the canvas's reverse, he believes his aging will stop. Maren confesses she agreed to help because Mr. Dorian promised to release her and her brothers from their circus contracts and pay $5,000. Will is furious but reluctantly stays. When the train crosses a muskeg, a vast expanse of bottomless bog, the supernatural hag lures Will outside in a trance, and Maren rescues him using her tightrope wire and the muskeg spectacles.

In the early hours, Will, Maren, and Mr. Dorian break into the funeral car. Maren slides beneath the electrified car to deactivate the current using Will's key. Mr. Dorian explains that the vault's timed lock will falter as the train crosses a time zone, and the vault door clicks open during the temporal disturbance. Brogan and his men ambush them inside. Brogan reveals his true objective: crates of gold bars Van Horne secretly mined to save the bankrupt railway. Van Horne's corpse rises from the sarcophagus, revealed to be a mechanical puppet that electrocutes two of Brogan's men and seizes Brogan in a mechanical grip. Maren retrieves the painting, and Mr. Dorian cuts the canvas from its frame. Brogan frees himself and pursues them.

A battle erupts atop the train as Zirkus Dante performers join the fight. Mr. Dorian, visibly weakening, asks Will to paint his portrait on the back of the Krieghoff canvas. In a maintenance car, using crude locomotive paints, Will produces a vivid, powerful portrait. Mr. Dorian approves it but collapses moments later; the canvas has no magical properties. "The trickster, tricked," he murmurs, and dies.

Brogan detonates nitroglycerin to sever the locomotive and funeral car from the rest of the Boundless, planning to steal the gold. Will and Maren cross the widening gap on her tightrope wire and reach the locomotive, where Brogan holds Will's father and two firemen at gunpoint. Will hits Brogan with a shovel but is overpowered. As Brogan holds a knife to Will's throat, Will spots an avalanche descending the slopes. The locomotive plows into the snow, and everyone is thrown clear.

Will finds his father clinging to a shrub at the edge of a gorge. Maren anchors herself to a tree, and together they pull James to safety. Will notices his father still carries the hand-sewn sketchbook Will gave him years ago. Goliath, the sasquatch captured as an infant, escapes his cage and kills Brogan before disappearing into the forest with wild sasquatch. Samuel Steele, a Mountie aboard the train, arrives on snowshoes to help.

Steele arrests Maren for her role in robbing the funeral car, but she slips her handcuffs and vanishes, performing her disappearing act one last time. James admits Will acted bravely, confirms he never stole any gold, and agrees to pay Will's way to art school in San Francisco. A paper bird lands on Will's shoulder carrying a note from Maren: Mr. Dorian left a will giving her ownership of the entire circus, and she will be in San Francisco in two weeks. Will writes "yes" on the paper, refolds the bird, and launches it west toward the setting sun.