Mado’s radicalization reaches its clearest and most disturbing articulation in these chapters as Donoghue shows her embracing something resembling a religious fatalism. Once Le Goff confirms that three Orne deputies are aboard, Mado feels “exalted” and begins to believe “the spirit of history” itself is urging her onward (185). Her focus shifts from anger grounded in social suffering (her father’s paralysis, her mother’s miscarriages, the rigged economy) to the notion of destiny. The Motivations for an Anarchist Mentality emerge most starkly in the way Mado justifies innocent deaths to herself. Watching Cécile struggle through labor, she acknowledges that the passengers “may not deserve to die, but what has deserving ever had to do with death?” (186). Her reasoning deliberately collapses the distinction between structural suffering and intentional murder. Because wars, factory accidents, and famine already kill the poor, she convinces herself that revolutionary violence merely redistributes an existing injustice toward a supposedly meaningful purpose.

Nevertheless, Mado’s ideological abstraction does not fully erase her capacity for human responsiveness. During the childbirth scene, when Blonska, mid-delivery, calls her over to free the stuck shoulder, Mado sets the bucket down, washes with brandy, and reaches inside Cécile until “her fingers disappear” (233). The detail is intensely physical, grounding the moment in touch, blood, pain, and bodily vulnerability—precisely the realities Mado’s revolutionary thinking requires her to suppress. Significantly, the midwifery knowledge that allows her to save the child stems from the same domestic suffering that contributed to her radicalization: years spent assisting her mother through miscarriages and difficult births. Donoghue depicts a profound contradiction within Mado. She remains committed to the mass killing even while actively saving a stranger’s baby, suggesting that political extremism and human compassion can coexist uneasily within the same person.

Alongside Mado’s ideological crisis, the novel continues to explore The Possibilities of Connections with Strangers through other characters’ interactions. Henry Tanner’s nosebleed transforms an ordinary ticket inspection into one of the narrative’s most revealing encounters. Significantly, the bleeding begins the moment Le Goff’s authority implicitly challenges Henry’s presence in the carriage, linking racial anxiety to bodily response. Within seconds, Marcelle takes control of the situation with clinical calm, using her handkerchief to stem the flow and ordering him to breathe through his mouth. The intimacy of the resulting conversation becomes possible precisely because the railway compartment suspends ordinary social distance. Henry’s recollection of the racial abuse his mother experienced on a Washington streetcar is answered by Marcelle’s memory of her brother Henri drowning at Calais, and the day curiosity “seeded itself in [her]” (172). This exchange is built on reciprocal vulnerability rather than ideological agreement. Marcelle’s advice—“perhaps you could remind yourself that this is not then? And that here is not there?” (172)—gives Henry a framework for separating his present experience from inherited fear. Donoghue presents these moments of genuine human connection in the train carriages while also underscoring their temporary nature. Marcelle, thinking back on her bruising exchange with Louise Sarazin-Levassor on the Dreux platform, revises the phrase “ships that pass in the night” to “Like strangers on a train” (202). The intimacy is real but only while the passengers are briefly suspended outside normal social structures.

At the same time, the technological crisis aboard Engine 721 advances through a series of ordinary workplace decisions. Pellerin and Garnier push Engine 721 well above safe speed limits because their Christmas bonus depends on maintaining the timetable. Garnier even convinces himself that speeding may reduce danger by minimizing signaling complications. Most revealingly, he concludes that if management truly opposed speeding, they would not reward punctuality. The narrative underscores The Human Cost of Technological Progress as the Company’s incentive structure normalizes risk-taking until catastrophe becomes structurally embedded within routine labor practices. Donoghue intensifies this critique by contrasting class perspectives on speed. Up in First Class, Bienvenüe calculates the train’s velocity mathematically while Émile is exhilarated stating, “fast is the way I like it” (214). For elite passengers, speed signifies pleasure, modernity, and prestige. On the footplate, however, the men are generating this speed out of economic desperation. When the Westinghouse air brake fails approaching Montparnasse, Garnier’s first question is whether Pellerin “applied it so very late at such high speed that the air brake’s just no match for the massive momentum of Engine 721” (234). Donoghue clarifies that the runaway train is not simply the result of a single error or mechanical malfunction but the culmination of economic pressures, institutional incentives, and normalized corner cutting.

The final pages of this section bring the three major narrative threads together without resolving them. Mado’s bomb sits under a bench while she helps deliver a stranger’s child; Blonska understands the danger but cannot warn the authorities; and Pellerin and Garnier desperately attempt to regain control of the train. The Motivations for an Anarchist Mentality and The Human Cost of Technological Progress turn out to be running on parallel tracks toward the same terminus. The cliffhanger at the end of “DEPART DREUX” is structural as well as narrative: Alice Guy cranks her camera at the window, Mariette wakes from his nap to seize the hand brake, Le Goff applies his rear brakes without authorization, and the novel withholds the moment of impact. The question suspending the novel is no longer simply whether impact can be avoided. Instead, these chapters ask whether individuals trapped inside larger systems—political, industrial, and historical—can still intervene meaningfully before disaster becomes irreversible.