Chapter 137: Passengers
We start moving.
Every traffic light flashing past the window is just the clock bleeding out. One more checkpoint gone. More time lost to the dark.
The first door between cars.
I’d expected resistance. A system lock or something. The last car was the only one that opened on the platform—every other car kept its doors sealed against us. So I assumed the internal doors would fight, too.
But it slides open like nothing ever mattered.
We stop in the escape area between cars. Cold air pushing through the gaps around the coupling. Outside, the absolute white is blurring past at a speed that makes my eyes ache if I focus on it too long, because we have no reference point to feel the speed.
An idea lands.
"What if we just disconnect the last car?"
Oliver steps forward. Looks down at the junction. He stows his hammer in his inventory with a grunt and lowers himself to the floor—flat on his stomach, peering under the divider.
His ribs protest twice.
I hear him catch his breath and hold it.
He pushes himself back up, but I reach down and pull him.
"Impossible, boss. The train’s coupled magnetically. Some kind of energy pulled from the engine car. We’d have to kill the source up front."
Of course we do.
"Because nothing in Thirstfall is ever easy..." I mutter.
Another traffic light passes by the train, Number 18.
"Let’s go. We’ve got cars to cross and I don’t trust any of them."
I push through into the second car.
Nothing.
Exactly like the first. Empty, white, and silent. Clean benches with cold light.
"Stay sharp."
Three nods behind me.
We cross the second slowly but without trouble. I make the math as we walk and search everything in the car.
Each car is maybe eighty feet. If this train has ten cars, that’s eight hundred feet of walking between us and the locomotive.
23 flashes past the window.
Move.
Third car. I push the door and the air changes. Not the temperature—the smell. Something metallic. Old copper. I scan the benches, the ceiling, the floor. Clean. White. No source for the smell.
"Anyone else getting that?"
"I do," Rhayne says quietly.
Oliver shakes his head. Lola doesn’t answer.
We cross methodically again. The smell dies the moment the far door closes behind us.
Fourth car. Lola stops in the middle of the aisle.
"Uncle."
"What?"
"Somebody was sitting there." She points at the bench in the left corner, near the window.
I look. But it’s empty.
"There’s nobody there, Lola."
"I know. But somebody was. Just now. The seat’s warm."
I walk over and press my palm to the cushion. Cold. Same as every other bench in this car.
I look back at Lola.
Her eyes go half-lidded and she doesn’t push. She doesn’t take it back, either.
We keep moving. Slower now. Something in the back of my neck is telling me Chronia’s gift didn’t show me everything.
47 flashes past.
Fifth car.
"Who is there?!" Oliver suddenly turns back, yelling.
"Where?" I ask him.
"Boss, I’m sure I heard a voice."
"Voice?"
"Like a whisper. Behind me."
I stop to listen.
Nothing.
The hum of the wheels, the faint pressure of air moving through the coupling seams, Rhayne’s breathing behind me. That’s all.
"Someone was talking, boss. I heard it."
"What did it say?"
"Don’t know. Wasn’t a language I’ve ever heard."
Rhayne shakes her head, denying.
Lola is watching her own shoes.
We cross even slower now.
Sixth car. Still white. Still clean. The benches still run along both walls in their neat, identical rows.
But the lights are failing.
Not dying—flickering. An uneven rhythm, like the circuit is breathing and skipping half its breaths. With every flicker, the shadows in the corners shift in ways that don’t line up with the source of the light.
I glance at the window as I walk.
My reflection is a frame behind me. I raise my arm. The reflection raises its arm a beat late. Like a person on the other side of the glass thinking about whether to copy me instead of a mirror doing what mirrors are supposed to do.
I don’t say anything to the group because they saw me testing it.
I keep walking.
My hand goes to the hilt of Eventide and stays there.
73 flashes past.
Seventh car. Rhayne grabs my arm.
"Dryden." Her voice is a thread. "Someone’s watching us."
"From where?"
"I don’t know. From everywhere."
I feel it too.
That pressure at the base of the skull. Eyes that aren’t anchored to any specific point and are coming from all of them at once.
The car is empty. I’ve checked every bench, every corner, under every seat.
But the feeling doesn’t stop.
Lola is walking with both arms crossed tight against herself, hugging her own ribs. No complaining. No talking. She’s quiet in a way that worries me more than screaming would.
Oliver has his hammer in his shoulder again. I don’t remember him pulling it from his inventory.
Am I that stressed?
We cross the seventh in silence. Eighty feet that feel like eight hundred. The atmosphere is getting heavy, difficult to breathe. Not physically—but something is clawing at our minds.
102 flashes past.
Eighth car.
I open the door.
The first thing that changes is the color. The white ends. The interior of this car is black. Black walls. Black ceiling. Black floor. The lights haven’t failed—they just don’t exist. The only light comes from a thin violet strip along the baseboard, bright enough to show where to step and nothing else.
The second thing that changes is that the car isn’t empty.
It’s crowded.
Every bench occupied. Every seat. Every row, both sides.
Figures are seated, upright, and motionless.
People? They look like people.
All identical. The same height. The same posture. The same clothes—white uniforms with no markings, no visible seams, no texture anywhere on the fabric. And each one of them is wearing a mask. Half white, half black, split down the center. Smooth. No mouth. No nose. Just two oval holes where eyes should be, and inside the holes, nothing.
None of them move.
None of them breathe.
124 flashes past the window behind me.
The weight of what I’m looking at sucks the air right out of me. I don’t even notice the signals flashing past anymore. We spend ten minutes—sometimes more—in every car.
One hundred thirty-one signals left.
And eighty feet of a crowded car between us and the next door.