Chapter 140: Signal 255
We push through the door into the engine car.
It’s the last one. No door at the front—just the curved nose of the locomotive, plated in the same pearl-white metal as the hull. The car is shorter than the others. Half the length. What it loses in size it makes up for in equipment.
Control panels run the length of both side walls. Blue crystals sunk into circuits that pulse on a slow internal rhythm. Levers in dark metal, polished smooth at the grips. Runic dials turning at speeds I can’t read—some clockwise, some against, some in patterns that don’t fit either. In the center sits a main console, a flat surface of black glass set at waist height. No buttons. No labels. No interface.
The traffic light 237, passes the window.
A line of text drops onto my HUD.
[Penalty: The Engineer has accelerated the train.]
The train seems to know what we’re doing.
It probably learned the trick when my father came through here.
I shake the thought loose. Useless right now.
"Search everything. Anything that looks like a brake. A control. A lever. Anything that responds."
Oliver heads to the left panel. Starts pulling levers one at a time. Nothing responds. Locked or decorative.
Rhayne examines the runic dials with her good arm. She turns one. It rotates and does nothing. Another rotates the wrong direction and resets itself.
I run my hand along the central console. The black glass doesn’t react to touch. I push, press, and slap a palm against it. No feedback. No light. Just a dead surface.
"Boss, none of this is responding." Oliver tries a heavier lever on the right wall with two hands. His ribs protest audibly, but the lever doesn’t move.
241 flashes past.
Lola is crouched in the corner, peering under the central console. "Wires down here. Lots. All blue."
"Don’t touch anything, Lola."
"I wasn’t gonna. They’re ugly."
I check the walls. Look for loose panels, hidden compartments, any seam that doesn’t match the rest. I knock my knuckles against the metal. Uniform. Solid. No hollow points.
Rhayne tries the floor. Stepping in different spots, looking for trapdoors or sections that give. Nothing.
244 flashes past.
Some traffic lights are too short, damn it...
"We’re losing time. There’s something here we’re not seeing."
Oliver stops. Looks at the ceiling. Looks at the floor. Then, without saying anything, he stows his hammer in his inventory and lowers himself flat onto the deck at the junction between the engine car and the one behind it.
The same move he made earlier when he checked the magnetic coupling.
His ribs scream at him. I see his teeth clench. He pushes himself further forward, half his body under the joint, head turned sideways to look at the underside.
247 flashes past.
He stays under for twenty seconds. Then he drags himself back and I take his hand and pull him up. His face is different.
"My quest changed."
"What?"
"Got coordinates. I think because I was the only one who actually saw the mechanism down there." He reads off his HUD. "Two of us at once. One person turns a red key on the console. The other climbs to the roof of the car and pulls a brake-and-decoupling lever. Same instant."
"Red key?" I look at the console. The dead black glass that didn’t respond to anything I did to it.
Oliver points.
In the bottom right corner of the console frame, embedded flush with the metal, sits a small red key. Tiny. The size of a shirt button. I’d swear on Eventide it wasn’t there a minute ago.
249 flashes past.
No time to ask the universe why.
"Oliver. Rhayne. You’re both wrecked. Get back to the car behind us and wait. If this goes wrong, you want to be in the section that decouples."
Oliver opens his mouth.
"Don’t argue. Go."
He goes. Rhayne goes with him, dead arm swinging at her side. She looks at me before passing through the door. Doesn’t say anything. The look does the talking.
The door closes behind them.
Lola and me.
"Lola. You stay here. When I yell in the comm, you turn that red key. Fast and no hesitation."
She looks at the key. Looks at me.
"And you?"
"I climb to the roof."
"The roof? Of the train? That’s moving?"
"Yes."
"You’re definitely crazy."
"I know. Turn the key when I say."
I find the ladder. A series of metal rungs sunk into the side wall of the engine car, climbing to a hatch in the ceiling.
I go up and push the hatch.
The wind hits me in the face like an open palm.
The roof of the engine car is narrow. Smooth. The wind is trying to peel me off with every gust. I drop to all fours, my hands gripping the edges of the pearl-white plating.
The cold cuts through every weak seam in the Horizon. The white emptiness outside doesn’t have weather of its own, but the train is moving fast enough to turn the empty air into knives.
252 rips past below me.
I look forward. The lever is there—a vertical metal bar rooted to the roof at the rear of the car, ten feet ahead of the hatch. It’s red and rusted. The only thing on this train that looks old.
I crawl toward it.
The wind shoves. Pulls. Tries to roll me sideways.
My fingers find seams in the plating and I pull myself forward an inch at a time.
The fingers of my left hand are reaching for the base of the lever.
Almost there—
253 passes.
I look ahead. Far down the line, past the rounded nose of the locomotive, I can see signal 254 coming.
A metal arch frames the track ahead. Curved. Spanning the rails like a doorway.
I duck flat to keep my head, but my left foot slips on the plating, and for one black second I’m hanging by one hand off the side of the engine car, the wind pulling everything that isn’t gripping the roof.
I throw my other hand up. Catch the side rail. I cling with both hands, waiting for the right moment to pull after the arch.
254 passes.
And the world changes.
The white outside disappears. In its place are trees. A dense forest, dark, blurring past at impossible speed. Thick trunks. Closed canopy. Green light filters down from somewhere above. Real light. From a real sky, a real sun, somewhere far up there. Like the train just punched through a wall I hadn’t been able to see.
I know what this means.
255 is next. Chronia’s window. One minute exact. If I don’t pull the lever at the right second, the train carries us back to Lost Ark and everything we’ve done since the sanctuary was for nothing.
Or even worse, we can die here.
I drive my boots against the plating and burn a tap of OXI through [Pressure Step]. The kick gives me just enough leverage to push my body back up onto the roof. I plant myself behind the lever, gripping it with both hands, facing the front of the train.
The forest streams toward me.
"LOLA! GET READY!" I shout into the comm.
From inside the car, muffled by the metal and the howl of the wind, her voice comes through the channel.
"Ready!"
I look ahead, watching for 255 to break the horizon.
A sound rips open in front of me.
It’s not the wind. It’s something tearing the air itself, a long ripping sound, like fabric splitting under a blade.
A portal has opened above the nose of the engine car. Black at the center. Rimmed in something that isn’t fire and isn’t light.
[The Engineer has appeared to reclaim control of the train.]
That energy... Leviathan...