Passenger

I don’t think we’d had clothes on for more than twenty minutes for that entire train ride.

I said, “Behave.”

Then the train stopped.

There is an overwhelming quiet that smothers a train when it stops. Especially when it happens in the middle of nowhere, somewhere other than its destination.

I lifted my chest up from Nickie and looked at her. Our skin was soaked between us, and the air in our compartment, still and hushed.

“This can’t be Grove,” I said.

I glanced out the window, only to assure myself that the train was no longer moving. Farm fields and windmills. All perfectly still, brilliant green beneath the late summer sky.

I shrugged. I wasn’t about to get up. “Maybe the train’s ahead of schedule, and we have to stop at a switch for another train.”

Nickie didn’t look concerned. I licked the side of her throat. She whispered, “Now we’ll have to be especially quiet.”

Then came the voices, urgent, distressed. Something like an argument in the corridor outside, and the sound of people—many of them—moving recklessly through the car, banging open the doors on the sleeping compartments.

I stopped, pulled myself away from Nickie. Somewhere down in the mess of cast-off clothes had to be something I could wear. I kicked through the pile, handed the top sheet up to Nickie.

“I want to see what’s going on.”

I slid into my pants, hurried. It felt awkward and wet—no underwear, socks, or shirt. I may just as well have walked out naked.

And there was something in my pocket.

Of course I knew what it was.

But I was going to get rid of it.

This is real.

It has to be.

*   *   *

As soon as I leaned out of our compartment, I came face-to-face with a uniformed man holding a rifle. He had one hand grasping our door, and was trying to force it open.

The hallway was choked with Rangers.

There must have been fifty of them.

My first instinct was to duck back inside, but the soldier, a sergeant whose last name was Ramirez, stuck his hand under my arm, as though he would lift me by the armpit. He yanked me out into the hallway in front of him.

“What are you doing in here?” he said. “Go that way. Forward.”

“I’m a student. I’m on my way to school. I have my student docs in there.”

I tried to push past him, back to my compartment, to Nickie.

“It doesn’t matter what you have,” Ramirez said. “Move. That way. Now.”

Then he goaded me toward the front of the train, jabbing my belly with the barrel of his rifle.

“Fuck this shit!” I pushed the gun away and tried to squeeze past him in the narrow hallway. That’s when I saw another Ranger duck his head inside the open door to the sleeping berth.

“Nickie!”

Next thing I knew, I was facedown, sprawled on the floor at the Ranger’s feet. My mouth was bleeding. The sonofabitch had punched me, and he pressed down on the back of my balls with the toe of his boot, trapping me there in agony.

I screamed, jerked. But I could feel how he’d butted the rifle barrel squarely into the base of my skull, pi

“I’ll fucking blow your head off, kid.”

I blacked out.

*   *   *

It is not time.

There are strings—the most delicate imaginable strands—and they co

You just follow the string.

You mind the gap.

But what if every time you answered, every destination, gap, each co

I am the worm, and I am the hole.

I am the King of Marbury.

You can’t just have something like the Marbury lens drop into your hands one day and then not begin to wonder at it, to figure out what the fuck’s been happening to you.

Wait.

It didn’t happen to me.

None of it did. Not from the moment I splashed down on Wy

Nickie.

Marbury.

The not-worlds.

None of it happened to me.

Everything happened because of me.

I fucked up.

It’s the strings. Like tuning a fucking television cha

And I thought, in those moments on the train lying tangled up with Nickie, that I could simply decide to make the randomness end. That this would be Jack’s world from now on. But something happened when I swung that hammer into the lens at the boys’ house.

It was like swinging a baseball bat through a universe made entirely of spiderwebs.

The strings were broken, and Jack was trapped.

All of us were.

Bouncing around, endlessly.

Inside a gap.

*   *   *

So I was lying against a corner, my arm trapped beneath me, bloodless and numb, in the space where the floor met the wall.

Who knew how long I’d been there?

I had some memory that I’d been dragged down the hallway, tossed into this corner. When I fought them, something hit me in the head.

Two men talked over me. They sounded agitated, tense. My mouth and nose were full of blood. The taste gagged me, and it felt as though my guts had been yanked out with fishhooks and were stretched along the stinking carpet, trailing all the way back to the spot outside our door where that fuckhead stepped on my balls.

One of them laughed. “Caught the kid having sex with that girl in one of the compartments.”

That girl.

Something about the way he said it, with a certain finality, like they knew the end of our story.

I felt the jabbing prod from the toe of a boot. It lifted my hip, turned me onto my side.

“Little fucker didn’t even get his fly buttoned up. Who the fuck’s kids are these nowadays?”

Fu

Open your eyes.

I slid my hand along the raspy carpeting, up toward my face.

Inhale.

The shapes blurred in front of me. The Ranger pulled his boot away from me, and I rolled back onto my stomach. I curled my knees in, tried to get up, moaning, spitting blood into the corner. There were pink roses printed on the wallpaper.

Nickie.

I managed to push up to my feet, steadying myself, leaning with my naked shoulder. They had me in some kind of storage car, one for baggage. There were very few seats inside; mostly open floor space with luggage racks that had already been stuffed with canvas duffel bags—the gear for the soldiers.

Six Rangers stood there, making a semicircle that pi

A bloodstain dried in a crusted line from my chin all the way down my belly to the button on my pants, and another handprint of mine was stamped in blood over a pattern of roses on the wall.

The train stood still, and I could hear people shouting, crying, through the open doorway that led to the other cars.

“Return to your seats,” I heard someone a

“Return to your seats immediately. The train has been commandeered.”

My head began to clear.

Somewhere, a woman and a little kid were crying, terrified.

“There’s an army of Hunters ahead. Return to your seats now, or you will be shot.”

I needed to get to Nickie.

*   *   *