Raya set the train on the track.
Q stepped between her and the stowaway. “Get in.”
Raya clambered into the crystal train. Q jumped in after her, landing in the playground’s sandbox. The train’s door shut behind them. Raya leaned against a jungle gym, breathing hard. “I hope Rasmus saw the flares.”
“He did,” Q said, willing it to be true. He stood up, the rumbling of the tiny train shaking the sand from his jeans.
Lightning struck the railway and broke it apart. The miniature train careened off the track. A fissure ripped open beneath Q’s feet. He fell into the jagged hole faster than he could scream. A blue-and-yellow seesaw tumbled after him, wedging halfway through the gaping hole.
“Q!” Raya ran to him, slipping and stumbling on the quaking ground.
Q clung to the seesaw, his legs dangling over a black void. Raya lay on her stomach and grabbed his hand. He clung to her and climbed onto the grass, knocking the seesaw into the darkness. “Thank you,” he panted.
Pieces of broken crystal fell around them. Q looked up, shielding his face with his hands. The sky cracked open and ripped the moon from the stars.
“How do the train’s flares work?”
Frequently Asked Questions
The Elsewhere Express
Passenger Handbook
Rasmus
Rasmus liked broken things. When he was a child, his room was littered with the skeletons and innards of toasters, radios, and alarm clocks. He had discovered early on that the best way to learn how to make something better was to take it apart. But nothing held his interest long. Not school. Not his work. Not even the woman he thought he had loved enough to marry.
His fiancée disappeared from his life after he had left her at the altar, and there were times, though infrequent, that he wondered how she was doing and where she was. The same questions rolled in his mind like tumbleweed on the day he had resigned from his latest job and boarded the Elsewhere Express.
Rasmus would have found the answers to these questions if he had been able to remember his fiancée when he bumped into her at the train’s gallery years later. She had changed her face and had swallowed the same vile-tasting tonic as he had. They nodded politely whenever they saw each other around the train with no inkling of who the other was. Their only connection was her husband’s name. He was called Rasmus too.
The Rasmus his ex-fiancée loved, Rasmus admitted, was more likable than he was. This explained how this version of himself came to be designated Han’s Rasmus and he merely as the Other. Though he and Han’s Rasmus were one and the same person, the little left and right turns they had taken since they had boarded the Elsewhere Express changed them in a hundred invisible ways. Han’s Rasmus was the train’s reigning Scrabble night champion, and he was the Rasmus that tracked down monsters and kept the train safe.
Rasmus had thought that his monster-hunting days were over when he retired as the train’s conductor. Beginnings and endings, however, were the most common illusions on a train running on infinite tracks. Days started when the painting crew hung the sun in the sky and ended when a painted moon took the sun’s place. Passengers found it easier to accept this arbitrary demarcation than to live in a single, eternal moment. Forever was easy to drown in if you couldn’t see the shore.
Rasmus exhaled, concluding his search of the opera house without finding any rot. The train’s opera troupe was set to begin its new season in a few days, and he was relieved that he did not have to decouple the opera train car. He looked out from center stage, admiring the train car’s elegant interiors. Excerpts from an award-winning crime documentary made up the proscenium while a judge’s deliberation on a custody case was sewed into the stage’s rich red curtains. Fair thoughts did not distort sound, but were unfortunately notoriously difficult to come by. It would take a very long time to collect enough clear, objective, well-balanced thoughts to rebuild the opera house from scratch.
Rasmus held a gilded frame in front of him. It would have been easier to use one of his crystal trains to travel around the Elsewhere Express, but he had no one to share the train’s map or, for that matter, anything else with. As the train’s former conductor, Rasmus knew attachments were distractions from duties no one else could perform. Keeping an entire train running smoothly and doubt-free was a job that demanded all of one’s attention. The ElsewhereExpress existed because its passengers believed that it did and ran exclusively on a fuel of faith.
Flares flashed in Rasmus’s good eye. He staggered back, blinded. The flares faded, their light burning what Raya’s eyes had just seen into his iris: lightning, rain, and rot.
“What do I do if I damage items I’ve borrowed from the Archive?”
Frequently Asked Questions
The Elsewhere Express
Passenger Handbook
Q
Jagged pieces of crystal littered the uneven ground, glittering in the pale light of a full moon. Raya and Q sat on their heels, gathering what remained of the miniature train. Q dropped a piece that looked like it could have been its chimney into an empty bag of gummy candy Raya had found in her tote. He reached for another shard, but his fingers refused to stop shaking long enough for him to pick it up. A nervous energy charged the air, making it impossible to breathe without trembling. He stood up, abandoning the bag of broken crystal. “What are we even doing, Raya? This is pointless. We need to find a way out of here.”
Raya grabbed the bag and got to her feet. “Thisisthe way out.”
Q rubbed his forehead. “The only thing those shards are going to do is shred our hands. It’s a miracle that the train managed to hold itself together for as long as it did. And even if we found all its pieces, how in the world are we going to put it back together?”
Raya sighed, shoving the bag of shards into her tote. “You’re right.”
