“We’ll find another way,” Q said.
Something round and soft bounced off the side of Raya’s head. She jumped. “What was that?”
Q spotted a balled-up gray object by her left foot and picked it up. “A sock,” he said, questioning his answer as soon as he heard himself say it out loud. A blue sock pelted his shoulder.
A set of house keys fell on Raya’s foot. “What in the world?”
The sound of metal rattled across the sky. Q looked up. A penny struck the bridge of his nose. He grimaced. More coins rained down, pockmarking the ground. Q shielded his head with his hands. “Run!”
Holes of varying depths and sizes dimpled the valley. Raya and Q snagged their feet in them, tripping and stumbling in the hail of coins. They kept their heads down, darting past stacks of wallets and mounds of car keys, searching for a place to shelter from the storm of loose change. A five-yen coin hit Q’s ear.
“Q.” Raya raised her voice above the clatter of coins. “There’s a light up ahead.”
A light flickered in the distance. The outline of a gently sloping hill emerged from the dark. A large tree watched over the valley from the top of the hill with a canopy so wide, it was a forest all on its own. Sprawling branches concealed the light’s source but let enough of it shine through to give Q and Raya a destination.
Thick aerial roots trailed down from the giant banyan tree’s branches like gnarled trunks, completing the illusion of a forest. Q and Raya sheltered beneath the tree, panting from the sprint up the hill. The banyan’s dense canopy muffled the downpour of coins, softening its clatter to a chime-like tinkling.
Raya touched the red mark a coin had left on her temple and winced. “We’re going to be quite the sight tomorrow.”
Tomorrow.Q rolled the word around in his mind. Growing up, he had hated it. It didn’t matter if tomorrow was his birthday or Lunar New Year. All tomorrows ever did was bring him a day closer to a life in the dark. But from Raya’s mouth, it sounded different, its syllables holding a promise of all the colors of the morning he missed: the roasted brown and burnt umber peeking from beneath swirls of milky foam in his favorite green glazed mug, the creamy sunrise streaming out of a broken yolk, the languid, buttery yellow puddle melting into amber syrup over golden toast. The word also conjured a palette he had never seen: Raya’s brown eyes at midday, her lavender hair in the afternoon, the blush on her cheeks at twilight. The “tomorrow” that Raya uttered was both so alien and familiar that it compelled Q to feel it on his own lips. He spoke it beneath his breath.
Tomorrow.
It tickled his tongue, sparkling and sweet. He had forgotten what anticipation tasted like. Fighting to make it through a night where no second was promised, Q had never longed for tomorrow more. But though the tether told him that he and Raya were both desperate to reach this day’s end, he knew they wanted it for different reasons. Raya wished to leave the train as much as every cell in his body ached to remain on it.
“Did you say something?” Raya said.
Q shook his head, making his way to the banyan’s trunk.
Raya gasped. “Stop.”
“What is it?”
She pointed to a faint light drizzling over his face. “The light.” She lifted her gaze to the branches above Q. “It’s coming from up there.”
They climbed a ladder carved from the banyan’s hanging roots into the tree’s canopy and stood at the doorstep of a small house growing out of its trunk. Branches intertwined to form the tree house’s living walls, its leaves weaving together to roof it. A light shonethrough the house’s windowpanes of crystallized tree sap, casting prismatic flecks over Q and Raya. A green door in the shape of a banyan leaf stood half open between two windows, inviting themin.
“That door,” Raya gasped. “I saw it in Olly’s notebook.”
A jar filled with light sat on a dresser at the far end of the tree house’s only room. The tree house, unlike most things on the Elsewhere Express, was just as small on the inside as it appeared from the outside. Q crossed the doorway and shut the leaf-shaped door behind him.
Raya gripped the windowsill, watching the downpour of lost coins and missing socks. “Out of all the tracks on the map, I just had to find the one that led us to the Missed and Misplaced Department. This place doesn’t have any frames to help us find the exit. We’re stuck here because of me.”
“What you did was save us from the stowaway,” Q said. “And I don’t think the track you chose brought us here. I felt the train go off the rails before it shattered. We must have crashed into a locked door. But we’re safe now.”
“And lost.” Raya sighed. “The air here makes my chest feel tight. It’s like the anxiety I get when I realize I’ve left the house without my wallet or keys. Can you imagine feeling this way every second of every day for god knows how long?”
Q did not have to imagine it. He could navigate his apartment as though he could see, but the world outside was different. He couldn’t walk out his door without feeling like he had left something behind, but sight was not something he could run back to retrieve. He walked over to the window and looked outside. Remote controls and eyeglasses clattered over the ground. “Unless Olly kept some umbrellas in here, we’re going to have to wait this out before we go searching for the exit.”
“If Olly did leave anything, there’s only one place he could havekept it.” Raya eyed the tree house’s lone piece of furniture, a dresser set against a windowless wall.
“Fingers crossed.” Q made his way to the dresser.
“Being stuck here must have been miserable.” Raya heaved a sigh that echoed in Q’s chest. “This place doesn’t even have a bed or a chair.”
“Which might have worked in Olly’s favor. Comfort has a way of making people believe they’re content,” Q said, recalling the portraits he painted. “It’s the most common lie people wear on their faces. It looks like a dead spot in the eyes even under the brightest studio lights. It was tricky to capture during my first few attempts, but after painting it so often, I sadly became quite good at it.”
Raya stopped midway to the dresser. “How about here?”
