“I’m sorry, but we don’t have a choice. We can’t keep the stowaway here.”
“Why not? Look at it.” Tears flooded Lily’s eyes. “It’s trapped. It can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
“And so you just want to leave it in this compartment?”
“No, not this compartment.”
“Then where?”
“We’ll leave it where we leave everything that we can’t take with us. The past.” Lily dried her eyes. “And make ourselves forget that any of this ever happened.”
“How big are the passenger compartments?”
Frequently Asked Questions
The Elsewhere Express
Passenger Handbook
Raya
The hospital room was too small to fit two truths. Either Rasmus’s story about what the song had done to the first stowaway was a lie or what her heart insisted on was. The bandaged man on the bed could not be a monster and her brother at the same time. Raya gripped the hospital bed’s railing. “You’re lying.”
“Listen to the song.” Rasmus stepped away from the bed. “Hear the truth for yourself.”
Raya clasped Jace’s wrist and shut her eyes. Rasmus knew the train, but she knew this hospital room better than anyone else. She had memorized the shade of its walls, every machine blinking inside it, and the lingering scent of chemicals that disinfected everything except for grief. Jace’s pulse drummed against her fingers. Then grew into lyrics and notes.
The song seeped into Raya’s hand just as it had flowed from her guitar strings years ago when she wrote it for Jace’s funeral. It was meant to carry happy memories, but when it left her lips, it was as hollow and cold as the husk she now gripped. Raya dropped the bandaged hand. There was a monster in her brother’s bed, wearingJace’s song like skin. “This…this is the song I wrote for my brother.”
Rasmus hung his shoulders. “Lily couldn’t see the first stowaway for what it was. She could only see the song that saved us.”
“That doesn’t sound like Lily at all,” Q said.
“She was not yet the person she is. She was new and struggled with the train’s rules. That night, something broke inside her. I didn’t want to be the person that shattered her completely. And so I agreed to hide the stowaway here by building another compartment over it.”
“That’s why we have the same compartment.” Raya looked at Q. “It’s two rooms in one.”
Rasmus nodded, releasing a sigh that shrank him. “A prison made from the sturdiest thoughts we could find. Rage. Sorrow. Guilt. We broke every rule to build this cage and hide it from the rest of the train. And ourselves. It took two bottles of Mr. Goh’s serum to erase the guilt, but I made the mistake of visiting the gallery to check on a leak before taking a second dose.”
“And Olly saw your secret,” Raya said. “That’s why he got lost.”
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes and you’re standing inside one of them. No one was ever meant to see this room. Not even me.”
“How did I see it through the mirror?” Q said.
“You look at things closely, Q. Perhaps too closely. When you caught a glimpse of this place, it planted questions in your head that set cracks running across the compartment, breaking it apart.”
“Did the bell in the Archive ring because it sensed this room?” Q asked.
“I don’t think so. This room has never been a problem since we hid it.”
“So it was just a false alarm?” Raya said.
Q reached under the hospital bed. He stood up, holding a moth wing. “It wasn’t. The second stowaway was here.”
“It must have seen the first stowaway and sensed danger,” Rasmus said. “And fled. We should head back to the Archive and check on the bells.”
“What about this thing?” Raya glared at the bandaged figure. “It can’t stay on this train.”
