When we can no longer look over our shoulders and see the city, we finally stop to rest. It’s nearly nightfall and we’re both hungry and tired.

  “What do you think happened?” Lucas asks when we’ve gotten a decent fire going and eaten some rice cakes with a spicy bean paste he found in one of the houses.

  I’ve been thinking about this, and the more I consider the more I dislike the only answer that comes to mind. Instead of offering my opinion, I pull out the little notebook I found next to the napping corpse and I hold it out to him.

  “Maybe there’s something in here.”

  He frowns at it. “What’s that?”

  “A journal I think. I didn’t get a good look at it but...” I finish the sentence with a shrug.

  He takes it from me and flips through the pages, pausing now and then to read.

  “Well?” I ask, impatient. I don’t know why I handed it to him instead of reading it myself. Some weak attempt at being conciliatory I suppose.

  He shakes his head. “Nothing so far. It’s just letters from some guy to his dead wife.”

  I grimace. Reading anyone’s journal is invasive, but that feels like it belongs wholly to the dead.

  “It feels kind of wrong to read it.” Lucas echoes my thoughts.

  I nod. “I know what you mean, but… it could tell us something about what happened there.”

  He sets it down gently, unwilling to treat its contents with a careless touch.

  “Do you think…” he begins, but stops and looks into the fire. Deciding whether to give voice to what we are both thinking.

  I wait.

  “Do you think that was the decommissioning?”

  “Yes,” I say flatly.

  “So no relocations, new jobs, keeping families together, all that…” he gestures vaguely.

  I shake my head, finding a lump in my throat that makes it difficult to speak.

  “But we can’t know for sure,” Lucas says. “Maybe something terrible happened there. A new disease, like the Pall.”

  I meet his eyes. They’re anxious and sad. He wants me to reassure him and I want to as well. The implications of our initial theory are too much to bear.

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  But neither of us believes it.

  We use the blankets we brought with us from the city to make up bedrolls on either side of the fire, and crawl into them. I shudder a little thinking about the possibility of another disease. If what happened in that city was some form of extreme quarantine, we’ve broken it by taking these with us.

  I lie awake for a long time, trying not to go back to the Gathering Place in my mind. The notebook lies near me where Lucas left it and after a while I overcome my earlier scruples and begin to read it.

  The letters are awkward and heartfelt—a man communing with the ghost of his wife and beginning to blossom a little as he does. I’m almost at the end when the letters start to get both more enthusiastic and more scientific. I skim the technical explanations but stifle a gasp in when I read the lines of the second to last page.

  “Darling, I think we might be able to cure the Pall.”

  A few lines later, the writer confirms my worst fears. The last thing he says to his wife is that the city is about to be decommissioned.

  So Lucas’s and my suspicions were correct. Haven Station was scheduled to be decommissioned and then everyone in the city was methodically murdered.

  I turn it over in my mind, trying to force it to align with anything I thought I knew about the world. Then a thought strikes me with the force of a slap and I bolt upright.

  “What?” Lucas sits up too, looking around for Antler-Folk or possibly a new pile of corpses.

  I look at him, eyes wide with horror.

  “Antissa.”

  He frowns, confused. “Antissa? The place Ren and Amiyah are from?”

  “It’s supposed to be decommissioned this year.”

  “What?” he gapes at me. “Are you sure?”

  “We have to catch up to them.”

  Lucas is stamping out the fire before the words have left my mouth.

  Some hours later the tracks take a turn toward the river. We follow mutely onto the bridge that extends over it. It’s as old and unmaintained as the tracks are and there are a few precarious moments during which I can almost see myself being sucked below the surface and swept away to meet Professor Blackhoof in the afterlife.

  Not long after the bridge, we lose the tracks. Maybe they’ve been covered by earth over the years, or dug up and carried off as building materials, or maybe I just took a few wrong steps in the dark. When we fail to find them again after searching for an hour, we finally sit down to rest. Wandering around in the dark isn’t going to get us any closer to finding the others, Lucas points out, and I find it difficult to argue with that. We nod off sitting back to back and wait for sunrise.

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  It turns out to be a mercy. In the morning light, I make out shapes on the horizon that we would have missed entirely in the dark and I know we’ve found what we were looking for.

  I don’t have much hope of finding our companions in the train graveyard but I am hoping they left us some communication so that we can follow them and, if we’re fast enough, catch up.

  We walk between rows of abandoned train cars lined up one behind another. Their retirement has not been kind to them—they are rusted and crumbling with age, overgrown and moldy. I peer into broken windows as we pass and wonder at the stark rows of empty benches that take up so many of them.

  This is what trains were once like. The Talavar has been my home for more than two decades, and it feels like a home. Our cars are designed to maximize living space, with open central areas and comfortable berths. I forget sometimes that this was once a widely used method of transportation. There was a time when anyone could catch one of any number of trains from one city to the next and arrive within a few days. They needed it for little more than a place to sit for a few hours. Now we all exist in our little silos, connected only by the infrequent stops of a single train.

  “Tali!”

  Ren’s voice calling my name drags me from my thoughts and I turn just in time to catch her as she barrels into me and pulls me into a tight hug with her good arm.

  “You’re still here!” I can hardly believe the words even as they leave my mouth. “Why are you still here? Is everyone alright?”

  She doesn’t answer, too busy giving Lucas the same semi-violent treatment, but Amiyah appears at my elbow.

  “It’s been a long couple of days. Looks like it’s been just as bad for you two.” She nods to Lucas with a raised eyebrow for me.

  I offer a small shake of my head in return. Later.

  Amiyah leads me to a makeshift camp—tragically downsized with the loss of the heater, our tents, and most of our supplies—where Yanto greets us with more enthusiasm than I’ve seen him express before now. I suppose losing half your expedition to a rainstorm does not a glowing recommendation make for a travel agent.

  To my great relief, everyone is here. It turns out we passed the graveyard, crossed the river, and approached it from behind. The others managed to find the tracks before they split and crossed at an earlier point, bringing them straight here instead of through Haven.

  Matthew and Rissa, looking a little worse for the wear, and Xan, muddy but appearing otherwise unphased, sit around the small campfire and greet us in turn as we join them. Xan almost looks happy to see us.

  “Matthew!” Lucas grins and thumps the other man on the back as he lowers himself down beside him. “Glad to see you’re alive. When I heard the Professor go, I was afraid he’d taken you with him.”

  My eyes widen in belated alarm. I had forgotten that Matthew would have been riding the bal-ghoro when the river caught him up.

  “No such luck,” Matthew says apologetically. “He got scared and bucked me off, poor sainted creature, and I escaped with a badly bruised tailbone on top of my broken leg.”

  I grimace. “You’re not having great luck, are you?”

  “Oh I don’t know.” He says with a good-natured shrug. “The club that broke my leg was aimed at my head, and the beast that threw me was immediately swept away by the current. It could be argued I have uncannily good luck.”

  “Fair enough.” I realize this likely accounts for why the others haven’t made much progress. Matthew is not terribly mobile now that his mount is gone.

  “Xan had to come back for me and practically carry me here,” he adds, confirming my theory. He offers Xan an exaggerated bow which she does not acknowledge.

  “So the two of you finally kissed and made up I take it?” Yanto asks, waving a hand back and forth between Lucas and me.

  “No, he’s still an asshole,” I reply without any real rancor. “But there’s something important we need to talk about.”

  “Eat first,” Yanto commands. “We have to get on the road before long.”

  “That’s what we need to talk about,” Lucas says and the urgency in his voice draws sharp looks from both Xan and Yanto.

  We tell them about our detour into the city of the dead. Xan listens with a dark frown to my description of the common room and the blood collection setup. I show them the journal and she nods before I’ve finished, understanding where this is headed.

  “So that’s a decommissioned town,” she says.

  “It would seem so.”

  Ren looks as if someone has slapped her. Rissa has her hands over her face as if she might weep.

  “But… surely that’s not what it’s always like?”

  I hear the same desperation in Amiyah’s voice that was in my own last night. Hoping there is some reasonable explanation for a single atrocity that doesn’t mean atrocities are actually common, mundane, administrative.

  “I hope not. Because that’s not all.” It pains me to look her in the eye knowing what I have to say next. “The next part concerns us, and you specifically.”

  I try to summarize my own story as quickly as possible but there are a lot of questions—about the Talavar, about the Conductor, about Lucas’s role in my exile. I answer more than I should, mostly out of cowardice. Now that my sense of urgency has been communicated to my companions, I feel myself shrinking from my duty. I would rather tell stories about life on the train all day and all night then tell Ren and Amiyah what I have to tell them.

  “This is all very interesting, but how exactly does it concern me?” Amiyah interrupts my overdetailed description of my courier work.

  I exchange an agonized glance with Lucas and then I tell them about Antissa.

  The shock and fear on Ren’s face will live with me for some time. They don’t panic, as I thought they might, they just sit in stunned silence, the weight of their own helplessness resting heavy on their shoulders.

  “Okay,” Rissa speaks in a tone of calm urgency. A tone that says there is no problem-solving time like the present. I think of her children and all the practice she must have had stemming the tides of panic with this tone. “We should go to Antissa and try to warn them.”

  Amiyah’s face is bone-white and wild-eyed. “And what can they do with the warning? There are between 2 and 3,000 people there. Where will they go?”

  “I think we should keep on course for Cabe’s Falls,” Yanto interjects. To me, he adds, “You say you’re close to the Conductor, yes? Surely once he learns what you know, he’ll put a stop to it.”

  “Assuming he doesn’t know already,” says Xan darkly. “He’s a Committee-member after all.”

  I shake my head adamantly, ignoring Lucas’s skeptical silence.

  “He doesn’t know,” I tell her firmly before turning to Yanto. “That might work, but I’m afraid we’ll be too late. What if the Talavar is gone before we get there?”

  “Then we go to Antissa.”

  “You and Xan are only contracted to go as far as Cabe’s Falls,” says Lucas. “How much to take advantage of your services if we extend the trip to Antissa?”

  Xan only snorts.

  Yanto waves dismissively. “That’s talk for later. The important thing now is to get there.”

  “And what then?” Amiyah repeats.

  Rissa, her arm around Ren’s trembling shoulders, nods. “She’s right. We have no way to help those poor people once we’ve warned them. And that’s assuming…” she trails off.

  “Assuming we even make it in time,” Amiyah finishes for her. I see the dread fall over her like a shroud. What if we find Antissa the way I found the dead city of Haven?

  “The way I see it, we have no control over those variables. We have to choose from the options that are available.” All eyes turn toward Xan, or toward the authority with which she speaks.

  “We can meet up with the train in Cabe’s Falls and try to stop it.” She counts on her fingers as she lists our meager choices. “We can go straight to Antissa to try to warn them. Or we can do one and then the other. Unless one of you knows someone high up in the Citadel and has a network connection that can reach them, those are our choices.”

  “The fact that all our supplies are downriver and we’ll barely make it to Cabe’s Falls as it is sort of rules out option two,” Yanto says glumly.

  “Cabe’s Falls then,” says Ren decisively. Her eyes are red and frightened but there’s steel in her voice. “If that’s our only choice, we should go. Now.”

  Amiyah gives her a proud look and nods.

  “Then it’s agreed,” Yanto begins gathering his things to pack away.

  “I’m so sorry to bring this up,” Matthew speaks for the first time, his voice tentative. “But what about me?”