24 Apr The Last Stop

Part I

Rain hammered the train windows with a steady, insistent rhythm, as though trying to force its way inside.

Tina Morales had always found something calming in train rides. The gentle sway of the car, the hum beneath her feet, and the long bands of fluorescent light stretching across the cabin and over the pages of strangers’ books all functioned like a balm. They gave her space to decompress after long shifts at the hospital, a buffer between the chaos of trauma bays and the cramped silence of her apartment. That decompression had become vital in recent weeks.

She looked up from her open notebook. Her textbooks—Neurological Trauma, Emergency Pharmacology, and a weathered anatomy atlas—rested untouched on the tray table. The words may as well have been written in another language. Her headache had returned, a dull pressure that made focusing impossible. Each time she tried, her thoughts drifted to the message she hadn’t answered:

Mom says you haven’t been to the cemetery lately. Neither of us have. I think that’s okay.

Without warning, the train entered the tunnel.

The exterior world disappeared, swallowed by concrete and darkness. The yellow-orange glow of station lights gave way to the artificial dusk of the tunnel, and the pressure shifted subtly, just enough to notice. Tina felt it in her ears—a soft static hum that settled across her skull.

The other passengers, maybe two dozen in all, barely reacted. It was after ten on a weekday night, and most were absorbed in screens or drifting into sleep. Across the aisle, an older man in a dark conductor’s cap helped a young woman stow her stroller, offering a quiet nod when she thanked him.

Tina managed a faint smile. The man looked like a retiree—one of those people who never entirely stopped being helpful even after their shift had long since ended.

Then the train jolted.

It wasn’t the gradual deceleration of a scheduled stop or a routine sway along the track. This was abrupt—an unexpected lurch that knocked notebooks from laps and startled passengers upright. The lights overhead flickered violently as Tina’s pen slid off the tray table and landed on the floor with a soft plastic clatter.

“What the hell…” someone muttered a few rows back.

Before anyone could respond, the lights went out.

Total darkness consumed the car. Not even cell phone screens lit the space. There were no emergency backlights, no ambient glow. The rain, once so persistent, had been silenced by the tunnel walls. In its place came the hum of failing systems—the faint whine of cooling metal and the low, intermittent thrum of the train’s emergency power trying to restart.

When the lights returned, they glowed a deep red.

The emergency bulbs cast a dim crimson wash across the cabin, painting everyone in the color of bruises. A heavy silence followed. No one spoke. Everyone seemed to be waiting—for the usual announcement, for instructions, for someone to reassure them that this had happened before.

The intercom crackled.

It wasn’t the familiar clipped female voice that usually reminded passengers to mind the gap or apologized for delays. This voice, distorted and warped, belonged to a man.

“—passengers… r-remain… the selection… must occur…”

The line hissed, then went dead.

A few people laughed nervously. One woman sighed and tapped her phone, likely hoping for a signal. Tina scanned the car. Most people seemed puzzled, but not alarmed. Someone in the back muttered about ARG marketing.

Then came a knock.

It was too soft for the metal siding, more like fingertips brushing the glass. Tina turned toward the sound, eyes locking on the window across the aisle. Her reflection stared back at her, bathed in red—wide-eyed and frozen.

But it wasn’t the only face in the glass.

A second face, half-hidden by shadows, had appeared in the seat across from hers. Pale skin. Wet hair clinging to a too-familiar forehead.

Michael.

Her brother.

Six years dead.

His face looked drained and slack. He didn’t blink.

Tina stood abruptly.

Her sudden movement startled a few nearby passengers. She stepped into the aisle, eyes fixed on the seat across from hers.

Empty.

The space was vacant, the upholstery undisturbed. Still, a tight sensation coiled through her ribs. Not panic. Not yet. But she could feel the stirrings of something close.

You haven’t eaten. You haven’t slept.

She tried to believe it.

A steady hand came to rest on the nearby pole. The older man with the conductor’s cap approached, voice low and steady. “You all right, miss?”

Tina nodded quickly, clearing her throat. “Yeah. Sorry. Thought I saw someone I recognized.”

He gave her a small smile—kind, but skeptical. “This stretch of tunnel plays tricks sometimes. Signals bounce. Static gets weird. It’s older than most of the city above it.”

“You’ve worked this line before?” she asked.

“For thirty years. Retired now, but I still ride it sometimes. Habit’s a hard thing to break.”

Before Tina could respond, the train jolted again.

The red lights above them began to strobe in slow, rhythmic intervals.

She looked back across the aisle.

Michael was sitting there again.

His expression had changed. He was smiling this time, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes. Those eyes were wrong—clouded, unnatural. And behind him, in the glass, something massive pressed against the outside of the train. A shape. Indistinct and gray. It resembled a handprint smeared across a fogged window—too large, too blurred to define.

The shape shifted.

Tina stumbled backward, bumping into the older man.

“You saw that?” she asked. “Tell me you saw that.”

But he wasn’t looking at the seat. His eyes had turned toward the connecting door at the far end of the car.

It stood open just a crack.

Only a sliver—but enough for pitch blackness to bleed through.

Something moved beyond it.

“That door’s not supposed to open while in the tunnel,” he murmured.

At the rear of the car, someone began to cry. Not a quiet sob, but a deep, rattling sound—the kind of anguish that suggested something had already broken. It echoed along the windows, bouncing between the metal walls.

Tina turned. A man near the back had stood up, holding a phone in front of him.

Omar Shah.

He had been recording.

“We’re in it now,” he said to no one in particular, turning the phone toward the flickering lights. “Midway 906, eastbound, somewhere past Beacon. If anyone sees this—if this gets out—watch the windows. You’ll see it before we do.”

The train jerked again.

This time, no one remained upright.

Passengers hit the floor or clung to seat backs as sparks fell from overhead fixtures. The red lights sputtered and died.

And in the dark that followed—total and crushing—Tina heard a voice.

The voice of hunger.

When the emergency lights returned, the train had stopped moving.

Beyond the windows: no tunnel. No wall. No world.

Only static.

Gray-black noise swallowed everything outside, like a fog made entirely of interference.

And from within it, something began to form.

Part II

Tina didn’t remember sitting down.

Yet she found herself back in her seat, her fingers locked tightly around her notebook. She couldn’t recall the act of moving there. The emergency lights had returned, though they glowed fainter now—drained, as though the train were running on power it no longer owned.

Around her, passengers shifted uneasily. A few whispered to one another in low tones, but most stared straight ahead with glazed expressions, as if stunned or half-asleep.

The window beside her was no longer a window.

Instead, it had become a screen—filled edge to edge with crawling static. The gray-black noise flickered and swelled. No tunnel wall remained. No rails, no light. Only movement.

But this movement wasn’t random.

The static pulsed in patterns, contracting and expanding in slow waves. Images emerged briefly—half-seen and dreamlike—before dissolving into the noise. Tina leaned closer.

A child lay curled in the overhead luggage rack, eyes wide open and unblinking.
A man slammed his fists against the conductor’s booth, blood pouring from his nose.
A woman in a hospital gown stepped barefoot into the tunnel, vanishing as fog closed around her.
A gurney rolled across a morgue floor. A toe tag dangled. It bore her name.
And then—herself, stretched motionless across the seats, mouth agape in a frozen, silent scream.

Tina turned away abruptly.

Across from her, the older man—Harris, she remembered—had removed his conductor’s cap. He clutched it loosely in his lap, sweat beading along his brow. His knuckles trembled as he traced shapes onto the metal pole beside him. Four vertical lines crossed by a fifth. A tally mark.

“Are you counting something?” Tina asked, her voice quieter than intended.

Harris didn’t respond immediately. When he did, his voice carried the weight of memory. “Sometimes I think I’m still in that tunnel. Still bleeding out.”

She watched him carefully. “You mean the Midway crash? ’Eighty-seven?”

He nodded once. “I was the conductor that night. Brake relay failed just after we entered the tunnel. The 907 derailed. Forty-seven people died. I should’ve been one of them.”

“But you survived.”

“I was pulled out—half-crushed, concussed, screaming about something that had followed us up from the dark. The EMTs thought I was hallucinating. They gave me morphine and never asked again.”

Tina looked down at her notebook, where her hand still clutched the pen in a white-knuckled grip. “You think this is related?”

“I don’t think anything anymore. But I remember the feeling. This… pressure. This noise. I’ve felt it before.”

Before she could ask more, she noticed Omar.

He stood in the aisle again, his phone raised, though this time he wasn’t streaming. His face had changed—drawn tight, bloodless around the edges. He looked like he had seen something he couldn’t articulate.

Tina crossed to him. “What are you seeing?”

He didn’t look at her. Instead, he turned the screen toward her. “I don’t know when I filmed this.”

The video showed the inside of their train car, dimly lit in red. The footage was jittery, the angle tilted, as if the phone had been dropped.

Every passenger lay sprawled across the floor or over the seats. Their eyes were open and vacant. Blood soaked the fabric. And in the aisle, Tina saw herself—lying on her side with her neck twisted too far back, as if it had snapped on impact.

The screen stuttered.

The camera panned to Harris, slouched in his seat, clutching his chest.

Then came a sound. A screech—organic, wet, and wrong.

A blurred figure crawled along the ceiling, upside down, its limbs bent at unnatural angles. Its body rippled with static, like a thing half-made from signal interference.

Tina recoiled from the image.

“This video wasn’t live,” Omar said, lowering the phone. “It was already on my device when I checked. No timestamp. No file size.”

Tina’s voice emerged hoarse. “That’s not possible.”

He didn’t answer.

At the rear of the car, a man collapsed.

Tina had noticed him earlier—pacing, muttering to himself. Now, without warning, he dropped. His body twitched once, then stilled.

Passengers screamed.

Tina ran. Every part of her training kicked in at once. She dropped to her knees beside him, turned his head, and checked for signs of life—there were none.

His pupils were fully dilated, and his mouth hung open slightly, caught mid-sentence, as if frozen in the act of speaking.

“He just fell,” someone whispered behind her. “He just dropped.”

Tina began compressions, her movements practiced, count steady. But even as she worked, she saw something else.

His lips were still moving. The muscles around his mouth contracted, silent but intentional. Tina leaned in, watching closely.

His lips shaped three words.

It sees you.

The lights failed again.

Darkness enveloped everything.

Tina fell forward, catching herself against the seat beside her.

Then the train moved.

A sudden, violent lurch propelled them forward. The wheels shrieked against the rails. Overhead lights stuttered, then flickered back to life. The mechanical hum returned.

The train was moving again.

But the man’s body was gone.

Tina spun around, eyes scanning the spot where he had fallen. The aisle was empty. No blood. No belongings. No disturbance.

The passengers had returned to their seats. Some blinked slowly, as if waking from a long nap. Others remained buried in their phones, scrolling as though nothing had happened.

Only Tina, Omar, and Harris looked disturbed.

She turned to Omar. “Do you remember that?”

He nodded. “The man. His mouth. The static. Yeah, I remember.”

Harris stood slowly and pointed to the window.

“Look.”

The static had returned—but it was no longer random.

A frozen image filled the screen.

The man who had died was pressed against the other side of the glass, his face distorted by the interference. His features were stretched and pale, smeared across the screen as if the static had absorbed him.

The train’s lights dimmed again.

An announcement chimed overhead.

The same garbled voice returned.

“Next stop… end of pattern… final iteration pending…”

“Final?” Tina echoed. “What does that even mean?”

Omar began pacing. “It’s not just time repeating. It’s people. Us.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think this isn’t a loop of events—it’s a loop of memory. Of identity. Every time it resets, someone’s missing. Someone gets erased. And whatever’s controlling it—it’s making decisions.”

Tina’s voice fell low. “Then how many loops have already happened?”

Harris didn’t move his gaze from the window. “More than five.”

Omar raised his phone again. “I think it’s tied to awareness. The ones who see through the loop—the ones who notice—get pulled deeper each time.”

Tina stared at the screen. The static behind the glass had taken on a faint pulsing rhythm. She could feel it now, behind her eyes—like pressure building before a storm.

It wasn’t outside anymore.

It was inside the train.

Inside them.

The intercom crackled once more.

“Remain seated… until the selection completes.”

Then the voice shifted.

It was no longer warped or mechanical.

It was Michael.

“Tina,” it said. “You left me there. Don’t leave them too.”

The lights died.

And in the darkness that followed, they heard footsteps, moving overhead.

Part III

Tina leaned against one of the cold steel poles, her knuckles pale beneath the flickering overhead lights. The emergency glow had taken on a different quality now—less like illumination, more like a warning.

She counted the passengers again.

Where there had once been over twenty, she now saw no more than ten. The air inside the car felt hollow, though she knew better than to trust that feeling.

In the front corner seat, Harris sat slouched with his conductor’s cap folded neatly in his lap. He had not put it back on since the last reset. His fingers tapped absently against the brim, but the rhythm wasn’t musical or casual. It carried a sense of calculation, as if he were measuring time against a clock only he could hear.

Tina approached cautiously and sat across from him, her voice soft. “Do you still remember it?”

He nodded once, though his jaw remained tense. “Every time.”

“How many have there been now?”

His gaze moved to the window, where the static pulsed faintly. “Five. Maybe six. I stopped trusting numbers two loops ago.”

“Why us?” she asked. “Why are we the ones who remember when everyone else resets?”

Harris shifted, his body language suddenly more guarded. “I’ve seen this happen before. Not exactly like this, but close enough. Back in ’87, I was the conductor when the 907 derailed. Brake relay failed just inside this tunnel. We lost nearly fifty people. I should have been one of them.”

“But you weren’t.”

“No,” he said. “They pulled me out—half-crushed, delirious. I kept telling the EMTs something had followed us out of the dark. I was sure of it. They sedated me and wrote it off as trauma-induced hallucination.”

Tina folded her arms and leaned back slightly, the chill in her spine deepening. “You think this is connected to that crash?”

“I think something was trapped down here,” Harris said. “And maybe it still is. Maybe it never left. Maybe none of us did.”

Before she could respond, Omar appeared at the end of the aisle. He moved quickly, his phone raised in one hand. His expression had sharpened—less shock now, more urgency.

“We’re caught in a recursion loop,” he said. “Not just a temporal one—a structural one. I’ve been tracking timestamps, and each reset brings fewer passengers. But my phone… it keeps capturing footage before the events actually happen. It’s like the next iteration is leaking into this one.”

He held the screen up so they could see. Harris leaned in beside Tina as the video played.

The footage showed Harris in the current train car—same seat, same posture—being yanked violently backward. His eyes were wide, his mouth frozen in a soundless gasp as his body was pulled through the sealed window behind him. His hands scraped against the glass, leaving smears. Then he vanished.

Another video played immediately afterward.

It showed Omar standing exactly where he stood now, mouth open in a silent scream. Above him, the ceiling warped and bulged, as if something massive pressed from the other side.

A third clip followed—grainy, distorted. Tina sat alone in the train car, the seats around her vacant. Her mouth moved constantly, whispering to herself. Her hands were red.

“These haven’t happened yet,” Omar said. “But they’re on my phone. The metadata says they were recorded hours ago. I didn’t film any of this.”

Tina tried to keep the dread from sinking deeper. “Then they’re not just predictions.”

“They might be inevitabilities,” Harris said.

A sharp metallic click echoed through the train car.

All three of them turned toward the sound.

The rear door had opened.

There was no sound of unlocking. It hadn’t been forced. It simply stood ajar now, the edges swaying slightly with the unnatural stillness of the train. Beyond it stretched only darkness.

A middle-aged man in a brown jacket rose from his seat and walked toward the opening. His gait was slow but determined. He didn’t speak. His eyes didn’t track his surroundings. He stepped through the doorway and vanished into the dark without hesitation.

No one stopped him. No one else reacted.

Then a teenage girl followed.

Then a woman in a tailored blue coat.

One after another, passengers stood and passed through the doorway, disappearing into whatever waited beyond.

By the time Tina blinked again, five of them were gone.

She turned to Harris, her voice tight. “Why aren’t the others reacting?”

“They weren’t meant to,” he said. “They’re part of the structure, not the loop.”

A deep cough broke the silence.

Tina turned to see a woman near the far end of the car clutching her chest. She doubled over, coughing harder, the sound turning wet. She wheezed once, twice, then went still.

Omar ran toward her while Tina knelt beside the woman, checking for a pulse. A moment later, she looked up, her expression grim.

“She’s gone,” Tina said.

Then the train jolted forward.

The lights flared and dimmed in rapid succession.

When the world settled again, Tina was back in her seat.

She sat up straight, immediately scanning the cabin. The woman who had just died was gone. So were the others who had walked into the tunnel.

Only seven passengers remained.

Harris and Omar were still present. Both looked as disoriented as she felt. They remembered.

She stood and moved to the window again. Outside, the tunnel was darker than ever before. The red emergency lights barely penetrated it. Within that gloom, shapes shifted—subtle and formless, like afterimages that refused to resolve.

Omar joined her, speaking quietly. “It’s speeding up.”

“What is?”

“The resets. The disappearances. The distortions in reality. It’s accelerating.”

Tina turned to Harris. “How does this end?”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he drew something into the fog on the window with his fingertip: a circle broken by a jagged vertical line.

“This isn’t a loop,” he said. “It’s a spiral. And we’re being pulled down.”

The lights flickered again.

And this time, they didn’t return.

Part IV

The lights did not return.

In the darkness, the familiar hum of the train was gone. No vibration traveled through the floor, no screech of wheels echoed along the rails, and no rhythmic jolt pressed through the carriage. Yet Tina still felt movement—a subtle pull forward, as if her body remembered inertia even when the world around her no longer cooperated.

She reached for the window, expecting to feel glass.

Instead, her hand touched something warm.

She recoiled instinctively. The surface felt like skin—cool, textured, and disturbingly organic.

The emergency lights flickered on at last, sputtering weakly overhead.

Where the window had once opened to tunnel walls, a sky had taken its place.

Jagged cityscapes floated above her, their silhouettes stretching into a ceiling of churning gray fog. The buildings rotated slowly, drifting on invisible currents, defying gravity and orientation alike.

Beside her, Omar raised his phone, hands trembling.

He aimed it toward the ceiling, where something dark and viscous was spreading outward from the front of the car. The light from his screen illuminated the edge of a shadow—irregular and in motion. It slithered between the vents and along the beams, as if navigating by instinct, avoiding direct exposure.

Tina stepped forward. “What are you doing?”

“I need proof,” Omar said, his voice shaking but resolute. “Even if no one ever sees it—someone has to know this existed. That something’s in here with us.”

Before she could respond, the shadow dropped.

It fell without warning, detaching from the ceiling in a fluid, silent motion.

Omar let out a single cry.

The thing reached him before Tina could move.

There was no impact, no sound of collision. Omar’s body folded into the floor like paper drawn into flame. He vanished in a single motion, as if he had never been there.

His phone landed on the seat beside Tina. Its screen remained lit.

She picked it up. The camera was still recording, aimed at the ceiling. The image displayed nothing unusual—just the red-lit panels and the faint outline of vents. But a sound had begun beneath the quiet hum of the lights.

A whisper.

It grew louder the longer she watched, though she hadn’t raised the volume. The more she focused on the screen, the more she felt it pulling at her awareness.

She set the phone down.

Harris had not moved from his seat.

His gaze was fixed beyond the window, where the inverted skyline continued its slow, unnatural drift. A small, leather-bound journal rested in his lap. Its cover was worn and brittle, the edges frayed.

He opened it without looking up.

Tina approached slowly and watched as he turned the pages.

Inside, every sheet had been filled with spirals—dozens of them. Each spiral had been numbered, some with dates, others with short notes: forgot again, found the waterline, no memory this time. Several names appeared, some crossed out, some left untouched.

“This isn’t your first time,” Tina said.

“No,” Harris replied. “I thought I’d escaped it. I thought retirement was the end of it. But that was just another iteration. A quieter one.”

“What is this place?”

“I tried to make sense of it. At first, I believed it was a dream. Then I thought it might be purgatory. Later, I blamed brain damage. But none of those theories explain the pattern. This isn’t a punishment. It’s a system that feeds on memory and awareness. The more you remember, the more it tightens its hold.”

He turned to the final page.

The last line had been written in fresh ink: She sees now. The loop is almost full.

Tina stared at it. “That’s me?”

He nodded slowly. “You’re the last. Once you’ve seen everything, the spiral completes. That’s when it comes.”

She took a step back. Images of Michael flooded her mind—his face pale and wet, his voice emerging from the intercom.

“I saw him here,” she said. “He told me I left him behind. He said I’m next.”

“So have I,” Harris said. “He’s not your brother. Not anymore.”

“He looked like him. Sounded like him.”

“It knows how to reach you,” Harris replied. “It doesn’t use memories—it uses loss.”

The train began to slow.

No sound accompanied the deceleration, but Tina felt the shift. The invisible forward pressure vanished. The lights dimmed further.

Then Michael sat across from her again.

He was younger this time—fourteen, maybe fifteen—his hospital gown loose across thin shoulders. IV lines trailed down the seat beside him. His wrists were wrapped in fresh bandages. His head tilted gently to one side, mimicking how she had found him on that final day.

His eyes were filled with regret.

“Tina,” he said.

“No.”

“I didn’t mean to go. I just didn’t want to stay.”

“You’re not him.”

The figure’s mouth twitched. Its smile widened too far, stretching unnaturally at the corners.

The bandages fell away from its wrists, revealing black gashes that leaked smoke instead of blood.

“I’m what’s left of him in your head,” it whispered. “That’s enough.”

Tina stepped back, but the figure moved with her. Its skin flowed over its bones like oil. Its voice shifted—first to Harris’s, then to her own.

The walls creaked. The air changed.

“You want to know what this place is?” it asked, leaning forward. “It’s the corridor between all the choices you didn’t make. Every regret you buried lives here. And I live with them.”

Tina reached for Harris, but his body had begun to dissolve.

The skin beneath his eyes sagged. His hands fell slack. His chest no longer rose.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I missed my stop a long time ago.”

He slumped forward.

His form collapsed into a fine, gray powder that vanished against the seat.

The intercom chimed.

A voice spoke again, clear and final: “Last iteration in progress. All passengers, please disembark.”

Tina stood alone.

She moved from car to car.

Each one was worse than the last.

Seats twisted into impossible shapes. Windows bulged inward or had been replaced with walls throbbing like flesh. Doors hung open over bottomless voids.

In the fourth car, Omar’s phone vibrated on the floor. She picked it up. A new video had appeared on the screen.

It showed her, standing in the front car, whispering a single sentence to herself: I don’t know who I am anymore.

The screen turned black.

The train reset.

But this time, there was no jolt. No shift in inertia.

Tina opened her eyes.

She sat alone in the front car.

Every seat was empty.

Harris’s cap lay folded neatly near the conductor’s booth.

Omar’s phone light blinked softly in the corner.

Outside the window, the tunnel had transformed.

It was no longer made of stone or steel. Instead, a shaft of white light stretched infinitely in both directions. Shapes passed beyond the glass—some mechanical, others organic, all pulsing faintly with memory. A few bore faces she recognized. One of them wore hers.

The train still moved forward.

But it no longer followed rails.

Tina sat without speaking, without moving.

She did not ask where she was.

She already knew.

Part V

Tina could no longer say how many loops had passed.

She had stopped tracking time in minutes or hours. Instead, she began marking what remained. She noted the shifting cadence of the red emergency lights. She memorized the tone of the intercom—sometimes mechanical, sometimes disturbingly human. She watched for the flickers in the windows, the moments when reflections failed to appear, the whispers that started just before the lights went out.

With no one left to speak to, she began speaking to herself.

At first, she wrote in the margins of her medical notebook, filling the diagrams with phrases she hoped would anchor her. When that no longer sufficed, she tore the pages into strips and taped them to the windows. When the tape failed to hold, she began carving tally marks into the vinyl seatbacks with the tip of a broken pen. Row by row. Slash after slash.

Twenty-three full iterations by her last count.

Eventually, she moved to her forearm, drawing lines with a permanent marker she’d found under a seat. When the ink faded or was mysteriously erased, she switched to a jagged piece of plastic cracked from an overhead bin. It left red lines behind—messy, uneven, but impossible to ignore.

Still, the train resisted her efforts.

She would wake to find the markings erased, her notes gone, the seats clean. Once, the messages she had written on the windows rearranged themselves into gibberish. Another time, her diagrams shifted into distorted faces when she blinked.

On her sixth attempt to reach the conductor’s cabin, the door locked just before she touched it. On her seventh try, it opened—but a white fog hissed down from the vents, thick and stinging. It smelled like bleach and frost. She collapsed before she could cover her face.

When she woke again, she was seated properly. Her lap was empty. Her arms had been scrubbed clean.

She waited until the lights flickered again. Then she ran.

This time, the car ahead had changed.

The floor sloped downward at an unnatural angle, as if the train had tipped or been reassembled out of alignment with gravity. Her footsteps echoed louder than they should have. The overhead lights swung in wide arcs, even though the train itself did not move.

At the far end of the car, she found Omar.

Or what remained of him.

His body had partially fused into the wall. From the waist down, he was embedded in the metal—flesh pressed outward like melting wax. His shirt had become one with the wall, skin blending into steel. The metal surface bulged around him as if trying to absorb what remained.

His eyes were open. Glazed. But aware.

His lips moved slowly, each syllable a struggle.

“It… won’t… let go.”

Tina crouched beside him, placing a hand gently on his shoulder. The surface of his skin was cool and strangely pliable.

“Are you still here?” she asked.

“Pieces,” he whispered. “Maybe.”

She leaned closer, straining to hear.

“It wants… to remember us… but it can’t. It doesn’t know who we are. It only knows what we’ve lost.”

His voice cracked. A trail of blood slipped from the corner of his mouth.

“Don’t give it a name,” he said. “If you name it… it becomes real.”

She reached for his hand, but the wall had already started to pull him deeper.

“I won’t forget you,” she said.

Omar said nothing more.

Tina stood and continued forward.

The next door opened before she could touch it.

Beyond it, the air had changed again. It carried a smell she hadn’t encountered since she was nineteen: sterilized floors, iron, antiseptic. Her shoes clicked against linoleum instead of metal.

Harris sat in a folding chair beside the wall, his uniform different now.

The fabric was gray wool, decorated with brass buttons and a tarnished nameplate that read McKeen. Dried blood matted one side of his head. His posture was slumped, but his chest still rose and fell.

As she approached, his eyes fluttered open.

“I didn’t mean to stop the train,” he murmured. “I didn’t mean to stop it.”

His fingers clawed at the seat’s edge. His eyes darted around, unfocused.

“Are you real?” she asked.

He did not respond.

Tina stepped past him.

The corridor ahead twisted sharply. It bent at impossible angles, spiraling inward. The floor muffled her footsteps, as if absorbing them.

Then the Entity spoke.

It no longer wore one face.

Now, it wore many.

Her brother appeared first—arms outstretched, eyes soft. Omar stood beside him, his face slack and melting. A version of Tina followed, clad in a torn lab coat, muttering anatomical terms backward. Behind them, Harris appeared whole again, younger, with eyes filled with guilt.

“You wanted to understand,” the Entity said through all of them. “You wanted to heal. But what do you do when the wound is the world itself?”

Tina stood still. “This isn’t memory,” she said. “This is mimicry.”

All of them smiled at once.

“We are the unchosen,” the Entity replied. “We are the lives you never lived. We exist in the fractures between your choices. You left us there.”

The car behind her darkened. The walls narrowed.

Voices rose all around her—Michael’s, Omar’s, her own—layered into a chorus of every failure, every silence, every hesitation.

“You can stop running,” the Entity said. “Stay. We’ll give him back. We’ll give you everything you missed.”

Tina stepped forward.

She walked through them.

The voices pleaded. The hallway contracted. Her brother’s face peeled apart like birch bark, unraveling into ash that scattered on a wind that did not blow.

At the end of the corridor, a doorway was illuminated with gray light.

It had no knob, no handle—just the shape of a threshold, outlined in static.

She paused. Not out of fear, but out of certainty.

Then she stepped through.

Part VI

The first thing Tina noticed was stillness.

There was no forward motion beneath her. No hum of electricity. No flicker of artificial light or sway of the train. Her limbs no longer resisted gravity. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime, her body was completely at rest.

The second thing she saw was the ceiling.

It was plain—white acoustic tile, framed by a recessed fluorescent fixture and a dusty air vent. The walls surrounding her were painted a dull hospital blue, the kind that faded under years of cleaning. The scent in the air was unmistakable: antiseptic, starched linens, and the subtle tang of IV tubing.

Hospital.

She tried to speak, but her tongue felt thick and dry. Only a faint rasp escaped her throat. Her arms had been restrained—not tightly, but firmly enough to keep her wrists pinned to the bedframe.

A curtain rustled to her right. Behind her, a monitor beeped in a slow, steady rhythm.

A man stepped into view.

He wore a lab coat, his expression calm and clinical. Middle-aged, with close-cropped gray hair and a clipboard tucked under one arm, he regarded her with practiced gentleness.

“You’re back,” he said.

Tina tried to lift her head, but her neck ached. Her muscles resisted the effort, sluggish and sore.

“How long?” she asked.

“Four days,” the doctor said. “But internally, it’s been much longer. You’ve experienced your twenty-ninth regression.”

Her eyes burned. “Regression?”

He nodded once. “Your cognition entered a persistent feedback pattern. Closed-loop logic, trauma reprocessing, memory collapse. You’ve been caught in it for some time. But you’re surfacing more frequently now. That’s a positive sign.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to anchor herself in the sound of the monitors and the weight of the blanket.

“It felt real,” she said. “The train. The tunnel. Harris. Omar.”

“They were constructs,” the doctor explained. “Projections of fragmented memory. Anchors your mind created to preserve continuity. It’s common in recursive states.”

Her voice cracked. “They were real.”

The doctor hesitated, just long enough for her to notice.

“Some aspects may have originated in reality,” he said carefully. “We believe your neural feedback isn’t entirely internal. There’s something reactive in the system—something triggered during the Midway event. We’re still working to understand its full scope.”

Tina turned her head toward the edge of the curtain. Beyond it, a hallway stretched outward. Nurses moved past, voices low and professional.

An orderly walked by, pushing a wheelchair.

The man sitting in it glanced toward her room.

It was Harris.

Thinner now, older than she remembered, but unmistakable. His eyes locked on hers. As he passed, he mouthed two words: Still here.

Then he disappeared around the corner.

Tina turned her head farther, ignoring the ache in her neck.

On the nightstand beside her bed sat a phone. It wasn’t hers. The model was older, the edges scorched. The screen was lit, its battery somehow still functional.

A single video was paused.

Her own face filled the frame—profile view, lit by dim red light.

She reached for it. The restraint allowed just enough slack.

As soon as her fingers touched the device, the image distorted.

Static bled across the screen. Her features dissolved into flickering gray noise. Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened, trying to speak through the interference.

The monitor behind her spiked.

The doctor stepped forward. “Easy,” he said. “Try not to exert yourself.”

Tina didn’t respond. She kept her eyes on the screen.

The static pulsed once more, and then froze.

Slowly, she turned her head toward the window.

Outside, the city looked familiar. Rows of lit buildings stretched toward the skyline. Rain streaked the glass. A few distant streetlights flickered.

But beyond the hospital campus, behind a chain-link fence and a row of maintenance sheds, she saw the tracks.

A single train sat waiting.

It was still, half-shrouded in shadow.

Its headlight flickered.

Beneath the surface of the earth, something shifted. She could feel the vibration in her chest.

The train began to move.

It rolled forward into the tunnel beneath the city—the same stretch she had ridden so many nights. A faded sign marked the entrance: Midway Tunnel – Eastbound 906 Line.

Something inside her clicked.

Recognition.

She remembered everything. The seat numbers. The sound of the emergency tones. The look in Omar’s eyes when he realized the loop wasn’t time—it was awareness. She remembered the shape the static had taken just before it reached her.

She looked down at her wrist.

A faint scar remained—a single tally mark.

Her eyes returned to the window.

The train slipped into the dark.

And behind her, almost too low to hear beneath the soft rhythm of the monitor, came a new sound.

Static.