“I’m sorry,” Malorie says. And it feels like she’s saying it to herself, telling herself she’s sorry for losing sight of Tom. Sorry for slapping her son. Sorry for turning into the paranoid person she’s become.

She stumbles from the door, visions of herself and Tom and Olympia tucked safely inside. As if she’s leaving that possibility now. Leaving security and safety at last. Becoming, in the end, unsafe.

If they’d run for the train a year earlier, would this be happening? Would Tom have reached his end with her?

And her with him?

She can’t think about that. Not now. The names of her parents burn bright in her head, burn the very pages they appeared upon, and Tom vanishing into the darkness of a moving train cannot eclipse this.

Yet, everything, everything feels wrong. The movement, the voices, the smells, the fact that they are in the hands of other people, Olympia alone in their room, Tom alone and angry, Malorie alone and searching.

The caskets in storage. Dean checking them.

How? How can he possibly know if one is in there or not without looking?

Absolutely everything feels wrong, everything is wrong, like it’s gone wrong, like she fucked up something that was once precious to her. She’s struggling to get a grip, to find purchase in the pitch-black present.

Jesus.

She should’ve stayed home.

She knocks on the next door. A man slides it open. When he speaks, his voice comes from above. He’s tall. He sounds like what people used to refer to as conservative, though that word doesn’t apply to the new world. Not to Malorie. There are only those who are safe and those who are not, and today she was not.

“My son,” she says.

Before she says any more, the man speaks.

“Young man? Teenager? Black hair like yours?”

“Yes.” She hears the light, the hope in her voice. It startles her.

“Saw him go down the hall. Closed my eyes when he made it to the end there.”

“Okay. Thank you.”

This is something.

“But he stood between the cars for a long time.”

“How would you know that?”

“Because I listen closely, ma’am. And I didn’t hear that second door, the door to the next car, open for a long, long time.”

“How long?”

“Two, three minutes.”

“But you heard it open?”

“Yes.”

“So you know he went through?”

“Me?” the man says. “What do I know? I think we’re out of our minds for taking a blind train in the first place. Could’ve been a creature that opened the next door for all I know.”

“But, you—”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he says. “That’s all I know.”

Firm. Final.

She understands. She thanks him as the door slides closed again.

Two or three minutes.

Between cars.

What was he doing there? No hoodie. No gloves. No fold.