“Please,” the woman says. “Don’t ask me to look.”

“I wouldn’t dare. I understand.”

There’s a moment of silence between them. Malorie feels it, a kinship. Something deeper than personality or character or even worldview.

Instincts.

The word doesn’t feel as good to her as it normally does. She has trusted her instincts since the world went mad, and so far it has served her well. She is alive. Her teens are alive. Despite abhorrent tragedy erupting around them, they have survived. Yet, only days ago, Malorie abandoned those instincts for the first time. Even as her parents’ names flared bright from the page, even as images of the people they once were and the people they might’ve become rose like colored fog in her personal darkness, Malorie’s gut told her to stay. Her gut told her she’d been doing it right, that it was the only way to do it, and that to leave, in a rush, to run for a train run by who knows who, to be accompanied by who knows who, was all much worse than simply being unsafe; it was playing too many games of cards at once, too many chances to lose.

And now she faces her old self. Her strict, instinctual self. And she feels shame for having come.

“It’s the only thing in the world I’d remove my fold for,” the woman says.

“What is?” Malorie asks.

“My boy.” Then, “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you.”

The woman slides the door closed, and the clicking of the latch severs their worlds.

Malorie is alone again.

She breathes in. She holds it. She breathes out.

She steps to the next door and knocks. She waits. She tries the handle. The door slides open.

She steps inside.

The train is rocking as she enters somebody else’s room. She stands still. She listens.

Is the stirring coming from the wheels beyond the wall she faces? Or does somebody move in this very space?

“I’m looking for my son,” she says. Surely whoever is in this room, if they were to see her, blindfolded, scared, hooded, surely they would empathize, understand, respond.

She steps deeper into the room, arms extended. Her gloved fingertips come into contact with what she thinks is the mirror.

Motion behind her. The door slides closed.

She doesn’t move. She waits.

The train hums. The wheels whir. Is Dean uncovering a creature as she stands here? Are his eyes open, allowing the unfathomable in? Does the lid to the second box creak open as he checks the first?

Is Dean, mad, in this room?

“Is anybody there?” she asks.

It’s impossible not to imagine everything, every kind of thing, every potential danger, in this darkness. People, expressions, features, feelings, animals, smells, rivers, homes, schools, cabins, trains, madness.

But there is no answer.

Malorie steps forward, checks the bench.