She can’t see it, but she knows this is where she boarded the train. The platform her teens pulled her onto, as the safety of Camp Yadin receded.

“Tom?” Malorie asks.

It’s a different voice that responds. Not her son. Not the man who took her here.

But a voice she recognizes all the same.

“Take her, Nate,” the second man says. Malorie imagines a beard. A briefcase. Hands tearing down the drapes in the house in which she gave birth to her son.

“No,” she says.

But it’s so obviously yes.

The blindfold is torn from her face.

“I’ll meet you at Athena’s,” the second man says to the first.

“No,” Malorie says.

But it’s so irreversibly yes.

She turns to reach for the train’s back door, but her hands only find other hands. Hands that grip her hard.

Before pushing her off the train.

She thinks she hears one of them leaping, too, just before she hits the tracks, headfirst, just before she blacks out and sinks into a darkness no blindfold on Earth could provide.

TWENTY-ONE

Dean is in the first storage car, the very back of the train, when he hears what sounds like people moving by the train’s back door, the door Malorie came through when she and her two teens boarded. He knows his mind is piqued by the things Malorie has been saying. A missing son. A creature in storage.

And the fact that she believes touch can drive someone mad.

This worries him. Not because he believes everything he hears, but Malorie is especially believable. She’s sharp. She’s dedicated. And, most of all, her kids have survived this long. Dean has nothing but unfathomable respect for any parent who pulled that off.

He didn’t.

Blindfolded, he steps through the boxes of canned goods and clothing, his palms out, moving slow, lest something was jostled loose by the motion of the train, something that would hurt to run into.

He thinks of something touching his hand. He imagines going insane.

In his version, he doesn’t act stealthily. There’s nothing cunning about his vision of madness. Rather, he’s embarrassed by what he does: he sees himself, frothing, wild-eyed, racing the halls of this train with an axe.

He shakes his head no. He doesn’t need to be thinking this way. Not while searching for a casket that the woman Malorie thinks may be harboring a creature.

Who told her this? It doesn’t matter. Rumors abound on a blind train. A lot of scared people. But if safety is truly his top priority, then he must look into this now. Only, look is the one thing he won’t do.

Or perhaps one of two things.

“She’s really gotten into your head,” he says.

She has.

He doesn’t know yet how he’s going to search the casket for what’s inside.