The names stand out to her, even now, as she stands far from them, at the door, her hand on the knob. The names seem to be written in something like steel, impossible to remove, hardier than she is. As if the names themselves wear blindfolds and will therefore survive this new world long after Malorie succumbs to it.

She closes her eyes.

She opens the office door then closes it again without leaving the room.

She returns to the page about the train.

“Mom?” Tom calls from the outer office. “You need help in there?”

She doesn’t answer. She reads:

Because of the existing tracks, a train is the safest mode of transportation in the new world. No fear of driving up onto a curve, hitting a parked car, hitting a person.

No. No. It’s too good. Too possible. And nothing, Malorie knows, absolutely nothing is so ready-made these days.

But she reads on.

So long as the tracks are clear, and the machine travels at a slow enough speed…

Malorie looks away. She feels pain. Literal, physical, pain. Are her parents alive? Have they been alive this whole time?

She thinks of Shannon’s face, telling her they weren’t answering their phone anymore. She thinks of Shannon’s dead body upstairs.

By her own hand.

The guilt for not having sought out Sam and Mary Walsh, to verify their deaths, is almost too rich to endure. It’s been seventeen years.

The Blind Train runs on tracks between Lansing, Michigan, and Mackinaw City, Michigan.

Mackinaw City, Malorie thinks. The very tip of the Lower Peninsula. The bottom of the bridge that connects it to the Upper.

The train travels at no more than five miles an hour. It runs on coal. The windows are painted black. I know almost nothing more about it for I have yet to ride it myself.

“Nope,” Malorie says.

But she’s already feeling the very tips of the fingers of yes.

She closes her eyes and exits the inner office.

“Mom,” Olympia says.

“I need to speak with Ron Handy,” she says.

“The door is closed, Mom,” Tom says.

She opens her eyes. She sees her two teens looking back at her with flushed faces. This must all be so incredibly exciting to them. This unreality. This lie.

“We’ll walk you there,” Tom says. “We can use my—”

“No,” she says. “I need to speak to him alone.”

She needs to speak to an adult is what she needs. Even one twice as paranoid as herself.

Ron Handy is the closest neighbor they have. At three miles, the former gas station he dwells in is far, but close enough.

She needs the self-proclaimed Humorous Hermit because she can hardly breathe. It feels like, any second, her parents could die again. If they are alive, if they also survived these seventeen years, what’s to stop them from dying right now…right now…

RIGHT NOW?