It doesn’t matter that she fought with Tom. Nothing matters right now but the incredible hum in the distance. Every few feet the source sounds like it’s coming from a different place. To her right; no, left. It’s got to be less than a mile now, no, more like three. At times, the sound vanishes altogether, and Malorie imagines a train vanishing, like a trick on television, the whole giant thing fading until, just when she thinks it’s gone, it appears again, over a horizon that could be near or far.

“Tom?” she asks.

“Yes. I’m fine.”

She doesn’t need to ask after Olympia. Her daughter is leading the rush, like she’s done so many times before. Malorie remembers the trip from the school for the blind to Camp Yadin. Even then, little Olympia took charge.

“Watch out,” Olympia calls. “Big turn in the road.”

Malorie moves toward her, her daughter, while thinking of herself as a daughter, daughter to Sam and Mary Walsh. She suddenly can’t tell the difference between who’s who here, and then Olympia’s hand is at her elbow, guiding her.

Olympia says something about the train, how it might not be leaving, might not be there at all. But Malorie’s mind is so gorged with the possibility of seeing her parents that she’s mistaking the train for them, as if it’s Mom and Dad idling in the distance.

“I can run ahead,” Tom says. Because he doesn’t worry about falling. Because he’d bounce back up. Because he’s sixteen.

“No,” Malorie says. But maybe this is one time she should say yes. “You can’t get hurt. Not now.”

Her voice is breathless, the syllables broken by heaves. Is she panicking?

It strikes her that Sam and Mary Walsh could be standing by the monster that idles. If the train goes to Mackinaw City, and if her parents had, at one point, worked their way downstate, doesn’t it stand to reason they could’ve taken the train south? Even as Malorie runs to take it up to them?

Reason.

The word sounds wholly out of place here. Reason in a world gone mad. A world gone dark. A world where she could conceivably be passing her mom and dad right now, the two of them quiet for the sound of three people running toward them, the two of them still working their way downstate, the two of them looking for her.

It’s not a train, Malorie thinks. Because it can’t be. Because the idling engine of a train doesn’t go quiet, then rise again. It doesn’t sound exactly like this. And because it would be too unfathomably good for her if it is there.

If there’s one thing Malorie hasn’t had, it’s breaks.

Has anyone?

But she moves toward it still. Nearly running now.