The teens are talking fast, yelling at each other, trying to pull Malorie to safety.

Malorie lifts her leg again and this time, when she lunges, the tip of her boot is supported by the first metal step.

“You can do it,” Olympia says.

Malorie pulls herself up, all the way, onto solid footing. She’s standing—standing!—gripping metal bannisters, already thinking that, however long this trip takes, she will not take off her fold for the duration.

They are moving without walking. In the new world.

A man’s voice breaks her reverie.

“You got her?”

“Yes,” Olympia says. She sounds like Shannon did on the dock.

“Who is that?” Malorie asks. But the thunder that usually accompanies these inquiries from her is absent.

They just made a moving train.

The man is talking again, but his voice grows distant. Malorie understands he’s heading deeper into the train. She hears a door slide closed.

She climbs the remaining steps.

Olympia and Tom are there. She hugs them in turn, as the three exclaim brief hollows of relief. Then she turns to face the darkness she just ran through, wondering if this was the right decision, if this isn’t the most dangerous thing she’s ever done.

She has put her teens’ lives in danger. There is no rationalizing this. No pretending she hasn’t.

“We did it,” Olympia says. She sounds ecstatic. Alive. Like a teen who has begun the biggest adventure of her life.

Malorie faces the train’s back door, the world of dirt roads and Camp Yadin fading out behind her.

She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out.

Who knows what kind of people are inside this train.

Or how many.

She thinks, If it gets bad, we can leap.

“Okay,” she says, flecks of mania in her voice. “Keep your folds and hoodies on. Gloves, too. We’re going in.”

She feels a pat against her bag. Is it Tom trying to hug her again?

Malorie steps between her teens and finds the handle for the sliding door. She thinks of her mom and dad because she can’t not think of them. Their names, emblazoned on the pages in her bag, their names that got her on this train.

“You do exactly what I say,” she says. “And you only talk to who I say you can talk to. You tell nobody where we are going or why. We are not here to make friends. We are here to get from one place to another. That is all. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Olympia says.

“Yes,” Tom says.

“Okay,” Malorie says. “I love you guys.”

All images, memories, and fantasies leave Malorie’s mind at once, leaving only the infinite black of what’s to come before her.

She slides the door open.

She breathes in, she holds it, she breathes out.

And the trio enters the blind train.

The Blind Train

THIRTEEN

This will end in madness.