Because it always does. When Malorie is around other people, someone makes a mistake. Someone tries something they shouldn’t. Someone believes something they shouldn’t. No two minds are alike, she knows. Not even her teens, raised as they have been in the same exact manner, having experienced the same exact series of events from when they were born to now, this minute, running for, and making, a train. Even someone who appears kindhearted might glance out a window. Even someone abrasive might never. The old constructs of good and bad have long been replaced with safe and unsafe. Are you a safe person? She thinks she is. She knows she is. At the school for the blind she was ridiculed for it. Others thought her precautions meant she thought they weren’t doing it right. Insecurities, here, even in the face of madness, the sight of a creature, not of this world, not of the old world, anyway. Long dead is the idea of the enthusiast, the go-getter, the happy man, woman, or child. Now, you either look or you do not. You either live by the fold or you do not. You either dedicate your life to the darkness, shared, at times, by rope, by hands, by voice, with those closest to you. Or you do not.

And this, this place that smells of people, where bodies can be heard shifting in the darkness, where conversations mingle with the throbbing of the engine and the rolling of the wheels on the pre-existing tracks, this place will end in madness, too.

Malorie only hopes they get to Mackinaw City first.

Someone walks toward them; Malorie hears heavy steps in what feels like a hall. The teens behind her, she stops and puts her arms out, acting the part of a shield. She thinks she hears movement behind a door to her left. Sleeping cars, then. A house moving at five miles per hour on a track. This is good. Or can be. Personal space. And if they get that space and someone invades it?

Jump.

“Latecomers,” a man’s voice. Sounds about Malorie’s age. “But comers all the same. David told me you just made it. Welcome. Isn’t it fantastic?”

Malorie feels the swaying of the car. Movement without moving her own legs. The first since taking a rowboat twelve years ago.

She doesn’t speak. She isn’t sure what to say, how to respond. This isn’t the same as encountering someone in Camp Yadin, a place she called home. This also isn’t like meeting someone in the woods, with no semblance of society at hand.

“I have a feeling you’re not going to want to do this,” the man begins. Malorie leans back, into her teens. “But you don’t have to wear your folds on the train.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Malorie says.