And in the dreams there are creatures.

Everywhere.

FIFTEEN

Despite the setting, the voices of other people, the sound of guitars being played, the motion of the train, and the man Dean himself sitting across a table she has not and will not see, Malorie still thinks of her parents. And how can she not? The last time she rode a train, it was with them, the Wolverine Line, from Detroit to Chicago, as Dad spent the beginning of his vacation in the bar car and his two daughters stared out the train windows, watching a wholly new landscape pass with more precision than it ever did in a minivan. It was exhilarating then, two Upper Peninsula teens heading to the big city for the first time in their lives. They only saw a sliver of Detroit, their drive down taking them over the bridge, through Mackinaw City, Gaylord, Bay City, Flint, and Saginaw before reaching the bustle of the suburbs of Detroit, the very area Shannon and Malorie would eventually move to, shortly before Shannon looked out a window and took her own life. Back then, on the Wolverine Line, the car full to capacity, Dad laughing with strangers in the bar car, Mom reading a book across the aisle, the idea of Chicago might as well have been Oz. Glittering constructs and shimmering suits, magic in every brick and bone.

“Here,” Dean says. He guides Malorie’s hand to a plate. “Fruit if you want it.”

Malorie, blindfolded, wonders if it’s possible that somehow the very train they took to Chicago, the cars themselves, made their way through some sort of boxcar arc, orphans moved from one location to another, so that here she sits in the very same rectangle that she and her sister once rode, feeling then the electricity of infinity ahead.

“Shoot,” Dean says. “Hit me with all you want to know.”

But before she does, a woman’s voice comes close.

“Dean,” the woman says. “There’s a man in car six who thinks a spider or some bug is crawling on him. I keep telling him I don’t see anything, but he insists.”

“And he wants us to get rid of it?”

“I guess so.”

Dean laughs. It sounds genuine to Malorie.

“Some people do expect old-world luxuries when they board, Jill.”

Malorie momentarily thinks that he’s talking to the woman. She’s forgotten she is “Jill.”

“Car six?” he asks the woman.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

Then, the two are alone again. Only they’re not. Malorie hears the quiet conversation of other people. Hears them discussing cities in Michigan, the telegram, the fact that they’re on a train and if a train again, why not everything again, why not the entire old world again, sooner than later?