She hears fear in the question and knows the woman wonders if she should be doing the same. But there’s mockery, too. The same tone she heard so often at the school for the blind. She feels it. With each person she passes, with each conversation she momentarily halts, she knows the people on this train are wondering about her.

Paranoid.

But this train is set up to be wrecked. She knows this. Just like the house where she gave birth to Tom was set up to be wrecked. And the school for the blind. And, possibly, Camp Yadin, had they stayed there any longer.

This train will go mad.

There are more people here than lived in the house. But fewer than the school.

“Excuse me,” she says, as her gloved fingers nick what is probably the top of somebody’s head.

The first car is like the one she rode in with Shannon a lifetime ago, with people seated like they used to be.

She moves fast.

Tom and Olympia have been alone too long.

This train will go mad. She knows this. Eventually, the metal sheets Dean secured to the train’s side will come loose. Eventually someone crazy in an old-world way will lower something onto the tracks, too late for the man Michael to clear them. Eventually someone will see something and someone will go mad. A crazy person will be allowed onto the train. Someone who doesn’t believe in the creatures. Someone who will want everyone else to think the same way he does.

She reaches the end of the car. She opens the door.

In the moment between cars, she thinks of a blink. Perhaps, the inverse of one. Darkness, darkness, darkness, a blink of the world, darkness, darkness, darkness. She thinks of Shannon pointing out the dilapidated buildings and weird city names. Malorie laughed at her sister’s jokes, and soon they were making up stories, giving names to the people they saw out in the fields on the horizon. Giving them lives and interests, relationships and problems. Malorie remembers their mother, across the aisle, smiling at them. She wanted to impress Mom in that moment, wanted Mary Walsh to think her daughters funny. There was a boy at school, a writer already, whom everybody called imaginative, and Malorie wanted Mom and Dad (Sam and Mary Walsh) to say the same about her.

And Mom did.

On cue, she nodded Malorie’s way and said, Those are better stories than the one I’m reading.

Now, it’s impossible not to see Mom as she might look today. Older, whiter, meeker. She must be wearing a blindfold because, even in Malorie’s imagination, she can’t have anybody look in a public place. Certainly no one she cares about.