She has to decide. She can’t sit still. She didn’t take her kids and leave her home and make it here just to be frightened into standing still by someone she doesn’t know. Someone she’s never seen. Someone she will never see again.

So she moves. She walks as if the man was never here. She passes where he must be. She doesn’t feel him. Doesn’t hit him. Doesn’t bump into anything at all.

She stops, reaches out behind her, feels both walls. The train rattles as she takes another step forward. She reaches out. Feels nobody. She goes the length of the hall, then back. All the way. She feels to know the doors to each cabin are closed and have been closed, since she did not hear them move. She smells the air. It still smells of a person, of a man. She can easily recall the touch of him. A bigger body. Like Dad’s was.

She looks up, blind, as if the man could somehow be hiding on the ceiling.

She makes it to the end of the hall again. She must pass through another set of doors to get to the next car. Then another at the end of that one. And so on.

She listens. Voices within the cabin beside her.

She hears:

“…someone on board claims to have caught one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I met him between cars.”

“Who?”

“He says it’s stowed in one of the caskets in storage.”

Malorie moves before she decides to. She’s through the doors and into the next hall, and her hands are extended, and her mind’s eye is cluttered with so many memories, so much fear, that it becomes even darker, as if, this whole time, all these years, she’s actually had the lights on, and the words she’s just heard through the closed door of a stranger’s cabin on a stranger’s train have flipped the switch off for good.

He claims to have caught one.

On board.

Stowed in one of the caskets in storage.

“Tom,” she says, “Olympia.”

Breathless, but breathing. Moving on her own but ultimately carried by the train.

By somebody else’s big idea.

Someone else’s idea of safe.

EIGHTEEN

“We’re not leaving this cabin until we get there,” she says. She’s still wearing her fold, her hoodie, her gloves. She’s made sure her teens are doing the same.

She doesn’t ask that they repeat what she’s said. She believes the ferocity of her tone is enough.

But is it?

“What happened?” Tom asks.

Of course Tom asks this. And of course Tom is going to resist. She crosses the cabin so that she’s closer to him. So that there’s no question as to how serious she is.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, tremors in her voice. “I said we’re staying. That means we are.”