“I’ll go.”

On the way to the train yard, I think about what Thane said—I need to learn to open the gates, to save souls, to rid the world of Influence. For such a heavy burden, I wonder why I was so alone in the discovery of my power. It had been just after I found Poppa dead and witnessed a plume of black explode from his body. Influence, I now know, but then, I’d been so afraid. So fearful. The thread had burst from me then and every time after that, responding to those same emotions. This can’t be how it’s meant to be, summoning the thread when I feel the most distress.

I know I need to learn to control it, and it would be best if I could summon the gates. Having a box of coins lying around is dangerous. Look at the chaos losing one caused. But how am I supposed to learn? How am I supposed to stay under the radar practicing?

The headlights of Thane’s Charger only provide a few feet of visibility against the night as we approach the train yard, protected by a locked gate and a tall fence. Thane stops, exits the car, and unlocks the padlock.

“What?” he asks when he returns to the driver’s seat.

“Where did you get that key?”

“My uncle owns this property,” he says, as if that explains everything.

I look at him suspiciously. “That’s…convenient.”

“Don’t overthink this, Anora. My uncle owns half the town.”

“So you stole his keys?”

“I borrowed them,” he corrects. “Don’t make everything I do sound like a crime.”

He inches the car forward until it’s inside the gate and then shuts the engine off. I follow him as he exits the car; the wind roars around me, picking my hair up, tangling it around my neck. It also carries the distinct smell of rot. It’s faint, still some distance away, but chills spider down my arms and back, making my skin feel like canvas stretched too tight. Thane doesn’t seem to notice as he walks, the crunch of loose gravel grating under his feet.

We make our way to the thick of the yard, moving over the outlines of tracks, overgrown with patches of grass. Streetlights spill blue-tinted light over parts of the property. Worn and broken locomotives sit abandoned to our left, and I swear the way the light hits them, they have faces, angry and disfigured. Metal silos and warehouses rise like guards, obscuring anything beyond the yard. It’s clear by the size of this place that it used to be the hub of town, now just a phantom, and Rayon has grown around it.

I pause, standing at the center of a set of tracks. Behind me, a train with an ugly face stares back at me, while the rails at my feet create a path straight to a grid of warehouses with vacant, black windows.

“Why would Lily come here?” I ask.