Chương 36: Choosing the Stop

"That rain cost me far too much time… My usual luck." Lance Klint caught his breath, gripping one of the fence posts along the hillside. He rubbed his side clean of the last traces of mud. A group of people overtook him, disappearing into the tunnel of wood and brick that was Bayork's station. Given the noise trains made, the space they required, and the maintenance they demanded, it had been an easy decision for the city's administrators to build the stops just outside the inhabited districts.

"It's my second time here, and it's still beautiful." He murmured, pushing off from the fence and resuming his walk across the muddy ground, damp and treacherous underfoot. He adjusted the white scarf at his neck, smiling.

"I never thought scarves were this good. Now I understand why so many people wear them even when it isn't freezing." He tried it in several different arrangements, studying his reflection in a grimy puddle. He settled on winding it around his neck and letting a short arm of fabric fall over his right shoulder.

"Not that this is exactly ordinary clothing..." What Lance was wearing at his throat like an ornament was, in truth, the suit Lucas had given him for the mission. The same applied to the gloves on his hands, reinforced all the way through their lining and capable of cleaving a wall clean through. He adjusted his bag against his side and tucked it under his arm before making his way into the passage. A row of white lights accompanied his entry, followed by a gust of cold air.

Most stations were built level with the city or on an incline, but Bayork's had been constructed through a fissure in the crust, opened up by the bombardments and tremors that had reduced the capital to the lagoon it was now. He descended the stairs slowly, letting others pass him on their way to their trains." These stairs were tiresome before, and they remain tiresome today." He smiled, remembering the first time he had come down these steps.

"When that client paid me a ticket for the T-Train, I couldn't believe it... It was so cool!" Pulling himself back to the present, Lance found himself inside the station, watching the crowd press toward the first platform. The entire structure rested on a vast platform connected by a series of bridges that directed each train to its respective line. The ravine itself was not particularly wide, which kept the infrastructure costs modest.

"ALL PASSENGERS HOLDING TICKETS FOR LINE T ARE REQUESTED TO PROCEED TO PLATFORM I." A human voice, amplified through a megaphone, rose above the murmur of the crowd. Lance shouldered his way toward the timetable board to check the next arrivals.

"I imagine all that technology is still too much for the public domain." Lambdite was not entirely obscure. Any devotee of science, or anyone who had visited the Institute, would have known something of it." Lucas told me that it's better this way... I guess chaos would erupt in a matter of hours." Lance finally made out the cork board, a timetable nailed to its surface. He stood before it for several minutes until he found the city Lucas had mentioned."

CLASS C TRAIN — DEPARTURE: 14: 10 — ARRIVAL: 00: 15 — FARE: 500 Alir""Prices have certainly risen since I was last here… Not that I ever paid for a train in my life." His wages had been left behind in his apartment at the NOIR base, and Lucas had left him just under a thousand to spend.

"Alir are such a strange currency. Why are they not tiered like Crowns and Crosses? He once saw them at a client's house.

"Was he a numismatist? I don't remember, but the wall filled with coins was pretty." They had various shapes: A cross and other strange ridges.

"Not that I have the time to think about culture and finances now..." Lance glanced at his coins: one alone was worth five hundred Alir, the others ranging from fifty to a hundred.

"How I used to leap for joy when I managed to earn more than a thousand at the end of the month." As a courier, Lance had never truly understood the value of money before coming to the capital.

"Frankly, the Capital is far more costly than what I could ever imagine."

"It matters little. I doubt I shall be taking many more trains in the near future." He smiled, turning toward the ticket window to complete his purchase. The man behind it, draped in a heavy bluish uniform trimmed with plumes along the shoulders, slid the hatch open and extended his hand.

"Coins only today." He warned in a dry, jaded tone, splaying his fingers as though offering a set of scales. Lance nodded and counted the correct amount into his palm. The man appeared to weigh the dull silver coins for a moment before withdrawing his arm behind the glass, replacing it with a white ticket edged in green. The boy thanked him with a bow and settled on one of the benches, which were, unexpectedly, quite empty along his line.

"I wonder whether Jeanne and Jude would enjoy a train journey. I know some fine places worth seeing…" He stared at the heavy iron slabs that made up the rails before him. A thin layer of ice coated the dark metal, though the warmth of the trains would make short work of so trivial an obstacle.

"What am I thinking… Why would I invite her along with my sister? I would only seem like a creep." He scratched his head, distracting himself from the quiet embarrassment with the architecture of the place. Now that he had a few minutes to spare, he could finally take in the station properly. The entire structure was built from two courses of red and white brick, intersecting in various geometric forms. Both ran upward toward the ceiling, supported by columns of dark, heavy timber.

Everything curved together into a vast mural bearing the archipelago's flag and its emblems. Andimica's flag was divided into two horizontal bands, yellow and black, with a pale blue sphere at its centre entwined with various symbols: gears, ravens, a cross, a torch, a ship, a sword, and a cloud. These were said to be the crests of the founders of the first Bayork. Then, without warning, a whistle cut through his reverie, followed by a cold rush of vapour.

Lance found his path barred by an enormous beast of iron and gears. Along the rails, massive chained wheels hissed against the ice. Rows of luminous red pipes gleamed near the windows, while a heavy cloud of smoke enveloped the carriage closest to the engine. The windows stretched wide across the full body of the vehicle, spanning two floors. The tapered form of the nose gradually gave way to the ordered, symmetrical arrangement of the rectangular carriages.

Gilded beams divided each car at its midpoint, while iron panels shielded the outer walls from debris and protected the windows.

"So this is Train C? Far more massive than I expected." Lance measured it against the slender T model, white-bodied with vivid red flanks.

"The trains that cross the Archipelago are a technology inherited from the past, refined after the war using knowledge that had been hard-won and repurposed." Lucas and Edvard were together in his memory, laughing while they started to explain things to a drenched Lance, armed with pincers and minuscule metal parts.

"Models are classified by build and function. C is the Common train, which moved slowly across almost all of Andimica. T was built around an extraordinarily complex Taumite engine, discovered through investigation of ancient remains. B carried passengers from any station to Bayork only, never stopping at the capital on arrival but departing instead from the start of its line. And then there was Train P, for the penitents."

Lucas read a little manual colored in red and green, all while Edvard kept on reminding Lance that he had missed a screw.

"Why am I doing this!?" Lance screamed, with his face red and dripping with sweat.

"You said... That you wanted to see our hobbies, no? Plus, you missed another piece of the model!" The boy sighed, swatting away the memory. Lance presented his ticket to one of the conductors, who, with a cordial smile, escorted him to his carriage. The wooden floor gave a deep, solid thud with each step, testifying to its sturdiness. The man slid open the door to Lance's small compartment. It glided smoothly into its recess, and he was pleasantly surprised by its ease.

He thanked the guard again and lay down on the dark green mattress, which carried a faint scent of woodland. He fixed his gaze on the vast forest beyond the small overhang, smiling at the sight of the snow.

"How beautiful the snow is this winter… A shame I cannot simply enjoy it." He breathed on the glass, drew a smiling face in the condensation, and waited for the train to depart. As time slipped past his gaze, Train C shot away from the station, leaving behind a trail of crimson vapour.

"Taumite… How many deliveries must it take to keep one of these running?" He recalled how arduous and sought-after those particular military shipments had been. Taumite was no recent discovery but a piece of lost history, recovered only by fortune.

"It amazes me how much a single one of those stones costs and how they can change people's lives."

"Perhaps Lucas will explain it to me someday… I was never that good with numbers." He murmured, his eyelids growing heavy. Yahhwwnnn. No sooner had the train chosen to depart than the young boy chose to reclaim every hour of sleep that anxiety had stripped from him over the preceding days. He found himself trapped inside an old room, lit by a feeble, hesitant light. The space was bare, holding only a bed and a small table nearby.

Lance took a step, drawing closer to the figure lying on the bed: a woman with long, thick black hair but of a skeletal, wasted appearance. Lance felt his chest seized by an icy grip, as though he were being punished for failing to recognise her. He finally summoned the will to approach the bedside and look her full in the face. For all the wretched state she was in, her eyes held a golden radiance so intense it rivalled the lamp. The two looked at one another, motionless in the grim silence of the room.

The woman smiled and held out her hand. Lance took it quickly and felt with a pang how cold and frail it seemed within his own. She smiled still, pressing her fingers tight around his.

"It is not your fault..." She murmured, barely a thread of voice. A violent cough tore loose from her mouth, shaking her body and the bed together. He moved to help her, driven by an instinct both distant and born of an inexplicable sorrow. He had always been grieved by death, but this was something altogether different. The woman waved him away, wiping the specks of blood from her lips with a dark handkerchief, velvet, perhaps.

"There is nothing left you can do, for me or for anyone." She raised her torso with effort, trembling, and pointed toward a corner of the room where the darkness had gathered like a dense and suffocating mire. The smell of death filled the chamber under the terrified gaze of the poor boy. In the corner were two figures: one lying on the ground, the other crouched above her, pressing the back of her hand gently against the fallen one's cheek.

The first was pale, drained of every glimmer of life, dressed in a pink pyjama that covered her only to the knees. In the dark, Lance made out countless cuts, wounds, and burns across her white skin, the same white as her hair, left to gather dust against the floorboards. He recognised the face and the fragments of glass that had once been her spectacles. The memories flooded him like a swarm of needles.

"Eva…" He whispered, biting his lip in the hope of holding back the tears. Despite the sharp, piercing ache inside him, he could not stop them from spilling from his dark eyes. The second figure noticed his presence and fixed him with a stare through the veil. Her appearance was identical to the girl on the floor; Only her height and her clothing differed. Lance recognised at once the spectral woman crouched beside his sister.

"EVE! MUST YOU TORMENT ME EVEN HERE?!" He snarled, his fury shaking the whole world that was that squalid room of death and grief. The woman materialised before him, taking his face between her hands.

"This is not my doing. It is only your own will, attempting to return to itself." She released him, sending him stumbling backwards until he struck the foot of the bed. Eve turned back to regard the body of her double, offering it one last caress before addressing Lance.

"There is nothing you can do here if you cannot remember that night." A blinding light seared his eyes, followed by the deep smell of smoke and burning flesh. His sight returned only for him to find his lungs invaded by fumes. He looked about in panic, his gaze landing on the bed. He spun to check on the woman, and before he had taken a single step, his breath stopped. An enormous burning beam had split the bed in two, scattering its flames everywhere like infernal sparks.

Lance stood weeping, unable to move, until an explosion at his back forced him to hurl himself from the building.

"Why am I seeing this? Have I truly forgotten even this much?" He gasped, fighting not to dwell on the smell of burning flesh and the countless shadows dancing within the flames. He slid across the earth, struck by the sudden rain crashing down from the night sky.

"Klint… Klint!!" A voice jolted him awake, sending an icy shiver racing across his skin, one he knew intimately. He staggered upright, lurching toward the cries. The wind, the rain, the lightning seemed intertwined in that instant, instruments of a stage Lance had come to know.

"This cannot be… It did not happen like this the other times." He slid down the hillside on which the house stood, streaking himself with mud and earth. He felt his ankle twist and a searing pain flood his body, but the fear was too great to allow him to heed it. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. At last, he caught sight of the scene he had never wished to see again.

A bolt of lightning struck the sea of rain and moaning wind, cleaving the night open and illuminating the two figures on the ground. The sound of flames wrestling with the water, and the dancing lights that forced their way savagely through the trees stripped from Lance whatever hope had remained in him.

"STOP!!" He cried, dragging his leg toward them, waving his hands uselessly against the rain that lashed his face. A white flash struck his exhausted eyes hard, sending him sliding into the mud and wet grass. He dug his fingers into the earth, hauling his body forward on the strength of his arms alone. He had reached the point in the dream where the figure bent over him.

"Please… Answer me... I beg you." He murmured, tasting soil on his tongue, undercut by the bitterness of ash and char. The few tears he managed to shed were washed away by the storm, as the figures receded from him, warping into an endless corridor of darkness and estrangement. Lance snapped awake, striking the handle of the sliding door squarely with his forehead. He began groaning and pressing carefully at his brow, hoping he would not have to waste time nursing a bruise.

Outside the window, the train hurtled along at full speed, the landscape dissolving in the instant his eyelids drooped. The sky was dark and terribly bare of light, a scattering of stars its only adornment.

"It hurts so much! How long was I asleep?" He raised his wrist, still wincing from the knock, and pushed his sleeve up to expose his watch. He tried to wake it, but the device was reluctant to show any sign of life. Lance began shaking his arm to rouse it until he struck the corner of the table clean on.

"Damn it!" He exclaimed, alarmed, making sure the watch was intact.

"Maverick will kill me if this thing gets a single crack!" He checked the watch on his wrist multiple times before sighing in relief. He lowered his shoulders, sinking into the seat. His gaze switched from the table to the dimly lit window, with a smile. Then something far more unsettling registered: the moon had vanished, and the landscape with it. The world beyond the train window had become a desolate expanse of pure dark.

"What in the devil is happening now…" He murmured uneasily, only to make out a figure seated on the other bench in the compartment. Lance turned with a frightened grimace and found a man dressed with impeccable elegance in a black suit and a hat of the same colour. The man raised his hand, waving it just below his chin, the only visible part of his face.

"Hello, Lance. This is the first time we have properly met…" Instead of greeting him in kind, the boy found himself standing on the bench, poised to spring back in alarm. The moment the man tilted his head, however, Lance relaxed.

"Ah… It's you, Tux." Relieved, he settled back into his place and pressed a hand to his chest to confirm his heart was still keeping a proper rhythm. Tux, for his part, seemed quite taken aback by the reaction.

"Is this how you greet me, after everything I have done for you?" He sighed, crossing his legs and resting his face on his arm. His jacket was so immaculate it showed not a single crease, as though it had somehow fused with his body.

"Forgive me, but I imagine you are aware of recent events?" Lance asked, adjusting his scarf and fixing his gaze on his interlocutor. A laugh escaped the fog that masked Tux's face"You have met my other half, though calling her that… Is rather an understatement on my part." He answered, adjusting the hat from beneath which untidy strands of black hair had escaped.

"Before we continue on that subject, I have a question." Tux leaned toward Lance, inclining his back slightly forward. For some reason, his reflection did not appear in the glass.

"Who is Tux?" He asked the boy, who had returned to that same expression of bewilderment as before.

"You are…" He answered calmly, attempting to produce a smile despite the awkward atmosphere. Tux shook his head and posed the question again.

"That much I had gathered, but why do you call me by that name?" With even greater confusion than before, Lance looked down and tried to explain the origin of the nickname.

"Because you are always impeccably dressed, and I needed a way to call you. The elegant voice that assails me while I am in a coma did not seem especially memorable." Tux allowed a laugh to escape, watching the shadows shift across the ceiling of the compartment.

"Were I a father, I would come to you for naming advice… I am rather fond of Tux." He placed a hand on Lance's shoulder despite the distance between them, and for a moment, the space between them seemed to contract. Lance reddened, muttering some incomprehensible apology.

"You dislike the idea? You do not wish to have children?" Tux asked, stifling a laugh at the sight of Lance mumbling something under his breath.

"It is not that I dislike the idea…" He murmured, face still burning, twisting his fingers together. Tux tilted his head and looked him square in the face.

"Only that you would need to find the right woman first, and I am not particularly skilled in that manner of thing…" He tried to escape Tux's scrutiny with a smile, reclaiming something of his composure for a brief moment.

"WHY IN THE DEVIL ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW?!" He blurted out, then immediately clapped a hand over his mouth.

"Do not worry about waking anyone. This is a space I have carved within your core. Think of it as a dimension that exists solely within your mind." Tux explained, gesturing toward the eternal darkness outside the window, which even the train's own lights could not pierce. Then he opened the door, and Lance noticed with astonishment that the rest of the train had vanished entirely.

"So I am dreaming?" He asked, reaching a hand out through the doorway. He felt the wind move along his skin and the whole compartment sway, yet it was impossible to tell whether the movement was real or merely a hallucination.

"Not precisely," Tux answered, producing a small black gemstone coated in a substance nearly transparent and violaceous, threaded through with a strange dark sediment. The sphere seemed almost to pulse, like a living heart. Lance appeared to recognise it immediately.

"Is that my core?!" Tux nodded and set it gently on the table. The organ seemed to float above the wood, suspended in perfect stillness." Is this what a doctor feels when they cut open a body?"

"You see, this space exists because both I and that woman are fundamental components of your core. Your consciousness is presently contained within it, while in the material world, you appear to be in a state of coma, and this is not something you can govern. If you lose control, one of us may emerge and draw you in here." He explained, tapping the gemstone before them with delicate care. Unsettling white drops struck its surface.

"What are you, exactly? You and Eve?" Lance asked, fixing Tux with a burning look. His dark pupils seemed almost to ignite.

"Let us say we are the remnants of a lost history, which unfortunately found their way into your interior." He answered quickly, gripping his own shoulder and avoiding his gaze.

"Are you from the Lost Epoch?!" Lance brought both hands down on the table, startled to find the core utterly unmoved by the impact.

"No. I know very little of what Nikola did. The one you call Eve knows far more, but her knowledge is still limited." He answered, sitting up now with greater formality, less ease than before.

"Then who is Eve?" He asked, conjuring before his mind the same woman who had appeared to him so many times, even during his waking hours.

"The one you call Eve is the fundamental component of your Core, born originally from…" Tux felt a sharp pain drive its way through his chest, until blood erupted across the entire surface of the table.

"TUX?!" Lance rushed to him, cradling his head, which had gone cold and colourless. The fog across his face was thickening.

"I am more constrained than I expected… Not much power remains to me." He murmured between one spray of blood and the next, pushing Lance away.

"I cannot tell you everything... I am bound, regrettably, but I wish to say one thing with the time I have left." He drew from his pocket a dark handkerchief, already stained. He wiped the blood from his lips and folded it carefully back into his breast pocket. Lance stood motionless, watching.

"Everything you have done and will do… Do you truly wish to do it?" The question seemed to shake the entire dark world around them. Even the gemstone on the table had begun to stir, trembling as though on the verge of boiling.

"What do you mean?" Lance shot to his feet in a second, staring at the fog that shrouded the man's face.

"I mean… Are you certain you wish to continue with this path?" He took Lance by the collar, sending the scarf sliding into the void behind him. Tux's grip grew steadily more intense. The boy looked at him, confused, as the man's breathing grew laboured.

"You are young. If you truly wished to leave and abandon it all, you could. I would keep Eve at bay for as long as I am able. With the power you carry, you could fashion yourself a life, and…" Tux fell silent as Lance embraced him, leaning slightly forward.

"Thank you… But this is not where I wish to stop." He smiled, feeling the back of his neck turn cold at the touch of that grim, fog-laden mass that was the man's face.

"This journey I undertook to help those who were dealt an ill hand, to find my family and my memories… And besides, NOIR is full of remarkable people. I do not wish to leave them, even if it shall cost me dearly." He drew back slowly, keeping his gaze on Tux, who had gone perfectly still.

"I... Did not fail Damian…" He began to laugh, tilting slightly to the side before spitting more blood. The faint sound of each splatter was enough to send a jolt through Lance.

"I am fine, but my time is nearly spent…" He murmured, catching Lance's sleeve, which had instinctively stretched toward him.

"Know that if this is your choice… You will be required to prove the will to pursue it. This was your sole occasion to change your stop." The fog over his face dissolved for an instant. Lance caught a glimpse of the scars beneath and the cracked lips before losing sight of him again.

"I promised I would not fail, and I shall not." Lance seized him by the shoulders, helping him sit, but Tux pushed him away once more.

"Always concerned with someone else… It suits you both." Another jet of blood stained the floor and the boy's clothes. Tux was beginning to flicker.

"It suits you both?" He murmured, feeling something like a flame kindle in his mind as his interlocutor's voice grew ever more distant.

"I cannot say more. I have paid the price in your stead. Know only this..."

"I am grateful you were born." An enormous tentacle of black mire drove through Tux's chest, spraying blood across the room and across Lance's face.

"You again…" A woman's voice seemed to snarl from the dark, slowly drawing him inward as Lance could only stand there, trembling, drained of colour.

"Damn it… My time is done… Do not hold it against her, Lance… She is only wounded." The blood ceased flowing from the wound, and Tux began to be absorbed into the black mire. That dark liquid pulsed with a rhythm of its own, and at each contraction it drew him further within. Lance seized his hand but understood at once he was utterly powerless.

"Come on… Pull!" He clenched his teeth, straining with every last reserve. His grip slipped, sending him slamming against the only stretch of wall the darkness had not yet devoured.

"Enough, Lance… I stop here, but you do not… You must live!" His torso was already within the tendril of shadow, which was slowly assuming something more feminine in its contours.

"Live your weeping, live your errors, live your joys… Hope you will tell me of them when we meet again, then." A tear escaped his eye, powerless before the creature slowly consuming his interlocutor. With what strength remained to him, Tux seized the boy's face, brushing the sorrow from beneath his eye.

"You are the emblem of my failure… And my most luminous hope." He lost his hold, sliding at last into the spectral pitch, from which Eve's features had finally made themselves plain: those long arms and the white cascade of her hair.

"Thank you for everything, Lance Klint…" These were his last words, followed by the total collapse of the world. Lance plunged into nothing, surrounded by scattered flashes of memory, each one presided over by the same boy he had dreamt of in the capital, watching him intently.

"And who should you be now…" He murmured, before feeling his body grow light as if he were drowning, and his mind grow heavy. He woke at last in the material world, turning a tearful gaze toward the moon as it danced across a sea of stars. The rhythm of the train and its jolts pulled him back to reality. The heavy thunder of the engine and the endless bursts of scalding steam shredded the nocturnal calm. His mouth was filled with saliva, and a singular tear had dried up on his cheek.

"Excuse me…" A voice called to him from behind. Lance recognised the train guard by the reflection in the window and turned after pushing his spectacles back up his nose.

"I am terribly sorry to disturb you, but the next stop is Catteridge. You ought to prepare yourself." Lance nodded with his usual mild and luminous expression, which the man returned in kind, before leaving him alone once more. A shaft of moonlight cleaved the nocturnal darkness that had obscured the view beyond the glass. Far off, a vast mountain rose into view, wedge-shaped, extending across the black horizon as it gathered stars around its crown.

Lance remained transfixed by so natural a sight, less imposing than the monolith of Dielmon, yet in its own manner far more extraordinary.

"Mount Argo…" He stayed there open-mouthed, face pressed to the glass like a child. Then a wall of dark, moss-and-ivy-covered brick cut across the view. The train began to slow, and Lance heard a great clamour of voices followed by a surging sound of footsteps.

"I have very little time." He wound his scarf close and seized his bag, throwing himself out of the compartment.

"Dirac… Tux… Lucas… I will not fail you." He set foot on the platform and bolted toward the exit, his mind fixed entirely on the wall of rock in the distance. He threw himself politely into a modest second-class cab, behind a rather drowsy driver. He pressed his last coins into the man's hand and made his request.

"Please… As close to that mountain as you can manage." The driver let out a gruff sigh and put his foot to the accelerator, vanishing into the dark forest.