Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

 They’d first heard the song in the car. It had come on the radio on the way home from a swim meet in their junior year; Lake was driving even though she technically didn’t have a license. She had a class G permit, but actually taking the exam and getting a proper state ID just hadn’t happened— they’d gotten her enrolled in school without too much trouble, as a freshman that first fall, but interacting more directly with the state government still felt like a dicey proposition. Jesse had offered to drive, but Lake had pointed out that he needed to rest and that the HPD weren’t really going to pull over a seven year old sedan with a Flagstaff High Athletics bumpersticker, and even promised not to speed if it made him feel better, so she was on the driver’s side while he tilted the passenger’s seat back and breathed slow. 

 He’d done well, coming in first in an individual and a relay, second in his other individual, and third in the last relay. It was a good showing, and after he’d done so well at state the previous year, he was definitely on track to go again. Lake had enjoyed state; the whole family had driven up to Phoenix, and Lake had never seen so many dumb swimming puns in her life as those kids had on their backpacks and hats and keychains. Nate had been psyched about all the new Pokémon he could catch, and the vibe of a bunch of Jesse’s chlorinated teammates laughing too loud at a diner after the last heat was, while not one where she felt like she belonged, one she could appreciate from a corner seat. 

 Because Lake was focusing equal parts on the road and on reminiscing, Jesse was the one who noticed the song first. 

 “Hey, did you hear that?” he asked, sitting up. 

 “Hear what?”

 “That,” he said unhelpfully, but then gestured to the dashboard, which narrowed it down a little. “Do you know this song?”

 “Why would I know a song on the 80s throwback station?”

 “Because my radio’s been stuck on it for like three weeks?”

 Lake rolled her eyes and wouldn’t have admitted she was smiling. She didn’t recognize the song; it was somewhere in the middle grounds between glam and arena rock, and her tastes always edged more towards punk and riot grrrl, but it had a catchy melody and the singer’s voice was nice, low and agile, kind of bargain-bin-Bowie. 

 “What about the sequin music, though?”

 “There was a line— maybe it’ll come back around, just listen.”

 So Lake listened. 

 There’s a big black train a-coming,
 Scraping along the track
 You’ll be someone you don’t know
 By the time it takes you back. 

 “Huh,” she said. 

 “It’s probably a coincidence,” Jesse said, though he sounded like he didn’t quite believe it. “I mean, I get a little weird about anything that talks about trains.”

 “And you were only there for like a month,” Lake said. “It sounds kinda familiar, though.”

 There’s a big black train a-coming,
 Rolling down the irons,
 You don’t need no tickets,
 It’ll take you when it’s time. 

 Lake narrowed her eyes, though they were still fixed on the road ahead of her. 

 “I’m googling it,” Jesse said, pulling out his phone. 

 “You’re gonna get carsick.”

 “I’m not gonna get carsick.”

 Jesse got carsick, but before he had to stop squinting at his phone to allay his blinding headache, he’d managed to find the name of the song— Big Black Train— and the artist, a Canadian rock band called Duet. 

 “Are you adding it to your library?” Lake asked. 

 “I’m trying,” Jesse said, “but I don’t have wifi out here. It’ll load when we get home.”

 “Add the whole album it’s on, dingus,” Lake said. “Concept albums were a thing in the eighties. Maybe it’s part of, like, a whole story that’ll make it make normal non-train sense.”

 “I’m a dingus for not thinking of that?” Jesse said, faux-offended.

 “Dingus.”

 They’d pretty much forgotten about it by the time they got home, the conversation having shifted to the imminent disaster that was Lake’s midterm APUSH essay.  She hadn’t planned to take any AP classes, being very firmly Not A Nerd, but she’d done well enough in her history class in sophomore year that the school counselor had insisted. She didn’t really regret it, since a lot of weird crap had happened in American history, but she was raging lately about how little they’d discussed the union movement and was planning to use her midterm essay to yell at the teacher about it in academic language. She’d put off writing it, because she was focused on not failing her least favourite subjects (Algebra and Bio), and now was scrambling to focus her rage into paragraphs and take out all the swear words. It was probably going to get her in trouble, but she was determined to do it. They were still joking about it when she pulled into the driveway, and Jesse had hugged her before she crawled upstairs. 

 Lake was in bed in the attic, which had become her room since she’d moved in with the Cosays, when she got a text from Jesse. 

JESSE: u awake?
LAKE: classy. yeah, i’m up.
JESSE: so I looked up the song!
LAKE: on your phone in bed, you’re going to wake up nate
JESSE: I’m under my blanket AND even if I wasn’t he’s shaded from the light in the bottom bunk. I have practice ;P
LAKE: carry on, Weeniest Rebel
JESSE: I dub thee Less Weenie Rebel
LAKE: i will take that title proudly
JESSE: song though
JESSE: so the band is called Duet and they’re these two Canadian guys who got big in the late 80s. Not like big big, but kinda big. They did concept albums a couple times so points to you. 
LAKE: points to me
JESSE: points to you!
JESSE: the song we heard wasn’t like a single or anything and apparently was kinda unpopular at the time because people thought it was weird this rock band was doing an old folk song. because it’s a folk song! 
LAKE: ???
JESSE: little black train is, like, Americana 101 apparently. There’s a carter family version and a woody guthrie version and the lyrics are always a little different and stuff. usually the train is a metaphor for death. duet took it and used it as a chorus and wrote their own verses. 
LAKE: huh, then maybe it doesn’t mean anything that they used it
LAKE: also, little black train? i thought it was big black train
JESSE: theirs is! but yeah, folk songs get changed a bunch, there’s versions where it’s old black train too
JESSE: get this though

JESSE:

LAKE: what the fuck
JESSE: right???
LAKE: jesse what the fuck
JESSE: exactly!!!
LAKE: jesse what the fuck who are these guys
JESSE: ok so I looked at that too,
JESSE: (wikipedia my beloved,)
JESSE: they’re childhood friends from british columbia, which is like southwest canada. Ryan Akagi is the singer/guitar player and Min-Gi Park plays synth and does most of the writing. apparently playing gigs since high school but didn’t like officially Be Duet til they were in college. 
LAKE: jesse i know where british columbia is
JESSE: Well I wasn’t sure so I looked it up :p
JESSE: excuse me for trying to be helpful :p
LAKE: never
JESSE: so cruel 😭
JESSE: but get this they were MISSING PERSONS for a YEAR AND A HALF out of high school
LAKE: you’re shitting me
LAKE: there’s no way they weren’t on the train then
LAKE: what did they say about it??? a year and a half is nuts, you got shit from your folks for being gone a month.
JESSE: and lucky me I had Cold Hard Evidence 😉
LAKE: come upstairs and i’ll show you how cold and hard i can be
JESSE: Lake, are you flirting with me
LAKE: i meant i’d shove my cold feet in your face donkus
JESSE: fair enough
JESSE: anyway they refused to talk about it lol
JESSE: like didn’t cooperate with the cops or anything
LAKE: good ftp
JESSE: anyway they’re apparently pretty quiet about their personal lives 
JESSE: for obvious reasons
JESSE: but then they got a bunch of tabloid shit in the nineties because people kinda figured out they’re gay but they didn’t want to talk about it but like that could be cause or effect you know? they don’t talk about their lives because people were being nosy or people were being nosy because they don’t talk about their lives
LAKE: they’re gay like they’re a couple or just they’re both individually gay
JESSE: they got married in 2003 😊
LAKE: nice
JESSE: nice, right?
LAKE: yeah. getting married as old dudes.
JESSE: well it wasn’t legal before then
LAKE: that recent? fuck man
JESSE: yeah i think that’s what they wanted to do ;)
LAKE: JESSE
JESSE: YES?
LAKE: 🤬
JESSE: 😇
LAKE: go to sleep 
JESSE: only if you do too
LAKE: fine

 About a week later, Jesse found the Duet album Kezziopeia on CD in the record shop and bought it used for three bucks. He put it in the car’s player, and he and Lake listened through it over and over, three songs at a time on their way to and from school, over the course of the next couple months. Lake was really warming up to the music, even though it wasn’t her usual genre at all. The melody was mostly propelled by an electric guitar and a stylophone, though most of the faster songs had a drum machine as well, and once you paid attention you could hear the second, lower voice backing up the lead. They worked well together, and the honesty of the sound broke through her preference for harder-edged music. 

 They weren’t all the surreal, heavily-train-themed-if-you-knew songs that Jesse’s research said had got them labeled as a successor to the psychedelia of the sixties; some of them were straight up love songs, or take-over-the-world youthful rebellion songs, and the title track was an almost disgustingly cute ode to a mother figure. 

 “It’s just cool,” Jesse said one morning as he put the car in park in the school’s gravel lot, “to hear people who went through it going on to do stuff with their lives, you know?”
 
 “You’re going to do stuff with your life,” Lake said, “so it’s not really a surprise.”

 Jesse cooed, and Lake grumbled about her own accidental sappiness. 

 “My point is that they made art about it, and that’s neat,” Jesse said. “And they stayed together, not just making music but as people. They have like fifteen albums! Not a lot of bands hold on that long.”

 “That is pretty cool,” Lake admitted. “We should look up some more of their stuff.”

 “If it shows up at Rasputin, I’m nabbing it.”

 “Why don’t you just play it on your phone? Didn’t you download this whole album after the first time we heard Big Black Train?”

 “Because the car doesn’t have bluetooth, and it’s more fun to share it with you?”

 Lake pounded the back of her head against the car seat in frustration at Jesse’s sweetness, and nearly broke it. 

Lake was procrastinating on studying for her bio final when she found out that Duet still toured sometimes. 

 “Dude,” she said. 

 “Dude?” Jesse replied from the other end of the room where he was painstakingly drawing flash cards.

 “Dude,” she repeated, “Duet is gonna tour this summer.”

 “Seriously?” Jesse asked, getting up off the floor and coming to look over her shoulder. “They haven’t released a new album in like a decade.”

 “Yeah, but apparently they still tour sometimes,” Lake said, tilting her tablet (Jesse’s mom’s old one, passed on to her when she got a newer model) so he could see better. “Only across Canada this time, though.”

 “That sucks,” Jesse said. “I’d love to go see them.”

 “Me too,” Lake said. 

 There was a moment’s silence.

 Without saying another word, Lake googled ‘how long does it take to drive from arizona to canada’. 

 “You wanna road trip it?” Jesse asked. 

 “Got any better ideas?”

 “I don’t think there are better ideas than a road trip,” Jesse said, grinning. “Travel friends ride again!”

 Lake rolled her eyes, but smiled. “And this time we can get terrible roadside food and look at weird tourist traps and not be running for our lives,” she said. 

 So it was decided. Even though Alberta would have been a straighter shot from Arizona, with the timing of the end of the school year they figured out the show in Toronto would be the one they could get to without having to drive dangerously many hours in a day. They’d take three days to get there, spend the day and night of the show in Toronto, then head back at about the same speed.  Jesse’s parents were completely on board, with Mrs Cosay even saying that going on a trip with a friend to chase a band was an important rite of teenage passage, with the only caveat being that Lake had to get her permit before they went. 

 “I don’t want you two having to scramble to switch drivers when you hit a more cop-heavy state,” she’d said, “especially if one of you is tired. You have to both be legal so that who’s got the energy is your only concern. I want you two to be safe.”

 Getting the license was intimidating— she’d already had her picture taken for the permit, but that one had been in black and white, and she’d matted down her skin with Jesse’s spray sunscreen so she didn’t look too reflective in the photo. Anybody looking through the photos stored in the database would probably just think she had really bad skin, which was fine. The license, though, would be a colour photo and an exam in a car with a stranger who worked for the state. 

 “It’s just another body recognizing you as a person,” Jesse pointed out when they were heading to the DMV, “which is neat. None of our teachers have made a deal out of it, so I don’t think the state will.”

 “Our teachers got used to seeing me in video classes all of 2020 and 2021 where I could pretend I had a stupid filter on,” Lake pointed out, “so by the time they saw me in person for  the second half of sophomore year they were probably second-guessing themselves and crap. The state keeps an eye out for weird shit, and I’m definitely weird shit.”

 “You’re my weird shit,” Jesse said, “and I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.”

 “What are you gonna do, sing at them?”

 Jesse snorted. “Yeah, I’ll sing at them. I will sing at them so loud and so proud about our eternal bond that they will say ‘we’re so sorry, mister Cosay, we did not understand the hallowed importance of Travel Friends, we will leave you alone forever, but first here’s these eternal friendship medals—“

 Lake flicked him in the forehead, and he laughed. 

 “Seriously, it’s gonna be fine,” he said. “And now you’ll have an ID! We won’t have to sneak you into PG-13 movies anymore!”

 “Jesse, nobody has asked for my ID at the movie theatre since I was actually thirteen.”

 “That’s because you wear a leather jacket and glare at them.”

 “Works like a charm.”

 So she got her license. As much as rules rankled at her, she was perfectly capable of driving like a law-abiding citizen for an hour with an instructor in the passenger’s seat; he slammed on his imaginary passenger’s side brake a few times but she still passed. Filling out the paperwork for the license, she gave her weight as what she looked like (about 120) rather than what she actually weighed (several hundred), and listed her hair and eye colors both as black. None of this was exactly true, but it was close enough to the truth to raise fewer eyebrows in the processing. Hopefully. 

 The license, nice and official on sturdy plastic, came in the mail during finals week. She held it in both hands for a while, staring at her name, listed as Lake Olsen. 

 (As much as she wasn’t Tulip, she’d decided when she’d first enrolled in school that using her surname felt right. They were kind of like siblings, after all, coming from the same childhood and diverging hard. The Cosays had offered her theirs, but that somehow didn’t seem quite accurate, as much as she was part of the family now.)

 There it was. There was her name, in neat and honestly kind of ugly text under her photograph, her messy signature reproduced below that. She kind of wanted to cry, seeing it there and official. The State of Arizona recognized Lake Olsen as a human being. It wasn’t perfect— Arizona still didn’t have an X or ‘not listed’ option, so ‘sex’ was marked as F— but it was there and it was good.

 Nate hugged her around the middle. Jesse hugged her around the shoulders. It was good. It really was.

 Final exams taken, final essays turned in, Lake and Jesse piled into the car on a Saturday morning. Nate was excited because his parents had promised to take him to the water park while they were gone; Jesse had pretended to be deathly offended at Nate’s being excited he was leaving and fallen to his back in the grass, clutching his chest, so Lake made him shake out his jacket and toss it in the backseat rather than just get into the car in it. They’d stocked the car up with beef jerky sticks and bags of sun chips and bottles upon bottles of water, with an extra stock of Monster hidden in the glove box because Mr Cosay didn’t really approve of it. 

 Lake slid into the driver’s seat and touched the little deer statue Jesse had bought at the bookstore’s gift shop section for good luck. They’d fixed it to the dashboard with blue tack as an icon of Alan Dracula, and it had already been warmed by the sun until it almost felt like his antler under her fingers. 

 “You, me, and AD,” Jesse said. 

 “You, me, and AD,” Lake repeated. “Let’s hit the road."

Chapter Text

 Grace had been off the train for only six months when she found Duet.

 It had been a rough few years, dismantling what had once been the Apex, setting up the Mall Car into no longer a gang’s base but a waystation for travellers. Together, they’d cleaned up the walls, replacing the constant sigils of the Apex with graffiti murals and potted plants, teaching themselves to work the long-abandoned kitchens of the food court and setting up more hammocks in the camping store than there were ex-Apex kids, so there was always somewhere for people passing through to sleep.

 And people had passed through. Some of the former Apex kids had decided to move on, setting off on their journeys either alone or alongside other passengers who had spent the weekend in the Mall Car.  The car healed slowly. Its original denizens were— the only way she could bring herself to think of it was long gone— but once they were being run, the stalls in the food court started to quietly restock themselves, and the stores always seemed to have any item of clothing or travel accoutrements that the latest visitor needed. 

 She’d set up a few of the older teenagers to look after the car, training them in food safety and first aid, group management, wilderness navigation, everything she’d picked up over the course of over ten years on the train; ones who were comfortable staying in the car for a while. Lucy had taken off with a thirteen-year-old English boy and a floating flounder who had a single eye like hers, and Grace had cried, openly and without artifice.

 She’d dubbed the paper crane who had stayed at her side Sadako; the Thousand Paper Cranes had been the first story she’d read as a child that hadn’t had a happy ending, and it had stayed with her. When she was naming Sadako, right after the dissolution of the Apex and Simon’s death, she was in a very sad-ending kind of place. Perhaps it was self-indulgent, but she felt like having Sadako by her side might let her grant her own wish. Sadako didn’t speak, but she remained with her through everything, through confusion and doubt and goodbyes, silently perched on her shoulder or her finger or on top of her head.  Grace sometimes felt like it was lucky Sadako didn’t speak, because it left fewer opportunities for Grace to lie to her. 

 She hadn’t seen Hazel again. Neither Hazel nor Amelia, in fact; they’d ridden that ejected car over the horizon and never returned. Grace thought about Hazel every day, but as dearly as she wanted to see her again she knew that there were things she had to do where she was. 

 For a long time, she’d planned to leave the Mall Car behind when it was set up and self-sustaining and search for Hazel, heading backwards along the train. She’d made all her plans, how she and Sadako would take off with a proper pack of supplies, ready to tell passengers about the Mall Car, explain to other lost souls like her the purpose of the train, and find their way, eventually, to Hazel. She’d packed and unpacked her bag over and over, watching the car run smoothly and passengers come and go, never quite sure if she was ready. 

 One evening, Sadako had landed on the top handle of her backpack— appropriated from the camping store, with a stiff ergonomic back and a water-bottle holder— and despite her lack of a face, seemed to be giving her a look. 

 She missed Hazel so much. She’d played out what she’d say to her when they met up again time after time, and it was never quite right— if she imagined Hazel accepting her apology, it didn’t sound like Hazel, but Hazel screaming all the things she deserved to hear wasn’t like her either. It couldn’t be a loving reconciliation, and it couldn’t be a cathartic punishment. 

 Under Sadako’s invisible eye, she’d realized that the only thing the reunion could be was awkward. Hazel would have conflicting feelings, Hazel would not know what to say. Hazel would have her own life by now, because this wasn’t about Hazel.

 That was the crux of it; Grace’s desire to see Hazel was for her own peace of mind, and wouldn’t do Hazel any good at all. She missed her so badly, and would probably miss her forever, but to love her like she deserved to be loved, she had to let her go. 

 That had been the moment. That had been her zero. 

 She’d sat in front of the door for the rest of the evening, laughing through tears, sharing a feast of hot dogs and popcorn chicken and slushies with the current residents of the car. They’d done this once or twice before, when someone had reached zero in the car; had a festival and sang songs. She wore a burger-joint cardboard crown and collected hugs before standing, taking a deep breath, and falling backwards into the passageway she’d feared for so long. 

 The train had dropped her flat in a snowdrift, with her fanny pack but without her backpack, and she’d laid there in shock for a good thirty seconds before recognizing the tree she was staring at. 

 Shit. She was in front of her parents’ house. 

 She’d hauled herself out of the snow, realizing dimly her shirt was soaked, and just started running. Personal demons were all well and good, but facing her parents was not an appealing proposition. They would see her face and they would know her, even after all these years, and she couldn’t let that happen. Without thinking, she’d gotten as far away from the mansion as she could. Her childhood was so far behind her that even looking at the facade felt more foreign than any train car. 

 It had taken only three days to get out of DC, sweet-talking tourists until she’d got together the bus fare out of town. She’d headed for New York on a whim, thinking it was a city it would be easy to get lost in, and she’d been kind of right. Over a decade on the train had gotten her used to sleeping rough; she had a toothbrush and paste in her fanny pack and was practiced at washing off in rivers and ponds, so being able to slip into the YMCA now and then for a real shower was honestly a relief. She slept in parks and doorways, and it was almost a relief for life to be difficult in external, tackleable ways. 

 (Still, sometimes, Grace would have a dream where Simon was standing over Hazel, braced by a foot at the back of her neck, gripping hard at the edge of her shell and hauling. Hazel would squirm and whimper, the shell pulling at her skin and her bones as he tried to help her by ripping her apart. 

 The worst dreams were the ones where Grace’s own hands were on the shell, numbers spiraling up, up, up her arm with every tug.)

 She’d had a close call when she’d tried to get a library card. She’d given the woman behind the counter her name, without even thinking, and the woman had replied “Is it spelled like the Grace Monroe?”

 “Sorry?” she’d said, alarm bells suddenly blaring in her mind. 
 
 “That girl who went missing back in 2013 or so,” the librarian had explained. “The diplomat’s daughter. You honestly look kind of like her, too,” she’d said, and Grace had started talking over her without thinking about it. 

 “Oh, that one,” she’d said, the lies coming faster than her conscious mind could keep up with. “No, I thought you meant Marilyn, people get funny about being a Monroe. They want you to do the skirt thing, you know. That’s funny, though, I’ve never heard I looked like her before. I remember hearing about that at the time, you know, I was just a kid; how wild is that, right? What do you think happened to her?”

 “Didn’t they find her body after a year? I know I heard that. Some accident, like someone had hit her with a car and tried to hide her. So sad. I remember there was this one photo of the funeral that was all over socials for a while. You didn’t see it?”

 “No,” Grace had said, blood running cold. “I’ve been on kind of a break from social media.”

 She’d left, deciding that she didn’t really need a library card when she had no home to take checked-out books to. She could just come in when she wanted to read things, and avoid that librarian like the plague. Had her parents faked it? Had they pretended to find her body in order to wrap up the whole mess, have a pretty funeral and make their lives go back to normal? Or had they found some other girl, unrecognizable from a year of decomposition, and wanted closure so badly they’d just believed? 

 She’d missed a lot, it turned out, being a ghost from 2013 to 2023. Several elections, the terrifying progression of climate change, Britain leaving the EU— she did not envy her parents dealing with that one— and not least a global damn pandemic that seemed to still have people jumpy about congregation and wary of anyone with a cough. In between scouring the streets for change and sweeping cafes’ floors for coffee, she’d sat at the computers in the back of the library, old models even to her eyes, and skimmed over headlines in the newspapers’ back catalogues, trying to give herself enough of a cursory idea of what was going on that she wouldn’t be caught unawares. 

 She’d been trying not to lie so much, in those last two years on the train, but now that she was off it again it was all coming back in full force and she couldn’t avoid it. There were no truths she could tell. 

 Well, that was what she’d thought at first. Truths did end up slipping out, now and then. She’d admitted, once, that she was a runaway, when she’d had a go at spending a week in a homeless shelter; that her family was alive but going back to them wasn’t an option. It was nice to sleep on a mattress, and the shelter had programmes where you could sign up for day jobs with the borough newspaper they’d contracted with and earn a little money— cleaning up around the offices, running errands, or even selling newspapers on the street— but they kept too close track of her so she’d ditched out before long. Maybe she’d try again later. 

  Another time she’d managed to gather enough money from her usual sweet-talk and pick-pocket routine that she’d decided to try getting drunk, and a girl at the bar with thick red curls had tried to take her home; she’d leaned in for a kiss and Grace had gone completely stiff, terrified in a way she hadn’t expected to be. The girl had asked if she’d misread her, if she was only into men.

 “That’s not it,” Grace had said, mouth suddenly dry. “Just. The last guy I kissed tried to throw me under a train.”

 The girl had winced and given her a hug instead, telegraphing her movements so as not to startle her. She’d cried, and she’d tried to blame it on the cider but it was probably more about the truth. 

 Another truth that had slipped out, though no one had heard it, was when she’d been wandering the aisles of a record store to kill time, and out of the corner of her eye she’d seen a sigil that had made her freeze in place.

 “One-One?”

 On the cover of a CD was the little white ball, drawn in an abstracted, blocky style so that he looked like a logo. White circle, bisected vertically with a black stripe. Only one white dot. 

 That wasn’t right, was it? 

 She had never met the Conductor, not face to face. Even after the Apex had been dismantled, even as she made amends, he’d never really needed to come and make himself known; she suspected Amelia was right in saying that in a very real way, they were all just numbers to him. She knew what he looked like, though, from the videos she’d seen over so many passengers’ shoulders and the younger kids’ constant drawings of him— he was, after all, very easy to draw. He’d been on Amelia’s jumpsuit and belt buckle, too, and his simple design was burned into her mind. 

 What the hell was he doing on an album cover? 

 She’d taken the CD in both hands, not so much reverent as wary, holding it like a grenade. She took it to the listening station and slipped the headphones on, standing there in the middle of the almost-empty store, and carefully slid the disc into the player. The CD itself was designed after One-One too, with the hole in the middle serving as a single eye. 

 The album was called Binary, by a band called Duet; squinting at the back cover revealed that it had been released in 1992. The man behind the counter had his eye on her— she could feel him weighing the pros of actually having a customer against the cons of how unlikely she was to buy anything—  so she wasn’t about to try fishing the lyric booklet out of the front of the CD; she’d just have to listen closely. 

 The first song started with a slow, chromatic build on some kind of monophonic synth, taken over suddenly by a surprisingly crunchy electric guitar riff. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t this; it was hard-edged, not quite metal but getting there. She’d find out later that the album was an anomaly for the band, but for the time being she just stood there, eyes half-closed, enough she could focus in on the music but not so much she’d be taken by surprise if the man at the counter decided to kick her out. 

Wake up, see what we see
All damnation watching me
Eyes all open, mouths all closed, 
Tell me what your mind’s composed….

 It seemed to be a concept album, though a fairly surreal one, with themes of finding oneself and struggling under the oversight of a god that thought himself benevolent but didn’t, in the end, care or understand. It didn’t really suit the persona of the goofy little ball she’d seen on video screens, reminding her more of the image she and Simon had built up in each other’s heads of the False Conductor, but there he was staring blankly from the album cover. She managed to make it through the entire album, the man at the counter getting distracted by customers, and the closing track was an eerie piece called One that started with some sparse lyrics about leaving a world behind and ended up just repeating the title, over and over, like the tolling of a bell. 

 She counted out the money in her fanny pack. She wanted badly to buy the album, to be able to pore over its lyric sheets, but she didn’t have a way to play it in the first place and she was hungry. She’d have to leave it behind, for now. 

 She did, however, now know the band’s name, and have another thing to research. She split her time carefully between listening to Duet in the record shop and looking them up online; she had no headphones, but sometimes when the library was almost empty she’d watch concert recordings and music videos on youtube with the sound down almost-inaudible so the librarians wouldn’t notice. They were fascinating. They used a lot of green light and train imagery, and it made her heart clench uncomfortably; they tripped some deep fear in her but she couldn’t look away. 

 The band, as its name indicated, consisted of only two people. Both handsome dark-haired men, one taller and broader, the other narrower and more energetic. Their stage chemistry was impressive; with a pang, Grace remembered moving that in-sync with someone, destroying car after car rather than making music. They’d toured pretty consistently over the course of their career, with a new album almost every other year from the late eighties to the early teens. Their style shifted as time went on, like most long-running bands’ did, but they’d never really stopped coming back to the theme of being stolen away, of struggle and of discovery. 

 The later albums tended towards a theme of healing, too, of coming back to yourself and moving on. Grace listened to those songs the most, watching the half-film half-concert-recording music video for a song called New Hometown over and over in the library. It was almost more comforting, though, that sometimes they wrote songs that didn’t feel like they had anything to do with the train at all. She was certain they’d been passengers— she’d known so many, on the train, and even if these men had been on the train long before she ever was, she still had a feeling— and sometimes they wrote about politics, or global warming, or feeling alone at a party. One of the later concert videos, from their 2006 tour, had a performance of an almost painfully sappy love song off an early album, pronouns added where they’d been carefully avoided in the original recording to make it clearly sung to a man rather than delicately unspecified. The both of them glowed, in the performance, looking established, proud, adult. Of course they were adults— they had to be about forty, at the time of that performance, and they’d be sixty or so now. They looked properly adult, though; confident in a way that came from time and experience rather than the frenzied insistence her own false confidence had always sprung from. 

 She missed Hazel, but it wasn’t desperate anymore. It was an ache she carried with her and always would. But she needed to do something, to make some movement in her life, the life she’d almost forgotten she had when the movement of the train always carried you forward. 

 She’d always tried to save what money she earned, though when you were hungry and sleeping in the park you didn’t really have the opportunity not to spend it on staying alive. Now, though, she had a plan, and the plan was another bus ticket. 

 She’d been off the train seven months, one of which had been spent absolutely fascinated by Duet. She’d been dropped off in DC in the dead of winter, and summer was really getting into swing; a trip up North sounded like a great idea. Carefully, she’d cross-referenced Greyhound schedules with Duet’s tour, and written the dates and bus numbers down along with their price. 

 She wasn’t worried about saving up for a concert ticket; getting into places was a skill she had. Getting from New York to Toronto, though, that would take a pretty significant bus fare, especially with the border crossing. 

 Time to sell newspapers. 

Chapter Text

 Tulip had been vaguely aware of Duet since long before the train, as one of those bands her parents listened to sometimes. A song or two had made it onto road trip mixes, though not in heavy rotation, and they occupied a similar space in her mind as Journey, or Pat Benatar, or Mott the Hoople. Dad bands. 

 It had been when she was in the car with her dad, then, fittingly, that she’d realized exactly what she was listening to. Or, singing along with, rather. It was one of the old road trip tapes; her dad had taken to putting them on in the car every time they went anywhere, ever since she’d mentioned that she missed singing along together. 

 (She hadn’t told them about the train— how could she have? They’d never have believed it without evidence, and she hadn’t noticed her reflection was still missing until after she’d already told them she’d “just been surviving” and that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. She had, though, made a point of bringing up lessons she’d learnt in roundabout ways, trying to fix her relationship with her parents without explaining how she’d had her revelations.)

 They’d been driving around the outskirts of town in a circle— her dad still felt guilty about not being able to take her to camp the previous year, especially with what had happened, so even though coding camp was remote that year because of COVID he’d decided they should take a nice long drive before she stayed at his place for the weekend and attended camp via video meetings on his computer. They’d been joking about how beautiful the vast wilderness of Wisconsin was, describing familiar sights as though they were the stunning foreign world of the next state over. 

 “Open the door to another world, another world, another world,” she’d sang along with the CD. “Screaming for a meaning, but you go unheard, go unheard, go unheard”

 She’d gone silent, then, listening to the lyrics with new ears, parsing them as something more than dad-rock surrealism. She’d asked her dad about the song after it was over, casually, and he’d gotten incredibly excited about her showing interest, and said he’d lend her his CDs when they got to his place. 

 “You can burn ‘em, I won’t tell anybody,” 

 “It’s ‘rip’ them, dad— burning a CD is getting songs from the computer onto the CD, ripping it is the other way around. Also it’s not actually illegal to burn a CD.”

 Going by his smile, Tulip sometimes suspected her dad said things incorrectly on purpose so she could explain them, but maybe he just genuinely enjoyed being called out. It was hard to tell. 

 She’d listened through four Duet CDs that long weekend alone, in between video meetings, taking notes almost as copious as those she took on other kids’ games and smart things they’d done with their code that she could emulate. There were definitely hints to the train throughout their work— it wasn’t just one song or even one album. She’d looked up the band members and found in the “early life” section a weirdly glib mention of their having been missing persons for a year and a half in the early eighties. She hadn’t caught the year, watching Amelia’s tape, but it had to be around the same time—one album, though, Binary, had an image of One-One on the cover, so they must have gotten on before Amelia took over. She briefly considered that they might have met him in the Snow Car and just used his image, because the eerie content of the album felt more suited to Amelia’s reign, but she couldn’t really imagine someone leaving One-One there. She’d made a chart of album releases, graduations, and every other date she could find on the wiki page and their website, and figured out most of a timeline. 

 So. In the early eighties, a pair of young Canadian men disappear for a year and a half. They come back, rename their high school band from Chicken Choice Judy (really?) to Duet, and had spent the next few years playing gigs in between college semesters, with their first album to get real attention outside BC being 87’s Hover Over Me. By 1990 they had a significant following and were touring across North America; by ’95 they’d even had an European tour. Despite having been active for over twenty years, their fanbase had never really dwindled, at least going by the size of venues they played in (not stadia or anything, but consistently big). In 2003 they had casually appeared on stage on the first show of a new tour with wedding rings on. 

 She’d been simultaneously burningly curious as to why they’d been on the train and very aware it wasn’t any of her business. Their lyrics seemed to emphasize communication and atonement, so maybe it had been an interpersonal problem— stop it, Tulip; think about how you’d feel if someone was speculating about you and the divorce.

 She’d set the question of their trip aside and focused on their music, and within three months had sent away for a Duet logo patch to sew onto her new jacket. 

 A lot had happened, since then. She’d cut her hair three more (significant) times, ending up with a blunt crop inspired by but shorter than the sander-shorn one her reflection had had when they last saw each other. It hadn’t really suited her, but it definitely suited Tulip. She was in both AP Calc and AP Physics, and as much as she’d always struggled with English class she was actually enjoying American Lit. She’d started the robotics club at North Branch High and for the first year was its only member, but the teacher that had sponsored her was completely fine with her messing around with solder in the mechanics shop, and she’d started thinking about ways to cross over game coding with robotics, getting Mikayla to test run a game-like control schema for a simple runner bot. 

 She was doing well. Her mom was dating a guy from the hospital, another nurse, and she was determinedly not weird about it. Hal was nice. Hal had good hair and watched telenovelas. Hal was very much not her dad, but also wasn’t really trying to be. It was okay. 

 Mikayla teased her about how much she liked Duet, these days, because they were undeniably a dad band, but when Tulip had managed to sneak Yours onto the playlist at prom (the original version with no pronouns, because as happy as Tulip had been for them with that live version, she wasn’t directing it at a ‘he’) she’d laughingly admitted it was romantic as hell and slow-danced for the entire four minutes. Tulip had stared at her freckles, blurry out of the corner of her eye beside her glasses, nuzzling into her temple. It had been the best part of prom.

 (They had technically gone double-doe, but nobody really bought it.)

 She wondered about the train a lot, even years on. Mostly she wondered about the people she’d left there: if the train was running better now that One-One was back in charge, if Amelia had made any progress, if— the-girl-who-was-once-her-reflection, who she felt bad thinking of as ‘her reflection’ because she wasn’t anymore but it kept cropping up because it was all she knew to call her— had made a good life for herself. She entertained herself imagining Atticus’s triumphant return to Corginia, and all the treats and walks he could want. There wasn’t much she could do about any of her wonderings, but she made an effort, because it was in her nature to make an effort. 

 Exactly one family owned a corgi in North Branch, and she had volunteered to dogsit her every time her people were out of town since she got back. Bailey was no substitute for Atticus, but she was a good egg, and it felt right to be providing a service for one of his people. She had to keep her scritching fingers in shape, after all. 

 Amelia she couldn’t track down at all, even looking up “Amelia Hughes missing person 1980s England” got her no hits. She’d looked up her alma mater, even, finding it by the motto, in case she could find anything about her on the school’s website, but it looked like they’d only started even having a website in the 1990s. 

 Going by the fact she’d been picked up on the roof of the college, Tulip had a pretty good idea what Amelia’s friends and family had probably thought. 

 Her not-reflection she had no way to research at all, seeing as the train was pretty definitely outside of the internet’s purview, so she just wished her well every time she walked past a shiny window and didn’t see herself, which had been the case for three years now but she still didn’t think she’d ever get used to. 

 And One-One! There was no way to know about him, either, but she missed the little ball so badly that it tore at her heart sometimes. Over the course of five months he’d become such a fast friend that his absence was a tangible hole. She’d listened to the album Binary over and over, even though it didn’t really sound like him lyrically, if only to have his little faceplate on her phone’s display. She doodled him in her notes, and sometimes imagined his two voices like they were her immensely unhelpful shoulder angels. 

 But there was no way to know how he was, was there. She had a new lease on life, right? She just had to live it. 

 And then, late in her junior year, she did what you’re never supposed to do. 

 She read the comments on a youtube video. 

 I think we all know why we’re here. Well, it was good music, that was one thing— Tulip’s dad was a fan, and he’d definitely never been on the train— but also. Also. There was that tantalizing hope, that slight possibility that if she went to a concert, she might see someone else who had done what she’d done. She might be that tiny bit less alone— and if there were any more recent passengers, she could even ask them if they’d heard anything about Atticus or One-One. 

 (It was unlikely they would have, of course, given infinity, but a girl could always hope.)

 She’d started diving a little more into the corners of the internet, finding old Reddit threads where people brought up the band and would always get a few cryptic little comments that only a passenger would recognize. She didn’t have an Instagram account because she had moral objections to Facebook, but she bookmarked the band’s page, which was about two thirds official posts (throwbacks to various albums on their release anniversaries, shares of fan covers, standing up for other artists when they were being dogged by the tabloids) and one third blurry pictures of Park at breakfast, apparently trying to slap the phone out of Akagi’s hand while laughing. The comments there were littered with train emoji too (there seemed to be no general consensus as to whether to use 🚃 or 🚂, but the message came across nonetheless), as well as various people calling themselves passengers outright. 

 TVTropes had an entry under FanCommunityNickname for Duet, saying that fans called themselves Passengers after an early song, The Never Train, but checking the page history revealed there had been a bit of an edit war over it, with some people repeatedly changing it to “for unknown reasons” despite the reason being right there, and others preferring “due to the band’s common use of train imagery”. Tulip had a very good idea why people were so vehement about it. 

 It hovered in the back of her mind for about a month, which was probably longer than it should have, but she’d been a little too apprehensive about going on a journey alone again. She’d been out of town with her mother, or her father, or Mikayla, or even her sponsoring teacher and five other kids for the robotics tournament in St Paul, but taking off on her own made a little smidge of sick seem to rise at the back of her throat. It was stupid. She was ready for anything. She’d just preferred not to be alone. 

 She did consider taking Mikayla, but if she was going to talk to anyone about the train she’d have to be on her own. Mikayla had a pretty good handle on the fact that something supernatural had happened while she’d been gone— you don’t go clothes shopping together and not notice someone had no reflection, after all— but Tulip hadn’t quite been able to lay out the story. She thought maybe she could, after she’d talked to other people who’d been there; maybe then the spigot would open. Maybe she could even tell her parents. 

 Hal didn’t get to know, though. 

 She’d used some of her birthday money to buy the concert ticket. The nearest show was in Toronto, a fourteen hour drive away, which her mother absolutely would not let her make in one shot (“so many people come in concussed and with punctured lungs and contusions from car crashes because they were exhausted, Tulip, it’s almost as bad as driving drunk, if you fall asleep at the wheel you’re gone—“) so she’d made arrangements with her aunt in Lansing to sleep on her couch for a night. Aunt Saga didn’t approve of Tulip’s new haircut or her large jackets and boys’ jeans, but weirdly enough did approve of Mikayla. No accounting for opinions, or something. 

 Tulip made a countdown on her bulletin board, one with all the numbers neatly written on scraps of printer paper and pinned up in two stacks— tens place and ones place—  so she could rip the appropriate top one off each night. She whispered her plans to Bailey when she dogsat over Spring break, and she told Mikayla she’d bring her back a tee shirt, and she went over and over and over again in her mind what she might say to someone who might understand. 

Chapter Text

The first thing Jesse noticed about the concert’s crowd, in the lobby of the venue, was how varied it was. There were people like the back of a board game box— from eight to eighty. He saw a couple with their preteen daughter, tons of young adults, an old guy with a walker, a twenty-something with a wheelchair.

That must have sucked, going along the gangways. Geez. Someone ought to tell One-One about ADA regulations.

Lake tugged on his sleeve, and he followed her pointing arm to see a young woman facing away, chatting with a friend. She had a watercolour tattoo on her shoulder blade, a big amorphous blob of blues and teals, and right in the middle, like it had been added with stick-and-poke, was a little smiley face.

“It’s Randall,” Lake hissed, close to laughter.

“Randall? Is that that water balloon guy from the carnival?”

“Is that really the only time you met Randall?” Lake asked. “Huh. He’s all the water on the train. Like, all of it. I was reflected on the surface of his body way too much.”

“Step off, Randall,” Jesse joked, and Lake punched him gently in the shoulder. She’d dressed up, for the show, fitting the glow-in-the-dark plugs she’d picked up at the Hot Topic into her ear holes, wearing her good leather jacket over an old Hole tee and black jeans from the thrift store. Her Doc Martens probably still counted as dressing up, even though she wore them almost every day, because she loved them so much. It was great to see her so excited, practically buzzing as they edged their way through the crowd towards the little concessions desk. She’d been like this all day, from when they woke up in the motel— he had carefully checked both beds for bedbugs the night before and she’d laughed at him because she couldn’t get bit— all through their exploration of Toronto. They’d had breakfast in a tiny cafe and he’d been so excited about the brightly colored Canadian money he’d almost forgotten to actually pay.

He loved the way that she laughed at him. It wasn’t humiliating, it didn’t make his face colour and ears burn, it just made him want to laugh too. He poked and prodded her right back and it didn’t feel like barely keeping his head above water the way it used to with kids at school, it didn’t feel like desperately trying to prove he was cool enough. He could cruise through a conversation with her freestyle.

She would absolutely punch him if he used the swimming metaphor out loud, but that was fair.

Once she’d pointed out the Randall, he started seeing tattoos everywhere. There were a lot of animals, in different levels of representational and cartooned, but he just had the feeling he was looking at denizens, immortalized on people’s shoulders and forearms and calves. Once, he caught sight of someone with a zero in brackets on the back of their hand— he was confused for a moment, before realizing that palm tattoos probably didn’t work— in green ink that he suspected was glow-in-the-dark by how bright it looked even shadowed by their purse. That felt gutsy, honestly, even though it wasn’t like anybody was out there trying to keep the train secret or anything— at least, not as far as he knew.

As he handed Lake her marked-up concessions coffee and packet of cookies, he realized that people were talking about the train. They were talking about it the way he talked to Lake only in total secret, telling stories. He heard a snippet of someone’s anecdote about a Candle Car, and turned around to see a goth girl who looked suspiciously like that OzKidz starlet who quit the TV business a couple years back, her honey-blonde waves now dark curls, her pastels and layering replaced with a black corset and pinstripes, a huge tattoo of a fruit bat sprawling across her shoulder blades.

Lake took his hand, and he squeezed hers tightly, feeling its comforting chill and the way it didn’t give under his. She pressed up against his side, and they looked out at the lobby full of passengers.

The concessions were set up by the venue, obviously, so there was nothing special about them. The merch stand, though, as best as he could tell— because there was a huge line and they couldn’t get close— had not just the standard tee shirts and LPs but also a variety of gloves; Jesse had good feelings about his right hand because it had, in the end, gotten the both of them home, but he could imagine how someone who had been there longer might have grown to hate looking at it, even when it was blank again.

He turned around again, admiring the crowd, and saw someone he did not expect to see.

“Oh, shit,” he hissed, and Lake looked up at him, startled. He didn’t swear much, not because he had anything against it but because he was paranoid about slipping up in front of Nate, and she knew it meant something was bad.

“This way okay let’s go” he said, slipping his arm around Lake and shuffling in the opposite direction of where he had seen Grace, her locks longer, hands in the pockets of her coat, the lipstick wave gone from her face— looking haunted, but still very much like someone he did not want to meet.

“What the hell, Jesse,” Lake said, and was cut off when they walked directly into someone, Lake’s momentum knocking them to the ground.

“Ow, geez,” grumbled the sprawled redhead, and Jesse offered her a hand up off the ground with floods of apologies. She took it, re-settling her glasses, and then stared, frozen, at Lake.

Oh.

“So, is this…?” Jesse started to ask, but trailed off when he realized the both of them were just staring at each other in shock and his intervention would probably not be helpful here. It was bizarre to see Tulip. The contours of her face were the same as Lake’s, her stature, even her mobile, blunt-fingered hands were the exact same shape, but she was wrapped in pale skin, her eyes green, her hair swinging freely in its bob— even when Lake’s grew out a little before she ground it off again, it always stuck up like little needles; it never got long enough to swing. Jesse felt like Tulip was a little bit the uncanny valley version of Lake, this face that he knew so well, just slightly wrong.

Lake stuck out her hand to shake, after a long pause. Tulip took it, and shook.

And then she pulled Lake into a tight hug.

Jesse tensed up, ready to intervene if Lake didn’t want to be hugged— not like she couldn’t shove someone off herself, but he’d want to be there for support anyway— but she squeezed Tulip in turn, arms folding around her, face hidden in the shoulder of her bomber jacket.

“I don’t hate you,” Lake mumbled.

“Thanks,” Tulip said quietly. They both pulled back, Tulip laughing a little as she fished a cleaning cloth with little onions on it out of her pocket to wipe her glasses with.

“Been a while,” Lake said. “One-One is the Conductor, huh. Did he figure that out before or after you left?”

“It feels so weird to just say that out loud,” Tulip said. “But yeah, that all happened— the same day I got off. Yeah. Did you see him again? After we split up?”

“He nearly let the flecs sand me,” Lake grumbled.

“He what?!”

“He did decide not to, in the end,” Jesse put in, and both the Olsens turned to look at him.

“Right, right,” Lake said, gesturing to him. “Tulip, this is Jesse. He’s… Jesse. Cosay.”

“Tulip Olsen,” Tulip said, holding out her hand to shake. Jesse obliged.

“And this is— wait, do you wanna tell her your name yourself?” Jesse said. “I was gonna do like a round robin introductions thing, but your name is awesome and I don’t know if it’s important to you to be the one to say it—“

“Just tell her my name, Jesse.”

“Tulip, this is Lake.”

Tulip grinned, and it wasn’t Lake’s grin. It was a completely different smile, even though the mouth that made it was the same shape, the teeth the same, the pull of skin at the corners of the lips the same. It was kind of a relief to see, and even though it wasn’t a bad smile at all it made Jesse all the fonder of Lake’s.

“That is an awesome name,” Tulip said. “I’m so glad. Lake.”

Lake smiled right back at her, face coloring a little in the way that she’d never been able to explain, and scratched the back of her neck. “You look good too,” she said. “Different.”

“Oh, geez, I hope you don’t mind the hair,” Tulip said. “I know Mikayla always talks about how much it sucks when her sister copies something she does, and then everyone thinks Allie did it first. I, like, thought about it when I was getting it, and I thought it’d be fine since we weren’t going to bump into each other again so it wasn’t like I’d be taking something that was yours—“

“I didn’t even like that haircut, Tulip, chill.”

“Okay,” Tulip said. “Okay. Cool.”

“Do you guys want a bit alone?” Jesse said, suddenly feeling like his presence might be stymieing conversation. “I can get in the merch line if you text me what you want, Lake, and we can meet up again before the show starts?”

“That might be good, yeah,” she said. “Sibling chat time. I’m not sure what I do want, though; I couldn’t see the table too well.” Tulip seemed to light up a little at being called a sibling. It was funny— Lake had come around to thinking of her— and talking about her— as a sister so long before that Jesse was used to it, but Tulip hadn’t had the chance to hear it before just now.

“I’ll send you a pic when I get close,” he said, squeezing Lake’s shoulder briefly. “I can pick something up for you too, Tulip, if you wanna pay me back; Lake has my number. Talk to you guys in a bit.”

Lake nodded, and the— ha, the Olsen twins— headed off to hang by a pillar and talk. Jesse watched them go, and sauntered over into the merch line behind an old guy in black and white overalls.

Grace had slid in while the ticket-taker was distracted by a woman who’d lost her ticket in the depths of her purse. It had been almost easy. She had a packet of honey roasted peanuts from the bus station in her fanny pack, so she had no temptation to hit up the overpriced concessions stand, and the main floor of the concert was open standing room, with chairs only up in the balcony, so it wasn’t like anyone would be kicking her out of a seat that wasn’t hers.

She’d been right; the place was full of ex-passengers. Bustling, chatting, laughing. She wished the jacket she’d gotten at the thrift store had a hood; she would have loved to pull it up around her face. Instead, she just turned up her collar, standing over by a wall, watching the crowd.

She’d wanted to come so badly. She’d wanted to see other passengers, to be back in the thick of it again. She’d had purpose for so long, and it was all gone. But how many of these people had been actively hurt by her purpose? How many of these people had lost denizens to the Apex? Probably more of them than even knew it. Was there anyone here who she had misled? She’d been the eldest, in the Apex, and she was twenty-one now, but there were teens here, and even kids with their parents. What if someone recognized her? What if they saw her and they hated her the way she deserved?

It was a rush of regrets she’d mostly been keeping at bay for the past seven months. Surviving had been priority number one, improving number two, and feeling was a deep seven or eight. She wanted to go back to her quick-spinning mind the way she always had, think only from interaction to interaction and try to keep all her balls in the air, but in this place they were all falling around her. Why had she come here? Why had she spent thirteen hours and all her tiny savings on a Greyhound for this?

She had come so far, since the Apex, since the train itself, even. She had been focusing on making herself better instead of punishing herself for her past, learning to move through the world on her own, not needing to tell other people what to do in order to feel like she was doing it right. Here, in this crowd of people who might understand, she was even more alone than in the world outside.

Why had she snuck in so early? Damn. The show wouldn’t start for another forty-five minutes, and she didn’t want to just stand there in her thoughts the whole time. Standing in the merch line would be a waste of time, because she had no money. She considered just going to the ladies’ room and splashing water on her face, but it didn’t feel like enough.

There was muffled music playing over the PA system— not Duet, probably just the radio— and Grace started shifting her feet to it. She pulled her hands back out of her pockets, rolling her neck, for once not trying to impress anyone with her movement, but just to enjoy it herself. It had been a while since she really danced, and while she wasn’t about to do any grand jetés here— the crowd wasn’t thick yet, but it wasn’t exactly a wide open space either— it felt good to move. She swayed, mostly, because there wasn’t much room for anything else, but after spinning around once just to feel the air move across her face, she realized a kid nearby was dancing too.

She really was just a kid— maybe seven or eight, big plastic bobble-ties on the ends of her braids, and Grace hoped against hope she was there with a passenger parent, not for her own sake. She’d known kids much younger than that, on the train, she knew it happened, but she hated it. She hated how vulnerable those kids had been— not just to the ravages of the train, but to her.

This little girl, though, was taking her influence just to dance. She was swinging her head around, hair ties clacking, her light-up sneakers flashing with every bounce. This girl wasn’t Apex; the worst she could hurt someone through Grace’s influence was if she danced too hard and crashed into someone-- which was all the more likely, as a couple other people were dancing too now.

Grace stood, and moved, and rejoiced in the fact that no one would notice that she started the dancing.

Meeting Lake again— meeting her properly as herself, for the first time— was completely bizarre and also the best thing Tulip never would have expected to happen. Lake had literally run into her. Lake had called her sister. Lake wore the reminder of the train all over her skin, which was probably really rough for her, but it opened that spigot in Tulip’s mind and everything came rushing out.

She asked her about One-One, a little horrified at his having considered letting Sieve kill her, but also understanding that since he was technically an AI— probably— it only made sense for his logic to work that way. It raised weird moral questions, for sure, and made Tulip wonder if she should try to get into AI development. Lake told her about the new welcome videos, which Tulip considered a vast improvement over her experience, and Tulip explained everything that had happened with Amelia, which Lake said connected a lot of dots for her.

Lake explained that she lived in Flagstaff now with Jesse and his family; the weather was “super different from Minnesota, for sure”, but it was apparently colder in Flagstaff than the general image of Arizona blazes would lead you to believe. She’d managed to avoid any bureaucratic nightmares so far, but was worried about what college would bring. She said she’d considered spray-painting herself taupe to try and fit in.

Tulip told her about how badly she’d missed One-One and Atticus; how she loved her family and her friends but she still felt so alone, unable to tell them. Lake and Jesse were lucky, she thought, to have disembarked together— which led to her speculation about Akagi and Park, and what their trip could have been like, so long ago.

Hearing herself talk about the train was surreal; her mouth had been shut on the topic for so long that it felt like her life was crashing back together— the Tulip who was in robotics club and was trying to fix her relationship with her parents and the Tulip who had spent five months on a sci-fi therapy train were finally the same Tulip. She found herself laughing even when things weren’t particularly funny.

Lake asked if she had asked Mikayla out yet, and she choked on her concessions-stand lemonade, Lake snickering at her.

“We went to Junior Prom together,” she said, “but that’s it so far.”

“Go get her, tiger,” Lake said, and Tulip shoved her in the shoulder, face still burning.

It was nice. It was comfortable. It was fun. When Lake’s friend Jesse texted the picture of the merch offerings, it felt natural to lean in close to her and look over her shoulder at the phone, pointing out the tee shirts, which designs they liked better, what they wanted.

“I bought the logo patch online,” Tulip said. “I should have waited, then I wouldn’t have had to pay shipping….”

“Oh, the patch is good,” Lake said. “I think I’m going for that black tee with the Bureaucracy Bells tracklist, though. Tear the sleeves off that and you’ve really got something.”

“Do you tear the sleeves off everything you wear?”

“Not the jackets,” Lake said, sticking out her tongue. Tulip laughed. It was good.

They put their orders through to Jesse— Lake went for the tracklist tee, Tulip got a metal water bottle and the more feminine-cut tee with some of the Yours lyrics on it for Mikayla— and Tulip smirked over at her— not her reflection, her sibling.

“So, Jesse,” she said.

“What about him?”

“I mean, you asked about Mikayla….”

“Because I was stuck stalking you for thirteen years and I know you’re stupid for her,” Lake said, grouchily. “Jesse is Jesse. He’s my Jesse and that’s where it is right now.”

“Okay, okay,” Tulip said. “Good luck however it goes.”

Lake thanked her, quietly, after a moment, and Tulip busied herself counting out her cash to pay Jesse back for the water bottle and tee. She felt like she’d misstepped a little, but also like it wasn’t the end of the world.

“Give me your notebook,” Lake said.

“What?”

“Just hand it over.”

Tulip did, a little baffled, but all Lake did was scrawl her phone number on the first free page.

“Text me,” she said.

“Will do,” Tulip replied, weirdly thrilled Lake had remembered how much it bugged her when people wrote on pages she'd already started.

Jesse returned with the promised items, excitedly showed off the keyring he’d bought for himself, and then produced one more item with a flourish.

“What is that?” Lake asked of the little round thing with the Duet logo on it, suspiciously.

“Car magnet,” Jesse said through a grin as he stuck it to the side of her head. “Plink.”

Lake shoved him, laughing, calling him a dinkus, and the lights started to dim.

Tulip didn’t go to a lot of concerts, and had kind of forgotten about the whole concept of an opening band. It wasn’t Duet that walked out at first, but a couple of twenty-something women with electric guitars. They weren’t great, but weren’t bad either, and Tulip entertained herself during their set by speculating as to whether they were passengers too. It would make sense for Duet to recruit other passengers to open for them— it wouldn’t be hard to find them, after all, given what a beacon they’d made themselves for folks who had been on the train. The women, whose band was apparently called Silver Diamond, had a cool electric-folk flavour, kind of late Dylan, and even though they fumbled some chords and didn’t quite hit every high note they were fun to listen to. Tulip felt like they would be awesome in a couple years, and wrote down their band name and the observation, slipping her notebook out of her pocket and squinting at it in the dark.

“That’s the point of opening bands,” Lake said to her, voice raised a little over the music but still coming off as hushed and only for her. “To know who to look out for.”

Jesse was apparently just enjoying himself no matter what, bouncing up and down to the music, uninhibited. Lake swayed a little, chin moving slightly with the beat, not really dancing but not stoic either. Tulip realized she wasn’t dancing at all because she’d been speculating, and decided to make an effort to move.

By the time Duet came on, she was feeling a little sweaty. It wasn’t a particularly hot evening or anything, but the masses of people in the venue— it had really filled in during Silver Diamond’s set— created a big human oven. She’d swung her backpack around to the front, because her mother had impressed upon her how important it was to ward against pickpockets in a standing-room concert, and she wrapped her arms around it, staring up at the stage.

They were a ways back, but it was bizarre to see Akagi and Park walk out onto that stage, in the same room with them, grown men who had gone and come back and succeeded. Tulip wasn’t surprised by their age— she’d looked at the instagram, she knew they weren’t the fresh-faced kids of their early albums anymore— but it was so much more dramatic in person how well they’d aged. Not in the way of looking younger, no, but like they were exactly the age they were supposed to be. The lines at the corners of their eyes, the slight salting of Park’s hair, the way Akagi’s knuckles were more prominent as he swung his guitar in a full circle on its strap, showing off— it all spoke to a life lived with intention, a life lived happily.

Tulip didn’t usually imagine herself as an old woman, not except for the occasional dreams where she was in Amelia’s place, refusing to let go. She didn’t have to worry about her old age yet; she hadn’t even hit eighteen. Those two, though, she locked in her mind as an image to remember, a note-to-self to pull back out if she ever got too fatalistic about getting old.

Akagi grinned out at the audience as they cheered, waving happily with both hands as Park stationed himself behind an electric keyboard.

“Welcome!” he shouted, sounding as enthusiastic now as he did in the videos from ’87. “Tonight we are all at our home station! You’re here for us, and we’re so glad, but do you want to know a secret?”

“Yes!” shouted the crowd, as one, and Tulip found herself joining in.

“We’re here for you, too,” Akagi said, and a cheer rose as he launched into the opening chords of The Long Haul.

They played so well. Tulip didn’t play any instruments, and her voice wasn’t about to win any awards, but even she could tell how perfectly their instruments meshed, decades of experience keeping them right in time. A good half the audience was singing along with every song, thrilled and collective and full of so much energy. Park, she realized a few songs in, wasn’t just playing the keyboard— his set-up included the drum machine she was hearing, as well as a couple of other synths she didn’t even recognize. He came to the forefront of the stage a couple times with a keytar, grinning smugly over at his husband, hands flying across the keys. Akagi switched from electric guitar to electric bass to a different electric guitar, between songs, and similarly Park seemed to be twisting around to different parts of his set-up, sometimes playing a couple synths at the same time. At one point Park pulled out an actual EWI— how many instruments did these guys play?

Lake, Tulip noticed with a rush of affection, was headbanging to every song even close to hard enough to warrant it. Jesse was in the contingent that sang along to everything, and his voice was about as untrained as hers but also completely confident and joyful. This whole room full of people, singing and dancing and jostling, loving the music but also loving each other and their lives, the lives they got to live now that they were home, swallowed Tulip up and made her feel whole again.

She grinned, and started singing along too, even though she didn’t know all the words.

Grace almost left when the opening band came on. Cassidy, the girl on the blue guitar, she recognized; she was one of the “adult passengers” she had told the Apex not to trust, once, in the Green Car, when she tried to help them, tried to get them to calm down, to stop breaking things. Grace had told them— children— not to trust a woman who was trying to help, so that they would depend on only her, and it made her sick to her stomach.

The only thing that kept her where she was was the realization that if she tried to push her way out through the crowd, she’d draw eyes. So she stayed where she was, staring up at the stage, silently apologizing in her mind to each Apex kid who’d been there that day. They played, they thanked the crowd, they went away.

“We’re here for you, too,” Akagi said once he’d come out, and the tears started to fall.

Grace stood there almost in a trance, listening to this music, listening to the success and happiness of ex-passengers, and it felt almost like absolution. Akagi’s buttery tenor ran through her as he sang about atonement, and she rocked her heavy head back and forth, her neck aching like she’d been carrying more weight in her than she ever knew. She started to dance, again— usually she leant towards ballet, but that took up space, so she reached back in her mind for the hip-hop and tap training she’d also excelled at but not liked quite as much. She shuffled in place, rolling her spine, feeling her sneakers squeak against the floor but not hearing it over the guitar. She bumped into the man next to her and almost stopped, startled, but he grinned and bumped right back. He definitely saw her face, but didn’t seem too surprised she was crying.

Maybe that kind of thing happened a lot, here.

She saw a flash, ahead and to the left of her, and realized someone’s phone camera had reflected off a shiny surface and happened to bounce into her eyes. Rising onto her toes for a moment, still dancing, she saw the nearly-bald back of that denizen’s head, the mirror girl. She knew they’d been introduced, but she didn’t remember her name. That had to be the boy she was with at the time next to her, didn’t it? Jesse, he was. She felt another pang of guilt at the fact she remembered the human’s name but not the denizen’s. It was absolutely no thanks to her, but the fact that they’d she’d survived and they found each other again was the kind of relief you only got once or twice in a lifetime. She’d sicced the cops on the poor kid. You don’t forget that, once you realize what you’ve done.

She wasn’t going to go introduce herself, even to apologize. She knew she had no place in their lives, like she had no place in Hazel’s. She just had to stand here and dance.

Grace didn’t want someone to see her and magically give her a position in some top-tier dance company. She didn’t need to be on the stage like Akagi and Park were; she knew she could be a good leader, from those last few years post-Apex, but now that it wasn’t her duty anymore she didn’t want to be. She didn’t need to make vast changes in international affairs like her parents; she didn’t need to be someone’s sole saviour or the only one who knew how to get numbers ‘that high’. She would have loved a job, obviously, or somewhere to live, but those things weren’t ones you got from dancing at a concert. Maybe what you got from dancing at a concert was will. She had a raw deal, back after a decade, lost, very, very alone. But she was young, in the end, and she had time.

By the end of the set, Lake had screamed herself hoarse. Akagi and Park played so well she didn’t give a single shit anymore that they weren’t her usual kind of music; watching them lean in, knowing exactly how to use their microphones to fill the space, playing intricate loops around each other’s melody lines, was just about transcendent. It was good— it was good. She’d seen Tulip again, and she was a different person— a person she could be around without feeling trapped, now. She was alive and free and cheering her head off, Jesse beside her, the heat in the room making condensation on her skin which was gross but very human, a dumb logo magnet on the side of her head, and she was there.

The whole room kept cheering until Duet came back on for their encore, and once they did re-appear on stage the cheering just got louder. They hadn’t said anything too explicitly about the train— their between-songs chatter was mostly anecdotes about Canadian life, about stupid joe jobs the both of them had had to get to make ends meet, about pets and friends and taxes and books. Human things. She supposed that was understandable. Not only was not quite everyone in the room a passenger— they were good musicians, so they had a perfectly considerable normie fanbase too— but they’d had so much life, about sixty years of it, that the year and the half on the train couldn’t fuel stage talk forever. It was present, because of course it was, but it wasn’t their whole story.

They came back on without their instruments— Park’s setup was still there on stage, because it took some moving, but he didn’t head to it— and sat down at the very front of the stage, legs dangling into the crowd. Someone knocked on Akagi’s toe-cap and he laughed.

Park had something in his hands— some piece of electronics, about the size of a paperback book. Akagi had fetched the microphone from its stand and brought it to the front of the stage, along with some other cord which Park plugged into the aux of the machine, fishing a little wired stylus out of a groove in the front and adjusting some dials.

“We’re glad you all came tonight,” Park said, and Lake reflected on how weird it was that when they were singing, Park’s voice was lower than Akagi’s, but when they were speaking it was the other way around. “Every one of you. If you’re here for us, we love you. If you’re here for each other, we love you. If you’re here for yourself, we love you.”

“Save some of that for me,” Akagi teased, and Park rolled his eyes and kissed him easily on the cheek. Someone in the audience whistled.

“We’ve just got time for one more song,” Park continued, “and we wanted to take you back a ways. You might not think it to look at us, but Ryan and I were twenty once. We were kids, even. And for a long time, before Ryan got his guitar, all we had was this.” He waved the little electronic box at the audience, and leaned on Akagi’s side.

“You might go different ways,” Akagi said. “You might fuck up, and you might think you’ve killed things forever, and you might think you’re never gonna get home. But you’re here. I promise, you’re gonna be okay.”

Akagi took a pause, then grinned out at the crowd. “Thanks for coming out tonight,” he said. “Here’s Yours.”

They started to sing, the only accompaniment being the little toy synth. Park dragged the stylus across the plate without looking, smoothly playing a counterpoint to the melody. Lake realized that Tulip was crying a little, thought about the tee she bought for Mikayla, and put an arm around her shoulders. Duet was playing a thirty-year-old song and it meant something, and Tulip was her sister now and it meant something, and Jesse was there for her and it meant everything.

As the song ended, Akagi and Park grinned out at the crowd, levering themselves to their feet.

“We love you, Toronto, thanks for being so kind to us.”

As the lights came back on and the crowd started to move, Lake leaned, exhausted, on Jesse’s side, suddenly feeling like it was much later than midnight. She looked around and realized why Jesse had hustled her away and straight into Tulip, earlier— Grace was there, by one wall of the hall, talking to some guy who seemed like he was asking her a question.

“Hey,” a teenager in a pink jumper said, tapping her shoulder and drawing her attention away from Grace. “Y’all Passengers?”

“Yeah,” Lake said, warily.

“I mean, I kinda figured,” the girl said, gesturing vaguely to Lake’s entire metal self, which was fair. “A bunch of us were gonna take the bus over to the Lakeview, get a midnight snack, talk about stuff. They have like ten eggs benedicts. Wanna come?”

Lake realized it was entirely possible Grace was being invited to the same diner, and decided that was probably okay. They didn’t have to talk, and if they did, she’d handle herself. This was Earth, and almost everyone in this concert hall had been given a weirdly literal fresh start.

She looked between Tulip and Jesse, and at their smiles, nodded.

“I bet you guys have some stories to tell,” she said to pink-jumper girl. “This will be a good night.”

And she meant it.

Chapter Text

Amelia Hughes was not at the concert, as she was not in Toronto at the time. She was not, in fact, on Earth.

She had met Akagi and Park, though, briefly. They’d seemed like nice enough lads, though being in the presence of young lovers too stupid to make the most of their time together stung her much too sharply as a new widow and she couldn’t bear to be near them for long. She was glad they’d been mucking about with the stylophone when she’d met them; the tones had caused a glitch in a car and given her the idea to extend the Captain Crunch hack to the train itself.

She’d checked up on them once, idly, a couple years later when she was settling into her role as Conductor properly. Both were listed in the computer as zeroed out and returned to Earth. She’d have to have actually been worried about them for it to have been a load off her mind, but she’d bothered to check, so she supposed she cared at least a little.

She didn’t imagine their little band was likely to go anywhere, though. The musical world was overdue an acoustic renaissance.