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Mourning is strange. Grace doesn’t know if what she’s doing can even be called mourning, even if it fits the definition on a basic level—it doesn’t account for how her grief tangles among more complicated emotions than sadness, and someone in genuine mourning, she feels, would have pushed to hold a funeral for Simon.
She didn’t. No one did. The Apex kids were confused, directionless, but they never really seemed to understand that Simon was gone, not just somewhere else. Even the witnesses. In all their time on the Train, they’d never seem a passenger die, after all. Not one of them. Grace had managed that, at least.
There’s a… memorial, though. A nook, a place she’d carved out among the old mall-store headquarters Simon used to set up camp in, the one he filled with relics and trophies, miniature figures left half-painted. Scribbled-over notebook pages for the great epic novel he’d plotted out.
Grace tells the kids that he let his emotions get the better of him, that he wanted things like power and violence—things that they shouldn’t want anymore. Things that will hurt them, in the end. She sticks to the short and simple, because she’s too good at getting the kids to listen to her, and that feels wrong. She could stretch the truth, make her eyes wide and her voice warm and sympathetic, convincing them to understand, but just the thought makes her skin crawl.
She can’t let them see her as an authority anymore. So, more than anything, they need to leave.
It’s not easy. Some of the kids are little—Hazel was little—and don’t really know how to manage the Train themselves, but Grace also knows the power dynamics of the Apex well, and some of the older kids would use teaming up as an excuse to bully them. So she has to nudge them away from that. And food and water are important, obviously, alongside clear instructions for how the Train works—how it’s meant to work. They don’t have to believe her. But she hopes they do.
All in all, it takes at least a few weeks for the last kids to close the domed red doors behind them, leaving the Mall Car empty for good.
Empty, except for Grace.
And Simon.
“Looks like it’s just us.”
Out of habit, Grace swings the door shut. Simon’s headquarters are just as cluttered as he left them.
She makes use of the step stool by the shelves. Weirdly, it’s one of the only things she can stand to touch; maybe it’s that they found it together on a raid for more notebooks in what she’s pretty sure they’d named the Stapler Car.
Maybe it’s that she doesn’t remember finding any nulls when they’d destroyed the place.
“Cath was the last one. I’m sure you were expecting that.”
The kids called her Scaredy Cath. Somewhere around ten years old and a near-constant bed-wetter, Cath was a recent addition to the Apex but no less fervent. Relentlessly teased, terrified of abandonment, desperate for validation.
Her number isn’t that high, though. She doesn’t have far to go.
“I had to give her, like, the worst talking-to. I felt like my mom. Ugh.” Grace gives a fake shudder, parking the stepstool by the corner nook. Making herself face it, the cleared-out space, the little chunk of stone outlined by faded carpet. The shaky letters written in lipstick across its surface.
“When she stopped crying, she told me she’s going upstream, because she wants to meet up with Wyatt and Ticia.” The older kids left last week. “If One doesn’t shuffle the cars around, maybe she’ll actually do it.”
Or maybe she’ll never see them again. Maybe it’s for the best. Grace doesn’t know if that’s something the Train can know. It has to be. Maybe that’s the final piece, the acceptance, the letting-go, that will dwindle Cath’s number into nothingness—null—and grant her exit.
“I fucking hate you, you know,” Grace says.
Predictably, Simon doesn’t answer.
Grace has talked to him every day since his death. The Apex kids thought it was weird, but they still revered her enough to leave her be. Even after they’re all gone, she sticks to the ritual, because she just can’t leave him yet. He doesn’t deserve much, but he deserves that, at least, since she’s the one who lied to him, who fed his appetite for vengeance, who strung him along and built his worldview from the ground up.
She needs to be honest now that it’s too late.
It’s not like she’s choosing to rot with him. No, she tells herself she’s looking after the place in case any kids come back, looking for refuge, but it’s really that she’s a coward. She doesn’t know where to go. How to face the line of Train cars stretching into the distance, the infinite linked chain of her crimes.
“I miss you,” she sighs to the makeshift grave on the second day.
“I wish I did something. Even though you were trying to kill me.”
It’s a weird back-and-forth between regret and defiance. Seesawing guilt, grief, shame—and stinging fury.
“You chose this.” Some days, it’s more one than the other. “You could’ve just—I know I lied to you, but you could’ve just been normal about it. You could’ve let me explain. And not pushed me off the Train, Simon, what the hell.”
The room is silent.
It’s lunchtime. Grace feels a surge of spite. She’s going to enjoy her meal. She’s going to live her life. And there’s nothing Simon can do about it.
“I knew you had a crush on me,” she confesses the next day.
Her head is bowed over her knees. Today, she didn’t eat lunch at all, and she can’t even explain why. She feels pathetic and small and alone. Her number hasn’t changed. She doesn’t want it to.
“I knew and—and I thought it was funny, okay, I never took it seriously because my head was up my own ass. You were nothing to me. But you were also—my best friend, and I should’ve treated you better.”
The words burn up her throat.
“What about you, though? Asshole. We kissed, like, once. When we were fourteen. Did you think you were entitled to me? Like you were entitled to the truth about Hazel? No. No, I’m just—saying things. I’m sorry.”
Grace doesn’t eat dinner that day, either.
“You could’ve just not tried to kill me, and then maybe it would’ve worked out,” she says the next morning, once she’s feeling better.
The denizen paper cranes leave her alone when she’s here with Simon. They’ve got empathy, or something. Grace doesn’t know how to thank them.
She doesn’t deserve them. Except, no, she does, because she changed. Unlike someone.
“I’m glad I couldn’t save you.”
This is probably her worst confession yet. She’s wearing her gloves, to avoid looking at what it does to her number. She can’t let herself know.
“Actually, I’m glad I didn’t get a choice.” She scoffs. “Isn’t that psycho?”
Happy to sit back and let her best friend die, absolved of the moral weight. Maybe that was what those giant cockroach dogs were for. Ghoms. Erasers of mistakes too massive to correct.
She sits a while more, contemplative, then adds, “I don’t think I was right for you. I mean, duh. But even if we were both okay people.”
“I feel like there’s no heaven on the Train. Or in general, but whatever.”
Time passes so slowly when you’ve got no one else to talk to. Grace kicks a lot of things around in her head, over and over again.
“My family was crazy religious. But mostly on paper.” She feels she owes Simon some of her history. The things she always avoided, back when he was alive. This is her first time mentioning her family of her own volition, and she feels clumsy at it. She doesn’t know what kind of tone to land on.
“I wonder if there’s a hell,” she adds. “Think I’d get to see you there? Hah.”
She buries her face in her hands. “Hahah…”
Her laughter turns wet and soaks her gloves.
“I don’t think I’m ever going to see her again. Probably for the best, right?”
She hopes Amelia is taking good care of Hazel.
She probably isn’t. And Grace has to live with never knowing.
New day, new confession. Grace forces herself, even when she doesn’t feel like it. It’s more than a habit, at this point. She needs to tell Simon each shameful realization, each thought she’d have ordinarily kept to herself. It’s the only way to get over it.
“I wish I could tell her I’m sorry. Hell, I wish I could tell you I’m sorry. But I’m not, okay? You had a chance—like, so many chances.” Her voice breaks.
“I’m still—I’m still sorry, though, kinda. I think if you’d never met me, you’d probably be home by now.”
“I don’t have anyone to go home to. Dad? Thought I was a disappointment. He was so—he couldn’t wrap his head around how sometimes people just suck. Sometimes people just decide a kid’s dumb, or ask them creepy questions, or spit on them in the park, and no big fat wallet’s gonna save you from that. No fucking—makeup, or clothes, or whatever. And I was trying so hard.”
She was trying so hard.
“I felt so alone. Even with all these other ballerinas—and even more ballerinas when I was like Hazel’s age, because little girls all get shoved into ballet classes—you get what I mean—all these ballerinas, and I couldn’t make friends with any of them. I couldn’t relate to them, not in the ‘right ways.’”
She makes air quotes.
It’s weird how she feels like she can’t keep eye contact with the general vicinity of Simon’s grave, even though he’s not looking at her and is obviously dead. She’s probably losing it.
“Fuck if I know what that even means, I just—I think I couldn’t. They were in tune with their lives, their families, whatever, and I thought they were kind of just… acting like victims. I don’t know. I don’t know, Simon. What do you want me to say.”
It’s not a question.
“Mom probably hated me. I heard the kind of things she said about other people, y’know. You’d—ha, I can picture your face if I told you. Do you know what she’d call you?”
She snorts out a laugh. It’s not funny, but it gives her the same swooping feeling in her stomach as a joke does. “But seriously. What a complex.”
Talking about her family the past few days reminds Grace of more things that felt so natural, at the time.
This is a makeshift confessional, after all, and she has plenty of sins to expel.
“I got pretty creative with insults sometimes. Not like I meant it, but. It’s kind of… my mother said a lot of things. I wonder if she thinks about me, ever.”
It doesn’t matter. Grace doesn’t think about her, either. Or—she didn’t until lately.
“She and my father would both hate my hair. I want to slap them so much, it’s not even funny. Want to guess what she’d call me if she saw me?”
Even if Simon were alive, it would be a rhetorical question.
“I used to get so—angry, but in a way where it was funny. Like, yeah, my mom is a deranged piece of shit, but so am I, so it’s okay! And so are other people, but that’s okay, too, because I can call them ugly and laugh in their faces, and we’re all just shitting on each other, but in the end, I’m literally worth more money than them. I swear I used to find that so funny.”
She sits there a while longer and then muses, “I bet none of those people even remember me.”
She hasn’t thought about her own exit yet. It’s still a long way off, at any rate. Part of her dreads it, but part of her craves it, and there’s no point in speculating when her number still wraps twice around her palm.
But it’s going down, and her arm looks so unbelievably bare.
She’s taken to leaving her gloves off again. And she restyled her wardrobe and hair—she’d let her appearance suffer in the weeks after the last Apex kid left—and life is going on. She’s okay.
“I think about Hazel a lot,” she tells Simon. It’s not an earth-shattering confession. But it’s still important to tell him.
“I know you don’t care. I just. I do.”
And maybe he wouldn’t care about any of the things she’d told him. Maybe, if his ghost were floating right here in front of her, he’d just tell her it was far, far too late for honesty.
But even if their worldviews had split irrevocably, she wanted to tell him.
“My mother was pregnant when I left.”
This confession is one of those strange ones that Grace doesn’t know how to talk about. Her voice comes out funny, like she’s confused about it herself.
“It was really early on. The first few months. But they knew it was a girl. They told me a few weeks before I got on the Train.”
It wasn’t even a part of her memory tape. That was how little she’d thought of it, how little it mattered in the grand scheme of things.
Grace had never thought, Oh, I’m going to be a big sister. She’d never even thought, Guess this means I’ll matter even less to them, even if the emotions of the sentiment carried over. She’d just felt like someone nonexistent. Like her parents could have been talking to a wall, instead of a child. Or a makeshift gravestone in the corner of a mall store.
Grace’s voice comes out so soft she can barely hear it herself. “I wonder if they told her she had a sister.”
“If heaven’s real, then so are souls, right?”
She’s back to aimlessly musing about the universe. Simon was more into theology than she ever was—part of his interest in worldbuilding—so she thinks he’d like this conversation. It almost feels like a conversation, sometimes.
“I feel like they are. Otherwise, what’s the point of this place?” She adds, “Two kids went home today.”
The Cat had stopped by. She’d gotten word of Simon’s death.
Grace didn’t know how to feel about letting her pay her respects, but she did, and in exchange, she told Grace how the Apex kids were doing. It was… fine. Grace was happy to hear it.
She was still glad when Samantha left, though.
“I think Hazel has a soul. And Tuba. I think she had one. And all the animals and things that could talk that we wheeled. And some things that don’t talk. I don’t know where the line is, I guess.” Grace blows out a sigh. “Maybe everything has a soul.”
Simon would disagree.
“I…” Her mouth is dry. “You had a soul.”
“I dream about you a lot.”
The confessions are shorter now. No more than a sentence or two. Grace still never skips a day, but she doesn’t feel that awful concoction of guilt and vindictiveness anymore. Mostly, she just misses who they were during those first years, having fun together before starting the Apex. Free from all the constraints of society, their past lives, except not really, because once the world infects you, it germinates. It grows, like it swelled in young Grace's head, in young Simon's head, even if they didn't feel it, and it made them resent each other, even if they couldn't pinpoint why. Every laugh felt like taking. Every touch like a game.
She can’t separate their friendship from the rot. But ignorance was bliss, and she misses it anyway.
“I want to forget you.”
She doesn’t mean it.
“I don’t want to forget Hazel.”
Hazel is why she’s doing this. Why she’s trying to be better. For her, and for other kids, and for everyone who should have been protected, guided, nurtured, by people who’re supposed to look out for them.
For Simon, the day she first met him.
For herself. Her own childhood.
It’s taken her a while to come to terms with it, but she can’t be a coward forever.
“I promise I won’t forget you.”
And, for the last time, Grace leaves the Mall Car, Simon, and the rot of their home behind.