1

It was a chill and late September morning of the Dutch type.

Marith tried to run up a set of ugly, grey stairs, poured out of cement, belonging to a train station that possessed all the charm of a Communist town square. She tried to balance herself on the tips of her toes, with her cello strapped to her back, while a kind of watery cold was in the process of seizing her bones. Her lungs protested heavily, by constricting painfully in her chest, and her heart demanded an explanation for such outlandish behaviour, by pounding her sternum.

The mist was even thicker on the platform. Marith took a minute to catch her breath. Exhaling created more fog. Only in the Netherlands had she ever experienced this type of mind boiling coldness. Over the centuries the little kingdom had received many gifts from the Nord-Sea. This was one of them.

The street lights were still on, creating large, yellow, floating orbs in the air. Behind the black and red railings the berry bushes were covered in hoarfrost, promising to transform the hours to come into a sunny autumn day with a bright blue sky.

There was something peculiar going on at that train station Marith was yet to realize. She had seen some cars and bicycles down on the parking lot, but the platform was deserted. Prying through the thick mist to her right she couldn’t distinguish any human activity. Not even the screens of tablets or smartphones lighting up.

Strange.

She peered to her left, but the large station clock was not visible. Not that it was important. Over the years she had come to believe the government had winded the timepiece back, as an elaborate scheme to cover up their monumental delays.

However, she decided not to fish her phone out of her pocket to look at the time either. The thought of the screen lighting her face and putting attention to her presence stopped her.

Had she missed anything? Did the timetables change? She wasn’t big on following the news every second of every day. Maybe the trains weren’t riding at all that morning?

Time passed. How much of it passed, however, was a big question mark. Marith waited. The longitude of her waiting started to lose its relevance, since she was frozen to the bone anyway. She just hoped it wouldn’t damage her instrument too much. Strings had a habit of jumping loose under cold circumstances.

She started to feel cross. Was she allowed to feel that way? It was her responsibility to catch up on the news, after all. Yes. No. She was absolutely allowed to feel agitated by a lack of decent public transportation. She lived in one of the most densely populated areas of her country, maybe even of Europe. People needed trains. How else were they supposed to get from one place to another?

The National Railways (NS) had made a habit out of letting people come to their draughty stations before letting them know, in very a-specific phrasings, they were going to take their travellers hostage for an unknown amount of time, with their own tax-money, without fair trial. The truth of the standstill always was that if you were planning on getting anywhere at all that day you’d better wait.

Just while Marith was contemplating whether or not to wait for the public service announcement to be made the blue striped, yellow hell finally came gliding into the station. First she saw the headlight of the train. The sound followed shortly thereafter. It was muffled by the weather conditions. A squeaking whine came from the tracks. The train was slowing down.

Marith peeked at the dark windows of the locomotive, but she couldn’t see an operator. Several wagons glided past her, before the train came to a complete halt.

A set of blue doors whizzed open in front of her. She stood in the light of the train for several confused moments. What moved her to take the first step and get on that vehicle remains a mystery.

The light had created a path over the platform and something had given her the persuasion to follow it, even though the better judgment floating around the centre of her brain tried to convince her otherwise.

The temperature inside was a slight improvement from the outside, so she took off her gloves. After she had taken a few steps in the train it started to ride. The artificial light and the round, oblong shape of the wagon made it seem like she stepped in to a safe reality. She couldn’t wait to leave that eerie station behind her.

The tail of the train was empty, so Marith walked in between the rows of worn out, green seats to the next cart. Her footsteps sounded hollow on the hard linoleum floor. With a pit in her stomach she came to the discovery the other wagons were unoccupied as well. What exactly was going on?

Marith marched through the next cart, while the vehicle was picking up speed. This gave her a pleasant feeling while walking, but couldn’t take away the fact that she became slightly alarmed again, as she realized the train was desolated.

She was halfway through the train, before she peeked out of one of the windows. The next village was also covered in thick shards of mist. The weather wasn’t getting any better and the train wasn’t slowing down either. Shouldn’t it stop to pick up passengers on the other stations?

She opened another set of blue swing doors and was struck by relief. On one of the benches on the right side of the aisle sat a young man by the window, his back to the driving direction, reading a book. Marith sighed and - although she was not the most people-ly-person of all people-persons, if she was a people-person at all - she walked towards him. She enjoyed the presence of other people in her surroundings if, at the same time, she did not have to participate in any conversation or event whatsoever. Luckily for her, her fellow passenger didn’t seem like the conversational kind.

If she was ever to write a scary novel or short story it would for sure start with a young woman on a deserted, misty train station, haunted by the thought of something haunting her, she told herself as she let her cello slide off her back, before sitting down.

The brown eyed, beanie wearing young fellow looked up and stared at her. She smiled politely. He smiled surprised. They both went back to their own business. Maybe it wasn’t appropriate to sit next to the one other passenger on a train, but it was too late now to go sit somewhere else.

Marith dug up some sheet music from behind the zippers of the back pocket of her cello bag and attempted to study. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help but notice the eyes of the guy across from her wander off to her hands and move up to her face again. She could feel him staring. It was innocent curiosity, because it isn’t something people see every day, but that didn’t make it any less awkward. She could feel how her face slowly started to burn and she took off her scarf. He went back to his book.

Although a chronic lack of sun had given her pale skin an almost translucent glow the unpigmented white spots of her Vitiligo always showed. It was a harmless auto-immune disease, but one that was visible. Her lungs were tormenting her in more diverse ways, yet that was not for the world to see, it was just for her to experience.

Time seemed to have stopped, while the train ran with an undiminished speed through a scantily illuminated world.

As soon as Pavan felt the transport was nearing its completion he stretched out his arms to steady himself for the landing. He didn’t have to stretch them out far for his hands to meet with walls. The first movement he made after making sure he wasn’t at risk of toppling over anymore was to pat the breast pocket of his shirt. It was there, clicking and buzzing against his chest, all seemed well. He didn’t do these things often anymore and with old age came certain contemplations and fears about the risks involved of such a consignment.

Just as he turned around to look for a mirror, or other shiny surface he could check his reflection in, he realised he had landed in an impossibly tiny room, with a very poignant smell. Also, his right foot seemed to be stuck in something moist. The wetness was slowly trickling trough his shoe and sock.

He looked down and with disgust he noticed a clogged up toilet with his foot disappearing in it. They had dropped him in some sort of lavatory. Did they think this was funny?!

Nauseated by the smell, and abhorred by the discovery the contents were in fact on him, he tried to tear loose from the fish bowl that was once instructed to be placed there as a toilet bowl by people who had never actually travelled by train. The kind of people that were never not seen wearing suits and betake from A to B with a chauffeur. The same people that think their contribution to the education system is indispensable, because they were given the job by the best friend of the brother of the captain of the rugby team from the law school their girlfriends sister had attended.

The moment he forcefully separated himself from the cesspool he had gained such momentum he smacked himself against the blue swing door that wasn’t locked and he found himself stumbling into the corridor of the train.

He was happy to have escaped out of that tiny, smelly compartment. The whole thing was just unsanitary. However, it didn’t ease his mind or reduce his agitation.

He checked his wrists. He could still feel the pressure on those delicate parts of his underarm, although the origins of those sensations were not visible right now.

He tried to compose himself by readjusting his yellow windbreaker, before he decided which wagon he should try first.

It wasn’t easy to cross two continents and an ocean and end up at the exact right place, especially not when the right place was a moving vehicle. Pavan was just praying that this was the right moving vehicle.

He took a few unsure steps into the train carriage. This one was empty, during rush hour. That was a promising sign.

Yet, he was looking for a person, in a less desolate carriage, so he turned around and entered the other one.

The mist and the fading darkness didn’t allow Marith to see much when she peeked through the window, except for some trees and dimly lit villages flashing by in the distance. She folded her scarf, shoved it in the back pocket of the cello bag and unbuttoned the top half of her thick coat.

When she picked up the sheet music again she could only stare at the musical notes dancing across the first page. They were specifically designed to confuse musicians and scare off newcomers in the musical world, but they were never supposed to engage in physical activity.

Marith started rubbing her eyes to expel the fatigue and the confusion. This gave her a momentary sense of relief. After that she could make out dangling spots, moving colours, bright stars, the vastness of the universe and an elderly man in a yellow windbreaker in her purview.

He was sitting a couple of rows further down the train. Facing her, watching her. As it turned out there were more people traveling to Leiden that morning and Marith tried to shake off the ominous feeling that kept creeping up on her.

The man appeared disgruntled. He had grey, fuzzy, thinning hair stuck to his head. His deep bronze skin was filled with dark freckles.

However, he didn’t stop looking at her. Taken aback by his direct gaze she pretended to study the sheet music again. Had they met before? There was a distant familiarity about him and his manner that Marith couldn’t quite recall.

His piercing eyes forced her to look up again and she was met with a crooked smile. Apparently, he knew her or he was having a chuckle with himself on that wicked morning.

A disturbing sound made her tear her gaze away from the stranger to look up and down the aisle. The sighing and slowly dying sound of a power failure wallowed through the train. Simultaneously the vehicle started to slow down, which caused Marith to tilt forward and hastily grab her cello to prevent it from toppling over.

She exchanged a quick look with the young man who was sitting diagonally across her. He peeked out the window and then, like a true hipster, shrugged the whole thing off.

From the foremost point of the train to the rear end the lights went off. One electric circuit at the time. Apparently this civilian caterpillar had given up on its duty to transport its contents over a slippery railway under these unholy weather conditions.

When the lights in their carriage went out the undefined feelings from the station returned, with the tiniest touch of terror. Marith felt empty and hollow on the inside, mentally and physically, as if she had been robbed of both her senses and her organs.

“What’s happening?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse and barely audible. It was the first thing she had said all day.

“I don’t know,” the young man whispered back shakily, from her right. He had apparently decided it was time to get alarmed as well.

Marith leaned over the handrail of the bench and propped herself slightly up. Their surroundings were pitch-black and she didn’t dare to leave her seat. Neither did her neighbours. She turned her head to her right, staring into dark depths, but she didn’t hear anything. The silence was overwhelming. She could have been able to hear a mosquito buzz on the other side of that train if it wasn’t for the fact that the cold wouldn’t allow insects to buzz at all that day. Instead her heart was pounding so hard she could swear it was audible outside her chest.

What were they supposed to do? Wait? Search for a conductor or the machinist? Were those people even present today?

A wintry wind blew through the aisle and the temperature dropped instantly. The high, creaking sound the hinges of the blue folding doors made when the wind blew through ended the deafening silence.

Marith rose halfway up from her seat to peak over the backrest. The tail of the cutting wind that travelled through the core of the train brushed her face and gave her instant goose bumps. Everything was off. Where had this icy wind come from?

The cold left the waggon and the sound of the swaying doors slowly died away until they were calmly hanging in their hinges again. It seemed like the stream of air was leaving the train via the back compartment.

It had to have been a sinister sight from the outside. A yellow train on a cold and misty day gliding alongside a dark track, slowly losing its powers and coming to a halt in the middle of nowhere. It was just sitting there, almost disappearing into the black hole that was attempting to unfold on the inside. What was happening exactly inside, however, was anyone’s guess. Whether there were any onlookers at all that morning to wonder about this floorer was starting to become more and more debatable.

Vanessa stood with her arms crossed in the cold and monumental atrium of the stronghold. It was dark in Sweet Lake and hardly any natural light was flowing in. The atrium and the adjacent hallways were dimly lit by light spots protruding from the massive walls.

She stared anxious at the diaphanous opening in the roof. A few rays of moonlight managed their way in. It was late, but that was not the point. The point was that their plan, which was hardly a plan, had to work.

“Hello Vanessa,” an ever cheerful voice rang behind her. He ogled the tall, slim, dark haired woman, who stood waiting outside the heavy doors of the conference room, quickly before she would turn around.

She had already heard him coming from the other side of the atrium. He was always jingling and jangling. Well, his outfit was.

He was Keymaker. A pretty large, mildly obese, middle aged man. His hair looked like one of his parents was blonde, the other one had been a ginger and in his teenage years the hair had decided it couldn’t pick a colour and went for orange. He basically looked like a sagged Viking.

She didn’t like him much. Not because he always stared at her - most men did that and she was fearing the day they would stop doing so - no, they had been having a spat over his son, William, for more than a year now.

She shot him a look with a razor sharp edge.

“Late one, eh?”

“Sure is,” Vanessa managed to answer without unfolding her arms.

“Think you’ve got one?” he continued, unbothered by her attitude.

“Yes,” she answered curtly.

“Really?” He took of his hat and scratched his scruffy hairdo.

“If I think I got one I got one,” she said snarky.

“Right, right.” He nodded wearily, with his hands on his hips.

“I have never been wrong,” Vanessa finished while she eyed him up and down.

Keymaker avoided eye contact after that one. He pretended to stare at the trousers of his complex habiliments. It mainly consisted of pockets, clasps and strings, filled with specialized instruments, tools and keys, held together by buttons and Velcro. The very uncomfortable Norman excused himself, claiming there was something missing, and ringed away.

If people would run into him on the streets, without his specific apparel, their first impression would be that of a happy-go-lucky and easy-going man who worked with his hands. Probably a plumber. Little did they know he had abilities that detectives, burglars and maybe even plumbers could only dream of.

Vanessa followed Keymaker with an evil gaze. When he was out of sight she returned to staring at the doors, because that would speed things up.

The power came back on as sudden and as noisy as it had gone out. The caterpillar was coming back to life again. Marith wasn’t expecting a butterfly. She just wanted to get on with her day. Some of her pupils were waiting in Leiden for a cello lesson.

Through the little, round windows in the blue swing doors she could see how the insides of the train were starting to get illuminated again, from the back carriage to the front. Block by block, one electrical circuit at the time.

The moment the lights in their waggon were about to be flipped on she turned back around to face the driving direction again.

The moment the fluorescent tubes jumped on Marith smacked her head against the green backrest of the bench she was seated on. Her upper legs slapped against her torso and knocked the air out of her lungs. The heals of her boots were cutting holes in the soft lining of the bench.

On the opposite bench, across from her, sat the old man with the yellow coat. She stared right into his bright brown eyes. The expression behind the thin, gold-plated frame of his glasses was pragmatic.

While clenching the armrest with her left hand she had inadvertently grabbed her instrument with the right one. Her back was pressed against the backrest so tight she almost became one with the train.

She wasn’t sure if she had made a noise, but her jaw was definitely ajar and she was panting.

He made a soothing gesture with his hands and stared right through her eyes.

“I am not interested in your instrument.” His voice was deep and manly, but fragile and creaking with old age.

“What?” She burst out.

He glanced at the black cello cover that she promptly let go off.

“Who are you?” Marith asked, completely out of breath.

“A reflection.” He smiled worrisome. “I came all the way here for you and you alone,” he clarified, without being asked. Even though he looked disordered he sounded eloquent.

It seemed like the mist was pulling up into the train and Marith and her companion were forsaken in their own limited world. They had only eyes for each other. Pavan was forming the periphery of a new, temporary reality.

This periphery, however, didn’t simply consist of mist. What Marith could discern from the corners of her eyes was a colourful, blue and purple haze that carried some sort of little twinkling stars in them, as if a glitter gun had exploded all around them.

He did not avert his eyes. Marith’s body was locked. She couldn’t escape her uncomfortable posture. The yellow coated Elder sat unmoved, his hands folded patiently in his lap.

Marith’s chest heaved uncontrollable, fighting for oxygen. Oxygen that was supposed to be all around them, but wasn’t entering her lungs any longer. She kept staring into the man’s eyes, while hugging her knees. The joints of her knees and hips started to burn.

He saw she was agonizing and he seemed to comprehend the importance of air. Pavan unfolded his hands and reached for the girl’s.

Filled with horror she awaited his touch.

His fingertips were lifeless and harsh. He pried her arms loose from around her knees. When he succeeded he let his hands trail the inside of her wrists and stopped on certain places of her skin and then went up… and down again. First centimetres, then just millimetres at the time.

As soon as Pavan found the points he was looking for he bore his fingers deep in the soft tissue of her underarms. The connection was instant and electric.

Marith’s lungs filled with air, as if she breathed with two dozens of lungs. Such a relief. Her heart stopped skipping beats and blood started to flow towards her limbs again. Her feet subsided from the bench to the floor and she sat up straight. Marith’s hands bended inwards and then just sat there in her lap.

Pavan kept holding on to her. His arms and hands curved at a curious angle. Like the grip a cellist had on the bow.

Then she lost vision. It didn’t just appear any longer he could see through her eyes. He really actually could.

Their bodies remained in the train while their minds travelled. How far and where to were uncertain and probably irrelevant quantities.

As emotionless as his face had been, all the more information was exchanged after the true connection was made. She felt his presence in her head, in her thoughts. How? Maybe even more important, why? Fear of death made room for curiosity.

He showed her stuff. Images. First blurry and incoherent. Then more bearable and understandable.

Marith realized she was seeing things through his eyes. Old memories. A battered old car, noisy kids screaming and playing, chalked sidewalks, hopscotch, a bell ringing, more noisy kids running towards the big red doors of a brick building.

She knew what that was and where it was! Her old elementary school in Sweet Lake.

The images continued. A little girl with pigtails and crayons in the back of the classroom, listening to a teacher explaining things she already knew and not looking up. The same little girl dragging a backpack filled with those crayons, colouring books and treasures from the forest through the hallways of that local school. She was on her way to another classroom to pick up her little, messy haired sister who had just started to go there. Together they crossed the playground, running towards their father, already waiting for them. They yelled goodbye to headmaster Pavan, who had just opened the gates that surrounded the grounds the school was on.

Gradually it dawned on Marith. The little girl was her and the headmaster was him. She had just never seen herself through someone else’s eyes.

We happen to have a lot in common, but we are not quite the same.

His words felt both harsh, in the mental space they shared together, and like some sort of acknowledgement, like the start of something new.

She was determined to absorb every detail of information that would follow and to never forget any of it. She was ready to be informed, enlightened and amazed, but instead of sharing more information he was now collecting pieces. In her mind.

He was flipping through her visions, like a teenager scrolling through a digital music collection or switching between the apps on a smartphone. He did it with ease.

As long as she could remember she had memories in her mind that she had never made. It had taken her years to realize that she would in fact never make them at all. At certain times in her life Marith had been given the rare ability to peek through the keyhole of the fourth dimension, at the future. Pavan tried to open the door for her.

When he found what he was looking for he showed her a forgotten vision. A nightmarish one. She did that. Forgetting about important stuff, especially when the images had been disturbing and horrific or vague and fleeting. In fact, it was one of her many hidden talents, alongside walking into doorposts, overthinking to the verge of a mental breakdown and being perennially insecure and doubtful about the matter of her existence.

Today we are joining our talents, so you might just survive what’s coming. I prefer that you do.

He added new views to the snippets of Marith’s original nightmare. Where did those phantoms come from?

Should she say something back? Could she even communicate back? She had to activate some desolate part of her brain that was definitely there, but quite rusty. It wasn’t rusty, because it had been quiet. It was out of use, because Marith had shut it down with all her might when she had been a child. She had become so good at it that suppressing it came without effort. Apart from the occasional snippets of horror she experienced she had been successful in denying and banishing her visions.

Accepting that part of herself and recollecting it was a fresh challenge that she didn’t think she could solve then and there.

Despite her dubiety she tried to feel Headmaster Pavan through his squeeze. She noticed he was taken aback by this. Since she could sense his surprise what she was doing must have been working.

No time.

What? Where had that come from? It had not been him. It was a different mental voice.

No time!

They were clearly not alone. She was in touch with other voices through her connection with Pavan. Was that where the additions to her original flashes of mayhem just came from? Some sort of network?

She was pioneering in a world that was long forgotten by her, but was apparently embraced by other people. Naturally they had the upper hand.

Marith was dumbfounded, but couldn’t wallow in her astonishment for long. Pavan and the others completed the message, the visions.

He broke the mental connection briskly and abruptly by letting go of her wrists. The back of her head hit against the headrest of the bench once more. She felt as if she awakened from a dream by falling of a staircase.

“You know what’s about to happen now.” This was no longer his powerful mental voice, but his actual brittle voice, caused by the movement of actual air hitting her eardrums.

“How…? What about you?” She stuttered, while standing up and forcing her legs not to fail on her.

“I return…”

“… to the others?”

His eyes twinkled.

“Okay,” Marith uttered, mostly to herself, with a heaving chest. She reached for the handle on her cello bag.

“Leave it!”

Marith hesitated for a fraction of a second, before she understood, before she remembered. They shot each other a conspiratorial look. Then Pavan felt himself fading away.

She hadn’t noticed yet that the train had started to move again. It was picking up significant speed too.

Along with Pavan the glittering, colourful clouds in the train had been drawn away. Marith found herself alone with the skinny teenager again.

Their eyes met and Marith understood that he didn’t understand. He hadn’t seen anything. He wasn’t told anything. He just stared at her standing there.

She fastened the belt of her heavy coat and walked off towards the back of the train, back to where she had entered this morning’s inferno. Determined and anxious to end this train ride different than the horrifying images and prophecies shown to her she accelerated, hoping the kid would bite.

Almost at the blue doors her heart was pounding and, despite the cold, her hands were sweating. It took him longer than she anticipated.

She stretched her hand out to open the doors.

“Ma’am?”

Marith slightly cringed when she heard him say that. Glancing over her shoulder she saw the young man standing in the aisle, awkwardly holding the most expensive thing she had ever owned.

“Your instrument!” He lifted it slightly.

The vehicle kept accelerating. They stared at each other through the fog created by their breath. Marith shot him a challenging look, threw her ponytail over her shoulder and pushed open the doors.

From the corner of her eye she registered his confusion. Then he started to move as well.

She sensed him in her wake and started to run. The heels of her boots stomped on the linoleum floor, creating hollow blows. The hinge doors squeaked. Both passengers panted.

“Hey!” He sounded agitated, but by the sound of his footsteps Marith knew he wasn’t giving up.

They crossed several more waggons. Faster and faster. Their feet barely touched the floor, their hands outstretched to intercept those ridiculous doors that were starting to piss them both off, their coats dancing around their bodies, their minds seized with growing alarm.

The train cleaved unrestrained through the fog, racing over frozen tracks, forced by an unknown harm.

Marith had reached the back end of the yellow hell. She grabbed one of the metal poles, for standing passengers, and turned around. Through the round windows in the blue doors she could see the bewildered boy coming for her.

Peeking outside she witnessed how greenery, meadows and farms had made place for vaguely lit brick buildings, streetlights and sidewalks. All still veiled in shards of the muffling weather conditions.

Almost there.

The boy stormed into the back waggon like thunder. His eyes carried questions, frustrations and fear.

He followed Marith’s gaze and glanced outside. When he realized the speed of the train was at least twice the average velocity and there weren’t any signs of the vehicle slowing down, he shot her a horror stricken look. They were hostages in a series of uncontrollable, giant metal tubes.

They understood each other then and there. That little confined space might become the only safe haven in the entire train very soon.

“Come.” Marith opened her arms.

She cringed when he dropped her cello to the ground. It made a colourful thumping sound.

The boy hugged her. The hairs of her neck jumped upright, as she could feel his fear. It strangled her lungs and doubled her own anxiety.

Soon, very soon.

“What is your name?” she whispered.

“Daan.”

They slid down the pole in a distressed embrace.

They watched the pillars that were holding the transparent roof up in the air bluster past them. The train had entered the station.

Their hug was tight, with the pole in the middle. They sat on the cold hard floor. Holding on for dear life. Daan was clinching the pole with one hand. With the other he cupped Marith’s head and held it against his chest. His chin rested in her hair. She could feel his trembling respiration.

Bracing for impact their grip on each other stiffened.

Every fibre in Marith’s body told her it was going to happen, but nothing could prepare her for the actual crash.

Marith and Daan were slapped against the chrome pole. The cello was catapulted into the train and landed again in a clamorous concussion.

Almost simultaneously crumpling and creaking noises hit their ears. They could barely hold on and grabbed what they could grab even tighter.

Marith closed her eyes and opened her mouth to scream. Whether or not actual sounds left her body was inaudible over the blasts originating from the collision. Or rather, collisions. It seemed each and every waggon was blown against another large object.

More slapping, punching and thrusting. More ominous, threatening, thundery noises. It was as if they were at the outskirts of an exploding bomb. Inauspicious and dark forces kept pulling at their limbs and yanking at their brains.

Vanessa watched the old gang trickle out of the room. She waited for the one.

“I think we have found another Pupil. She’s a satellite. A lone individual.”

“Young in age and old in soul. She fits the profile.”

Nods were exchanged and expectancies were high.

As Chains grew older it became harder to tell which specific talent belonged to whom. The endowments of these elderly citizens had begun to intertwine long before Vanessa was turned. They had been defying death for quite a while now, but Chains didn’t often co-exist for long on one and the same continent.

After Vanessa had appeared to be a Pupil they had started to realize their time was slowly going to come to an end. They had accepted their allotment with grace and dignity. For most of them it felt like a relief. Each and every one of them had been living a secret and complicated life for the past decades. These specific Elders had been called members of the Lost Generation for more than one reason.

Their perpetual loyalty to one another and their distant heirs moved them to help sharp up the next line of Pupils. It was their honour to help. These Pupils were their successors after all.

Even though none of them showed their true age it was clear to every onlooker that their best years were behind them. Most of them shuffled past Vanessa behind rollators or with the help of others, mumbling disordered goodnight’s to her. Pavan’s transport had taken an extraordinary toll on them.

Finally a yellow blob appeared in the door opening and last, but not least, the most remarkable member of them all, Cecile Sybling. Unlike the others she didn’t show any age and therefore seemed to be the youngest one, but the opposite was likely true. She was dressed in white clothes, impeccable as ever, chaperoned by her guide dog. Cecile was half of a twin. She had lost her eye-sight when her sister was found to be the mother of all Prophets. After that she had remained a prominent member of the community.

“And? How about Gene’s kid?” Vanessa asked, before they could say anything.

“I think I got through.” He patted Vanessa fatherly on the shoulder while at the same time grabbing her for support. He looked exhausted.

“She is quite something. She felt all of us. Not just me, the entire Chain.”

Vanessa smiled excited.

“Is there any way she will survive?”

“There is always a way. He doesn’t decide the outcome for us.”

“I know. I know,” answered Vanessa hastily. She wasn’t reassured, however.

“We expect her to come back soon. You take care of her when she arrives, I presume?” Pavan’s companion stared right past her. Vanessa had gotten used to this and locked eyes with her dog instead, which had been previously requested.

“Absolutely, dr. Sybling.”

Physically speaking the majority may have been disturbingly archaic, but eyes are treacherous reflections of the brain. All remaining Elders were living a life of the mind, sustained by the same forces that created the human imagination.

Their car was still jerking and jolting. After a big bump Marith figured it had surely come off the tracks. The waggon lurched and rocked. It played with its passengers body’s like a dryer tosses around wet clothing. Except for the fact that a laundromat probably makes more pleasant noises.

Then, suddenly, the bright yellow coffin came to an impulsive stop.

Marith trembled. She had inadvertently grabbed Daan’s beanie, which she was veraciously holding onto at that point. Also, his head wasn’t in it anymore.

The power had gone out everywhere and water and steam came pouring out of unjustifiable places.

They were lying on the floor of the last waggon, beaten, mangled, still more or less entwined. Neither Marith nor Daan could let go of one another just yet.

Marith wondered if she had broken anything, but her body didn’t feel like feeling. It was fighting in between consciousness and a black out.

Behind them the safety circuit forced the double doors to hiss open. Welcome fresh air came flowing in. Like one functioning organism they breathed in… and out.

After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably a matter of moments, their hold on each other weakened.

Daan rolled over and tried to get up.

“We have to…” He pointed breathless at the platform.

Marith nodded, crying. She wasn’t sure she could move, but another untimely train might bolt into the station any second, just like theirs.

Their car had indeed derailed, so they had to climb out, falter over several tracks and then clamber onto the exaltation.

To Marith this seemed like taking hurdles of Olympic proportions. She attempted to get up, her feet slipping away from under her, stumbled out of the waggon and collapsed in the gravel. Daan put his arm around her waist and hoisted her up with all his might.

They helped each other onto the platform, which involved a lot of gawky pushing and dragging.

As soon as Marith felt the ribbed tiles, meant for the blind, beneath her hands her legs definitively gave up on her. She was out of strength.

Daan came apart next to her.

They were lying side by side, in the midst of the biggest destruction the city had met with since the Germans had taken an interest in occupying the Netherlands during the Second World War.

Silence, pure silence, was all that remained in the deserted station. A pile of wrecked and derailed train cars emerged from clouds of smoke and dust. It was a sight she only recognized from apocalyptic movies.

Marith and Daan stayed there with their eyes closed until the first rays of sunlight fought their way through the disappearing mist to warm the skin of their faces.

Just after Marith registered some hubbub and footsteps in the far distance she passed out. Spiralling into a mindless and comfortable blackness.