The darkness felt thick enough to chew.
Crossing the threshold was like walking into the gap between two blinks. One step we were in the stone room with the pillar; the next, the light behind us snapped off, and the world became nothing but black.
Not just "lights out" dark. This was deeper. No echo, no air movement, no sense of walls. Just boots on something that might as well have been nothing.
"Stay close," Captain Dorn said. Her voice sounded like it came from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Somebody's hand bumped my back. Arlen muttered a quiet apology. I could feel the heat of bodies near me, but I couldn't see a single silhouette.
"Hands out," Dorn said. "If you lose contact with the person in front of you, you say so immediately. Nobody wanders."
A line of cadets pressed tighter. Fingers brushed shoulders, backs, sleeves.
I swallowed against the pressure in my ears.
The Law in my bones pulsed once, faintly. The weight in the dark liked me here.
"Domain's turning off the lights now?" I said, mostly to prove my voice still worked. "Bit on the nose."
"This isn't 'off'," Dorn said. "This is storing us between scenes."
"Like a loading screen?" someone whispered.
"Like its mouth closed and we're between teeth," she said.
That shut them up.
We took another step.
The ground lurched.
It wasn't a fall. It was worse. Gravity rotated ninety degrees without asking. My stomach tried to go sideways while my feet tried to decide what "down" meant.
Then something slammed into my shoulder from behind. Hard. Metal pole, rubber padding.
I grabbed it on reflex.
The darkness ripped open.
Light flickered on overhead. Harsh, fluorescent, buzzing like a nest of angry insects. The black snapped back into hard edges, filled in by metal walls and rows of seats.
We were standing in a train car.
Not the modern transit boxes from Zone 17. Older. Narrower. Metal ribs, overhead straps, scratched windows. The kind of carriage you saw in old footage of evacuations—built to move bodies, not comfort.
Cadets reeled, catching themselves on poles, seats, each other. A couple fell hard. Someone swore in a choked voice.
The floor beneath us vibrated with a muted, constant rumble.
"We on…" Arlen began. Stopped. Swallowed. "Tell me the Domain didn't just spawn us on a moving train."
Dorn's jaw tightened. "Ren," she said, without looking at me, "you recognize this layout?"
My fingers tightened on the pole.
The carriage was wrong and right at the same time. I'd never been in this exact one—that I could recall—but the spacing of the seats, the angle of the windows, the pattern of scratches near the doors…
My head throbbed.
I'd dreamed this. Or something like it. Nightmares that smelled like oil and metal and too many people, always ending before I saw what happened.
"I think I've seen it," I said. "Once. Before I was… before I remember clearly."
Dorn's expression didn't change, but something in her eyes did. Recognition. And something like fury, aimed at the walls.
"Of course," she murmured. "Beolryve dug deeper."
The lights flickered again. For a moment, the car wasn't full of cadets and one very angry captain.
It was full of strangers.
Blurred figures packed the seats and aisles—men, women, kids, all gray smudges with no faces. Their shapes overlapped ours, out of sync. For a second, my hand shared a pole with five other hands that weren't there.
Then the vision snapped, and they were gone.
The train kept moving.
I glanced at the windows.
Outside, there was no tunnel wall. No cityscape. Just darkness. Not the blank of before—this had depth. Occasionally something like light streaked past, thin and fast, leaving afterimages in my eyes that looked like… words. Too quick to read.
"Roll check," Dorn said. "Sound off."
We called names. Zones. "Here." "Still here." "Wish I wasn't." No one missing. No one new.
The PA system overhead crackled.
A flat, distorted voice spilled out, words chopped into pieces, old and glitchy.
"…line… to… /… all passengers… remain… /… until… instructed…"
The language was old-city formal, the kind you only heard in archive footage. That made it worse somehow.
"Domain's stealing sound now," I muttered.
"It's replaying something," Dorn said. "This is an echo. Train incident, probably tied to when Beolryve first brushed you."
"Why me?" I said, before I could stop myself.
She didn't say Because it's bored. Or Because you're unlucky. Or Because the universe hates you specifically.
"Because you listened back," she said.
The floor shuddered. The vibration under our feet changed pitch, the way it did when a train switched tracks.
Nobody fell, but we all felt it.
The lights dimmed, then steadied. The PA spat more chopped words.
"…branch… 12… /… variance… high… /… containment… failed…"
"Variance," Arlen repeated. "Hate that word now."
Dorn stepped into the center aisle. The carriage was long, doors at either end with small windows. Both showed more dark beyond.
"Everyone stay away from the doors," she said. "Until we know what's on the other side, we treat them as teeth, not exits."
A cadet near the front raised a hand like he was in class. He lowered it quickly when she looked at him anyway.
"If this is… his old incident," he said, nodding at me, "does that mean we're about to watch him die?"
"Not if I have anything to say about it," Dorn said. Her voice was flat. Iron.
"Captain," I said quietly. "I don't remember this."
"You remember pieces," she said. "Enough that the Domain can build a set. The rest it'll improvise."
"Using me," I said.
"Using you." She scanned the car. "But improvisation goes both ways. That's the point of your Law, isn't it?"
The words settled under my ribs.
I didn't answer. The Domain would have liked me to say yes, to make it clean—Protagonist accepts role, cue music.
I swallowed it.
The PA crackled again. This time, the voice came through more clearly. Not full sentences, but enough for my skin to crawl.
"…REN, JACE… age… nine… /… Law expression… /… early contact… /… incident classified… BEOLRYVE…"
The overhead speaker said my name in a clipped, official tone that didn't belong here.
The carriage went very quiet.
Arlen slowly, deliberately lifted his middle finger toward the speaker.
Nobody laughed. The gesture didn't feel funny. It felt correct.
"Captain," I said. "If this is replaying my first contact, what happened to the original train?"
"Different Domain," she said. "Different day. Different kid. This isn't time travel. It's a copy built from what Beolryve remembers. And what it wants."
"What does it want?" someone whispered.
"Us to play along," Dorn said. "So it can see if a different line works better this time."
The lights flickered.
When they came back, one of the windows had changed.
Instead of black, it showed a slice of city.
Not Verrin. Not as I knew it. The buildings were wrong—old, lower, different signage, different lines. A different Zone entirely, maybe a different year.
The view slid past too fast to focus, like watching someone else's dream through a slit.
I stepped closer before I could stop myself.
My reflection looked back at me in the glass.
The new face. The girl version. Dark eyes, hair longer, jaw a little softer.
For a heartbeat, the reflection stuttered.
Behind mine, another face blinked into alignment. Same eyes, sharper jaw, shorter hair. The boy I half-remembered.
We looked at each other through the same skin.
Then the older version dissolved, leaving only the new.
My stomach twisted so hard I had to grab the seatback.
"Ren?" Dorn's voice was closer than I thought. "Report."
"Window's playing games," I said. My voice came out hoarse. "Old me. New me. Domain can't decide which draft is canon."
"That's not its choice," she said. "It's yours."
The words hit harder than they should have.
I turned away from the window. The carriage seemed narrower now. Every pole and handle a potential anchor and a potential trap.
The PA crackled again.
"…PRIMARY THREAD… /… decision point… /… replay…"
"Decision point?" Arlen said. "That never means anything nice."
The vibration under our feet deepened.
Something clanged at the far end of the carriage. The door there shivered, then banged open on its own, slamming into the stopper.
Beyond it, instead of another car, there was a platform.
Sand-colored. Empty. A single bench. A sign I couldn't read, letters smeared into nonsense.
The train wasn't stopping.
The platform slid past, then another. And another. Each appeared in the open doorway for a half-second, then vanished into the dark behind us.
Somewhere up front, brakes screeched.
The sound didn't match the motion. The floor kept vibrating like we were moving forward, but the shriek rose and rose like the train was trying to tear its own wheels off.
The Domain was recreating a crash.
My skin prickled.
"Everyone away from that door!" Dorn shouted. "Back here, now!"
Cadets stumbled away from the far end. The open doorway kept showing flash-frames: platform, dark, platform, dark. Each one warped a little more than the last.
The PA voice overlapped itself in a babble of broken phrases.
"…remain calm… /… incident… /… emergency protocol… /… REN, JACE…"
The Law inside me pressed against my ribs.
I could feel the scene forming. The way this had gone, once. A train that didn't stop. A crash. A Domain blooming from twisted steel and screaming people. A nine-year-old kid in the middle, with something in his head that listened.
"Captain," I said. "I think this is the part where it killed us."
"Which means this," she said, "is the part where we don't let it."
The brakes screamed higher. The floor lurched subtly, the sense of forward motion finally starting to slow. The open door at the far end showed one more platform—
—and for a fraction of a second, it wasn't empty.
I saw myself.
Smaller. Rough haircut. Big jacket, sleeves too long. Nine-year-old me stood on that platform, staring at the train hurtling by.
Our eyes met across years and drafts.
Then the platform was gone.
My heart slammed against my ribs hard enough to hurt.
"What did you see?" Dorn asked.
"Me," I said. "Smaller. Outside. Watching. I'm pretty sure I should be inside for this story."
"That's the thing about rewrites," she said. "They never line up perfectly."
The train shuddered.
I didn't have to be a train engineer to know this kind of stop was going to end badly. The metal under us complained in long, grinding squeals.
The Domain wanted a crash. That was the original shape of this story.
I could feel the Law waiting for me to pick an if.
If we crash, someone dies.
If we don't crash, the Domain throws something worse.
If—
I forced my mind to stop at the word.
Every time I'd given it a straight condition so far, it had taken something. Small, but accumulating. Smells, sounds, pieces of myself.
If I kept spending at this rate, I wasn't going to like the balance sheet.
Dorn's hand landed on my shoulder. Firm. Solid.
"You don't have to fix everything," she said, low enough that only I could hear. "Pick the line that keeps the most people standing. That's it. That's the job."
"Just that," I said. My throat was tight. "No pressure."
"Pressure's free," she said. "It's the only thing this Law doesn't charge for."
The train lurched again.
Okay.
Okay.
I couldn't stop the scene completely. The Domain wanted the crash; it had momentum. But maybe I could… redirect. Soften. Change what "crash" meant.
I gripped the pole so hard my knuckles ached.
If this train has to crash, then it crashes into somewhere that can take it. We walk out of it. Everyone in this car walks out alive.
The condition dropped into place like a stone into water.
The Law grabbed it.
The world flexed.
For a heartbeat, everything went weightless.
The squeal of brakes twisted into a new shape. The forward motion didn't just slow; it turned, like the entire carriage had been lifted off the rails and spun.
Cadets yelled. Arlen's hand found my jacket and stayed there.
The open doorway at the end of the car filled with light.
Not platform light. Not tunnel light. Something else—white, but with depth, streaked with thin lines that looked like… text, stretched into infinity.
We hit it.
I braced for impact. For metal folding. For bodies slamming into walls.
The world went sideways.
Not just us. The entire scene tilted ninety degrees and slid.
We weren't thrown. We were… rewritten.
The vibration under our feet became a hum. The carriage stopped moving forward and started… hanging?
The lights flickered out. Came back as a different tone, warmer and softer.
The screaming brakes cut off mid-wail.
We were no longer moving.
Nobody had fallen.
The open doorway now showed a platform.
Different from the sterile ones before. This one was cracked, old, half overgrown with something that might have been moss if moss glowed faintly along the edges.
Air drifted in. Cool. Still.
I staggered, my knees suddenly sure they remembered an impact that hadn't happened.
The Law collected its due.
The pain came like someone had dropped a stone through the middle of my mind. Heavy. Dragging.
I tasted metal and dust and something like… ink.
Memories shuddered.
My uncle's face, leaning over the railing, telling me not to die stupid. Still there.
The conscription letter on the wall. Still there.
My own name, spoken in my head in my old voice—
It wobbled. For a second, I couldn't tell if I was hearing nine-year-old me, today me, or some version in between.
Then the confusion smoothed.
What it left behind was a gap where certainty had been.
I didn't forget my name. I just couldn't remember how it had sounded in my head before today. As if I'd always sounded like this.
"Ren?" Arlen said. "You still upright?"
"Mostly," I said. "Ask me again in five minutes."
Dorn took a breath like she'd been underwater and stepped toward the open door.
No crash. No twisted metal. No screaming. We'd pulled the train off its own rails into… somewhere else.
The platform outside waited.
She glanced back at me.
"Nice diversion," she said. "You still owe me a full list of what it's taking. Later."
"Working on an itemized invoice," I said. "So far: smells, sounds, self."
Her mouth twitched. "Welcome to the Corps."
She turned to the rest of the cadets, raising her voice.
"Everybody hear this," she said. "What just happened? We did not crash. We did not die. If anyone asks, the Domain tried to run us through a transit echo and we walked it off. That's the story."
"The true one?" someone asked.
"The useful one," she said.
She lifted her makeshift weapon, resting it along her shoulder like a casual promise.
"Next scene," she said. "Let's see what else Beolryve thinks it can throw at us before we introduce it to disappointment."
She stepped out onto the platform.
The rest of us moved to follow.
The train behind us stayed silent, doors gaping open like it had been caught mid-bite and left there.
I didn't look back at the windows.
I didn't want to see who was watching from the other side.