The Last Train to Halcyon

Darkness thuds against your eyelids in rhythm with the rails.

You wake to the sway first, then the sound: steel wheels hammering a long, relentless pulse beneath you. For one disorienting second you think you are still falling, but the motion has a pattern to it, a direction. A train.

Your mouth tastes of copper and stale sleep. The berth around you is narrow, enclosed by padded walls the color of old ash. A thin strip of amber light leaks from somewhere above the bunk, just enough to carve the compartment into edges and shadows. Beyond the sealed door, the corridor rocks with the faint creak of couplings and the occasional metallic clank of something settling under strain.

You know, with the cold certainty of a reflex, that you should remember how you got here.

You don’t.

There is no boarding platform. No ticket. No last face seen through glass. Only a blank stretch where the hours before this should be, as smooth and empty as wiped glass. Panic arrives a beat later, sharp enough to make you sit up too fast. The compartment tilts with the motion and your shoulder knocks the wall.

Something shifts beneath your hand.

A small object lies half-buried in the bedding: a keycard, worn at the corners, its printed label scuffed nearly unreadable. One name remains legible in the amber light: your own. Or what might be your own, if the missing memory behind it were not so absolute.

On the far wall, above the berth, a recessed panel blinks red. Locked.

A thin speaker hidden in the ceiling crackles awake before you can touch it.

"Attention passengers. Current location: unknown. Current schedule updated. First stop is now listed as Halcyon-adjacent service point. Prepare for carriage transition as directed."

The voice is smooth, broadcast-perfect, and somehow too close, as if it is speaking from inside the metal around you rather than through it.

Then, after a breath of static, it adds:

"Passenger in sleeper seven. Proceed to Carriage Three. Repeat: Carriage Three."

Your pulse climbs. The train is moving. You are somewhere inside it with no memory of boarding, a locked door at your back, and a voice that seems to know exactly where you are.

Somewhere down the corridor, another door slams.

The train does not slow.