The Weight Beneath

Mercy entered the passage beneath the tower nose-first, though there was no track to carry her and no reliable direction left in the world.

One moment, the train had been sliding down the cracked floor of the heart-machine. The next, the passage turned sideways, and the carriages hung against a wall of black stone. Nadia’s embedded core burned through her ribs with a cold, white light. Wherever she pointed her hand, gravity remembered itself for a few trembling seconds.

“Left,” she said.

Oliver pulled the lever. Mercy groaned and obeyed.

Aven stood behind him with one hand wrapped around the child’s shoulder. The child had been silent since boarding. He looked no more than eight years old, with Oliver’s eyes and a face pinched by the ancient terror of being left alone. Every few breaths, he glanced toward the rear windows, as if expecting the tower to reach in and take him back.

“Is this on your schedule?” Oliver asked.

Aven peered into the dark ahead. “Not precisely.”

“That means no.”

“It means the schedule has become philosophical.”

“Schedules don’t become philosophical.”

“Everything does, eventually.”

The passage widened. Stone arches drifted overhead, each one bearing a clock with no hands. Behind the glass of the clocks, small objects floated: a wedding ring, a cracked cup, a red shoe, a bundle of letters bound in twine. They turned slowly in the dark, preserved in pockets of vanished weight.

The child pressed closer to Aven. “Those are things people dropped.”

“Not dropped,” Aven said softly. “Things they were unable to carry.”

The train’s engine gave a low, waking hum. Oliver glanced at the gauge. Its needle had gone beyond the painted scale and trembled against a blank brass plate. No colored lights burned there. No measure described what Mercy was consuming, if consuming was still the right word.

“What is it taking?” Nadia asked.

Oliver kept his eyes on the gauge. “Nothing.”

“Then why is it running?”

He had no answer. The train seemed to move on recognition alone, its wheels turning because the child was aboard and because Oliver had chosen not to leave him behind.

The voice came again through the walls.

Bring back what was taken.

The words were not loud. They entered the carriages as pressure, making every window bow inward. The clocks overhead began to tick. Their hands appeared all at once, spinning backward.