"I'm going," Dohyeok said. Fifth time.

"Nobody argued," Chae-a said.

"You made a face."

"That's just my face."

The page sat in the middle of the watch-room table where nobody wanted to touch it. Rank Two. Minimum participants: six.

Insik tapped his ledger. "Six minimum means seven go. You never send the minimum. Minimums are for people who trust the world."

"Then I'm the seventh," Baek-gu said.

"You're the third," Mu-hyeon said. "We counted you an hour ago."

"Good. I like being early."

It settled fast after that, the way things settled when Mu-hyeon stood up. Him, Chae-a, Baek-gu, Minseo, Dohyeok, Haru, me. Insik and Yeonhwa stayed with the Hwangs and Gureum.

Yeonhwa took my wrist on the way out. She always did that. Like checking whether I was still running.

"Come back bored," she said. "Bored is my favorite."

Gureum stood at the bay door with the long-neck dinosaur under his arm. He didn't say anything. He held the dinosaur up, once, and put it back down.

Haru crouched to his level. "He's lending us his luck. That's a whole dinosaur of luck. We're basically cheating."

We left at half past eleven.

* * *

Nobody talks much on a night walk. You listen instead.

Our feet. The wind working a loose banner somewhere. Baek-gu walking his bike beside us because he refused to leave the company home, front wheel ticking.

Me, I was doing the thing I do. Counting what I knew.

Four hundred and twelve chapters. Games in schools, games in churches, games on rooftops, a game in a flooded parking garage. I had read every one of them so many times I could recite the casualty lists.

Not one of them went underground.

Not one. Mu-hyeon never took a train. The draft never even mentioned Line 4.

...So I know nothing.

For the first time since the Turning, I was walking into a Story exactly as blind as everyone next to me. My hands wouldn't stop opening and closing.

"Receipts." Haru bumped my shoulder. "You're doing math with your face again."

"It's just my face."

"It's really not. Chae-a has the math face. Yours is worse. Yours is the face of a man rereading a contract."

"...I'll work on it."

"Don't. It's useful. Just not at me."

Ahead, the mouth of Gyoha Station glowed.

Every building on the street was dead black. The stairwell down was lit warm and gold, every step, like a house expecting guests.

11:52 PM.

Mu-hyeon went down first, axe low. We followed the light in.

* * *

The turnstiles stood open. All of them, arrows green, humming softly, as if the fare system had decided tonight was on the house.

The ads on the walls were gray. Not torn, not dark. Printed gray. Rectangles of nothing where smiling people used to sell phones.

The escalator was running. Down.

"I hate that it's running," Baek-gu said. "Who's it been running for?"

"Us," Minseo said quietly. "Since dusk, probably. It knew we'd come."

The platform was worse, because the platform was perfect. Clean floor. Warm lamplight in every fixture. And the train.

It sat there with all its doors open. Six cars, lit up soft and yellow inside, empty seats facing each other like a conversation waiting to start.

The destination board over the platform blinked between two lines.

[THE LAST TRAIN]

[PLEASE BOARD]

Dohyeok whistled, low. "It's kind of beautiful. Am I allowed to say that?"

"No," Chae-a said.

"Okay. It's kind of beautiful though."

Then the warmth hit my hip.

I flinched. Reached into my jacket pocket, the zip one, and my fingers found stiff paper that had not been there on the stairs. Warm. Warm like the coin had been warm, that first night. Warm like a thing recently held.

Around me, everyone did the same flinch. Seven hands went to seven pockets.

"Tickets," Minseo said.

Mine was old-style. Hard cardboard, cream colored, edges sharp. One word printed across the middle in neat black type.

CHEONMUN.

Cheonmun. The observatory stop. Second to last on the line. I'd never once gotten off there.

Dohyeok opened his mouth, ticket raised, and Baek-gu's hand shot out and closed over it.

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Don't read it out loud." Baek-gu's eyes were red-rimmed. Four days without sleep, and steadier than any of us. "Route rule. You never say the last address of the night out loud. The road hears you and adds a stop."

"That's a superstition," Chae-a said.

"It's a rule. The company and I have never once been wrong about it." He let go of Dohyeok's hand. "Look at yours. Memorize it. Keep it in your pocket and keep the name in your teeth. Until we know what the game wants, it doesn't get anything from us for free."

One by one, everyone looked, and everyone went quiet in a different way.

Minseo looked at hers the longest. Her face didn't move at all, which is how I knew it was bad.

"Board's here," Mu-hyeon said.

Where the route map should have hung, behind glass, white letters sat on black felt. The kind of board that lists train times. It listed this.

[RULES OF THE LINE]

[1. Your ticket names your destination.]

[2. The doors open for the length of the chime.]

[3. A passenger who leaves at their own station has arrived. Arrival is free. The binding of an arrived passenger will be extended.]

[4. The conductor collects fares. A punched ticket is spent. A spent ticket opens no doors.]

[5. This train does not announce its stops truthfully.]

[6. Passengers still aboard at dawn ride on.]

We read it twice. Nobody spoke while we did. That had become a habit of ours, reading rules like scripture, because they were.

"Five," Chae-a said first. "Everyone see five?"

"It doesn't announce its stops truthfully," Haru read. "So it lies."

"It doesn't lie." The words left me before I decided on them. Everyone looked. I pointed at the glass. "The rules don't lie. They just leave things out. If it says the announcements aren't truthful, then that's the truth, and it's telling us to our face. It's fair. It's fair the way a knife is fair."

"Comforting," Dohyeok said. "Truly. Thank you, receipts."

"Six is the one." Minseo's voice stayed level. "Ride on. Ride on where? Past the last station there's nothing. It doesn't say what's there."

"It doesn't say," Mu-hyeon agreed, "so nobody finds out."

He turned and put his back to the board, and looked at each of us in turn, taking his time about it.

"Pact. Before we board." He held up one hand. "Nobody steps off this train until all seven of us agree it's right. Not at your own station. Not at anyone's. I don't care if the doors open on your childhood bedroom. Seven yes, or nobody moves."

"And if my station comes first?" Dohyeok said.

"Then you stand there and you hate me, and the doors close, and you're still alive to hate me. It comes around again or it doesn't. We learn the game before the game learns us."

"...Seven yes," Chae-a said.

"Yes," Minseo said.

"Yes." "Yes." "Yes," from Baek-gu, from Haru, from me.

Dohyeok blew out a breath. "Yes. Fine. Yes."

We boarded the middle car. The floor was warm through my shoes.

The chime sounded, two soft notes, and every door on the train slid shut in the same second.

[The Story has opened its cover.]

The phones lit in our pockets, all seven at once, that pale library light.

[The Story 'The Last Train' welcomes 7 passengers.]

[We hope you reach your destination.]

The train began to move. Smooth. No jerk at all. The lit platform slid away and the tunnel took us, and our reflections came up in the black glass, seven people in a bright box under the city.

Then the door at the end of the car opened.

Not our end. The far end, the connecting door to the next car, and I know it had been empty. I had looked down the whole train. It had all been empty.

The conductor came through.

Navy uniform, pressed sharp, brass buttons. White gloves. In one glove, an old lever-style ticket punch, silver, worn bright at the grip.

Above the collar there was an egg.

That's the only way to say it. Smooth, white, the size of a head because it was where a head goes, with no eyes and no nose and no hair. Just one horizontal slot, low down, where a mouth would be. A thin, clean slot.

Like the mouth of a ticket machine.

The slot moved. Widened a hair, narrowed. Widened, narrowed.

It was breathing.

Nobody in the car moved. Mu-hyeon's hand rested on the axe and did nothing else, because what do you do. Haru's fingers found my sleeve and held on.

The conductor stopped in the middle of the aisle and stood with its gloves folded in front of it, exactly how conductors stand, and when it spoke, the voice didn't come from the slot so much as from the ceiling, from the speakers, from everywhere. A woman's voice. Bright and canned and gently distorted.

The voice every train in this country used to have.

"This train is bound for all stations."

The slot breathed.

"Passengers are kindly asked to prepare their tickets."

It turned, unhurried, and took a grip on the overhead rail, swaying with the car, patient as furniture.

Baek-gu whispered, "Nobody give it anything."

The train ran on. One minute. Two. The tunnel lights stitched past. Dohyeok kept touching his pocket and stopping himself, touching it and stopping.

Then the motors dropped a note. We slowed.

Light swelled ahead, gold and warm, and a platform came alongside, and I pressed my face near the glass to catch the name on the tiled wall. Big blue letters on white tile, letters I had ridden past a hundred ordinary times.

SAEJAE.

Overhead, the speakers crackled. The conductor's slot opened wide.

"Now arriving. Daeheung. Daeheung station."

...The wall says Saejae.

The voice says Daeheung.

Rule five sat in my chest like a swallowed stone. It does not announce its stops truthfully.

Behind me, paper rustled. Dohyeok had his ticket out, both hands, and his face had gone the color of the conductor's egg.

"Guys," he said. "Mine says Daeheung."

The chime rang, two soft notes.

The doors opened.