[Remaining aboard: 1.]

The doors closed on the two youngest, and the train pulled Cha Mu-hyeon back into the dark.

He watched the platform go. Seojin with one hand half-raised, like he'd forgotten what waving was. Haru shouting something through the glass. He couldn't hear it. He could guess it. Something about coffee.

Then the river was gone. Then the tunnel. Then there was only his own face in the black window, lit from above.

And the conductor.

It stood at the far end of the car with its white gloves folded in front of it. The lever punch hung at its hip. The eggshell face was turned toward him, and the slot in it breathed. In. Out. A paper sound.

Mu-hyeon took the seat closest to the aisle. The worst seat. The one anything walking the car would reach first.

Old habit. Somebody has to be the first thing in the door.

You are alone now. Good. This is the part you are made for.

He went very still.

The voice.

Not the conductor. The conductor's mouth was a slot and its voice was a subway announcement. This voice had no direction at all. It came from behind his own ears.

He knew it. It talked over his sleep. It had talked over his sleep for as long as he could remember, calm and sure, telling him what he would do next. He had never told a single person. Firefighters who hear voices get desks.

It had never once spoken to him while he was awake.

"...Huh," he said.

You are not surprised. You are never surprised. That is one of the parts I like.

"Don't like parts of me. I'm not a set menu."

The train took a curve. Wheels on old rail. Somewhere ahead of them, past the tunnel, the sky was going gray at the edges.

Dawn.

Rule six sat in his chest like a swallowed stone. Those still aboard at dawn ride on.

He took out his ticket.

HWAGOK.

The last station on the line. Of course it was. Of course the train had saved him for the end of the track, the far turn of the river, the stop past everyone else's stop.

The conductor began to walk.

Not fast. It never went fast. Glove trailing along the seat backs, punch swinging, slot breathing. Click. Click. It punched the air over an empty seat and a little paper crescent fell, and Mu-hyeon thought of Minseo saying it soft: he isn't voiding paper.

"Mu-yeon would have loved this train," he said.

He said it out loud, to the car, because talking beat listening.

Your sister.

"My sister. The loud one. She got the volume and I got the leftovers."

Seven years old, at the dinner table, holding up a mushroom on her chopsticks: does the mushroom know it's poison? Or does it think it's food like everything else? Their mother said eat, Mu-yeon. She didn't eat. She wanted the answer. She always wanted the answer more than the meal.

Her shoes in the hall. That was the other thing. She never once set them down straight. One always tipped on its side, like it had fallen over laughing.

You were three streets away, the voice said.

His jaw set.

"Yeah."

Buying nothing. You stood in a convenience store with an empty basket while she burned. Off-shift. Three streets. A man who runs into buildings, and that night you were comparing prices on nothing.

"Yeah," he said again. "I know the story. I was there for it."

The conductor punched another empty seat. Click. Closer now. Four rows.

He made himself look at the window instead. Concrete ribs flicking past. His arm, when he pushed the sleeve back, said 5. Five days. He'd come aboard with five and he would leave with more or he would not leave.

Think.

The wall tiles at the last stop had said CHEONMUN, and the slot had said Hwagok, and the two kids had stepped off on the true name of their signal, shoulders bumping, gone up into the air. Which meant the pattern had held the whole line. The voice names the next station up. Always one ahead. Your stop announces itself as the stop past yours.

So. His stop was Hwagok.

The end of the line.

...What comes after the end of the line?

There it was. The problem, standing in the aisle of his head with its gloves folded.

Gyoha, Saejae, Daeheung, Dalbit, Wonseo, Haedong, Myodong, Cheonmun, Hwagok. Nine stations. Nothing after Hwagok. Rails into the dark and then the yard and then nothing. There was no name one past his name.

The train doesn't announce its stops truthfully. That was the rule as written. Not: the train says whatever it wants. Every lie all night had been the same lie, the same size, one step up the line. A liar with a rule. A fair liar.

A fair liar reaches the last page and has one move left.

It wraps.

The line was written in a circle, or the lie was. One past the end was the beginning. One past Hwagok was the first name on the wall of the first station, the one they'd all boarded from, half a city ago.

"Gyoha," he said quietly. "My signal is Gyoha."

Or the pattern breaks at the terminus, the voice said, pleasant. Or the last station is announced truly, as a reward. Or falsely, as a joke. You are betting your name on the grammar of a monster.

"I've bet it on worse grammar. You should hear the radio."

You will hesitate. You hesitated at your sister's street and you will hesitate at the doors. I have read you, Cha Mu-hyeon. You count the beds. You take the worst seat. And under all of it you are a man who arrives three streets late.

The train began to slow.

He stood up. His knees were fine. His hands were fine. He put the ticket between two fingers the way Baek-gu held a toll pass, and he faced the doors, and in the window's black mirror the conductor stopped walking and turned its egg of a face toward him with something like attention.

"You keep telling me who I am," Mu-hyeon said. "You only ever pick the parts that lose."

Silence behind his ears.

"The night she died, I carried four people out of that building before the second team got there. That's also written. You never read me that page."

Tiles rose in the windows. White, chipped, older than the rest of the line.

The wall said HWAGOK.

His station. Named true on the wall, which meant nothing, which had meant nothing all night. He did not move. The doors did not open. The slot in the conductor's face worked, in, out, and the canned announcer voice of a city that no longer existed filled the car.

"Now arriving. Gyoha. Gyoha station."

The beginning, named at the end.

The doors opened on the chime.

He stepped through them, unhurried, the way he walked into buildings, and behind him he heard the punch come down. A clean metal bite. Air.

The gloves had moved for the collar of his coat and closed on the smell of him.

He turned around on the platform. The conductor stood in the open doors with its punch still raised, and for a long second the eggshell face looked at him, and the slot breathed, and then the doors slid shut between them like a cover closing.

[A passenger has arrived.]

[Remaining aboard: 0.]

[The Story 'The Last Train' has ended its service. All passengers accounted for.]

[The cover has closed. The Story thanks you for your participation.]

[Binding extended. +2 days.]

The train pulled out. He watched it the whole way down the tunnel, red lights shrinking, and when the dark had eaten it entirely the station lamps dimmed from warm to ordinary, all together, like a stage letting go.

Then his legs sat him down on the platform bench.

His hands started.

He held them out in front of him and watched them shake, both of them, big steady rescue-certified hands rattling like a pot lid. It came up through his arms and into his teeth. It always came after. Never during. During, he was the calm one, eat first, then we talk. After, alone, the bill arrived.

Nobody had ever seen this. Not the squad. Not Mu-yeon.

He gave it its time.

Minute. Minute and a half. The shaking wound down through his wrists and left, the way it always left, and he sat there breathing in an empty station at the wrong end of the city.

His arm itched. He pushed the sleeve back. The script rewrote itself while he watched, 5 unraveling into 7, ink swimming under skin like something feeding.

Two days. Bought with one long night.

His phone buzzed. The LIBRARY app, the closed book, one line waiting.

[Readers: 51.]

Fifty-one.

He looked at it for a while. He didn't know what it counted. He'd caught Seojin looking at the same screen with a face like a man reading his own chart, so it counted something, and fifty-one of it was pointed at him.

What he hated was the small warm thing in his chest when the number sat there. Being watched by fifty-one of anything should not feel like applause.

It suits you, said the voice, faint now, going.

"Don't," he said.

It went.

He climbed the frozen escalator on foot. Topside, the sky over Hwagok was gray-gold at the rim, the river somewhere behind the buildings pulling light up out of the ground, and the streets were as empty as every street, and none of it was his problem for one entire hour.

Somewhere north, a nurse had promised coffee. Two kids were sitting on a stair by the river thinking he was still riding.

He didn't drink coffee. He checked his boots, rolled his shoulder where the axe usually sat, and started walking north anyway.

He'd want to be handed one.