The Unknown Train

CHAPTER 2 — THE BOY WHO KNEW HER

The next night, Mira returned to Platform 0.

She did not know why, not really — not in any way she could have explained to someone who hadn't seen what she'd seen. Perhaps it was the note, still folded in her pocket, its creases gone soft from how many times she'd opened and closed it throughout the day. Perhaps it was the strange certainty that had settled into her since waking, the feeling that somewhere between memory and sleep, she had known this boy — Aiden, her mind kept offering, though she couldn't say where the name had come from — long before last night.

At exactly 3:17, the station appeared again, rising out of the dark exactly as it had before, patient and certain, as if it had never really left.

Aiden was waiting beneath the lamp, hands in his pockets, watching the place where she would arrive like he'd been watching it for hours.

"You knew I'd come," she said, stepping onto the platform.

"I hoped you would." His voice was quieter tonight, less like a stranger's.

"Why?"

"Because you still have questions."

She studied his face for a long moment, looking for the answer to a question she hadn't asked yet. "Have we met before?"

"You tell me."

"I don't remember you."

"I know." He said it without hurt, like a fact he'd made peace with a long time ago.

They boarded the train together, and this time Mira noticed the details she'd missed the night before — the worn brass fittings, the seats upholstered in a green that had faded to something between moss and dust, and the old book Aiden carried under one arm, its spine cracked white with age.

"You always carry that?" she asked, nodding at it.

"Almost always."

"What's it about?"

"People who forget."

"Forget what?"

"Someone." He said it simply, and something in the way he said it made her chest ache without knowing why.

Mira studied him as the train began to move, the platform sliding away behind the rain-streaked glass.

There was something in the set of his shoulders, the way he held himself, that tugged at a memory she couldn't quite reach.

"You used to draw stars everywhere," she said slowly, surprising herself. She didn't know where the memory had come from, only that it had arrived complete, like a photograph developing in her mind.

"I still do," he said.

"No." She shook her head, more certain now. "You stopped. After the accident."

Mira froze the moment the word left her mouth. She hadn't meant to say it — hadn't even known, until she'd said it, that there had been an accident at all.

"I never told you about that," she said carefully.

"I know."

"Then how?"

"Because I was there."

The words settled between them and stayed there, heavier than anything either of them said next. Mira didn't push further, not yet — some part of her understood, without being told, that there were things she wasn't ready to pull into the light all at once.

And somewhere beyond the dark windows, past the edges of what she could see, a childhood memory began, very quietly, to return.