The Unknown Train

CHAPTER 4 — THE THINGS WE FORGOT

Mira began remembering in fragments after that, the way a wound reopens along an old scar — not all at once, but in pieces, each one arriving with its own particular ache.

Every return to Platform 0 gave her another piece of a life she had somehow forgotten entirely, buried so deep she hadn't even known there was something missing. She came back the next night, and the night after that, drawn by a pull she no longer bothered questioning.

"You came back," Aiden said, the third night, or maybe the fourth — she had lost count.

"I wanted answers."

"And now?"

She considered the question honestly, surprising herself with the answer. "Now I want memories."

That night, sitting across from him as the train carried them through the dark, she remembered being younger, sitting beside Aiden beneath an open, star-scattered sky, the grass damp beneath them, their shoulders touching.

"When we're older, we'll leave together," the memory-version of herself had said, with all the confidence of a child who'd never been told the world could say no.

"Where?" young Aiden had asked.

"Anywhere."

Mira surfaced from the memory laughing despite herself. "I really said that?"

"You did."

"I was dramatic."

"You still are," Aiden said, and there was warmth in it, not mockery.

She laughed again, a real laugh this time, the first one that had come easily in longer than she wanted to admit.

Aiden watched her, quiet, something unreadable moving behind his eyes. "You still laugh the same way."

"You remember that?"

"I remember everything."

Mira almost asked him something else then — the question had risen in her throat, sudden and urgent: Were we... But she stopped herself before it fully formed, not ready yet to hear whatever answer might follow.

Instead, she reached for the book he always carried, curious despite herself, and opened it to find its pages entirely blank.

"Why are these pages empty?" she asked.

"Because some stories haven't happened yet."

She turned another blank page, and another, before looking up at him. "Why do I feel like I've missed you?"

"Maybe you have."

When Mira reached across the space between them and touched his hand — an impulse she didn't examine before acting on it — another memory flashed through her, quick and disorienting, gone before she could hold onto its shape.

"What happened to you?" she asked again, more urgently this time.

"You already know."

"I don't."

"Not yet."

Mira turned toward the window then, needing a moment to simply breathe, to let the questions settle. And in the dark glass, in the place where his reflection should have been sitting beside her own, there was nothing at all. For a moment, Aiden had no reflection.

She didn't mention it. She wasn't sure, yet, that she wanted to know why.