Passenger Without a Reflection

I boarded the last northbound train at Civic Center with exactly four other people in my car: a delivery cyclist asleep against his backpack, two students sharing earbuds, and a woman in a grey coat standing instead of sitting though every seat was open.

She got on after the warning chime, slipping between the closing doors with the sort of timing that makes everyone else glance up at once. What held my attention was the coat. It was soaked as if she had walked through a river, and the floor beneath her shoes stayed perfectly dry.

At the next station, the students got off. When the doors shut, I saw the woman's face in profile and then looked automatically to the black window beside her.

Nothing looked back.

I rubbed the glass, assuming glare or some angle of light was hiding her reflection. The cyclist snored. My own face floated pale in the window. The overhead strip lights repeated into darkness. The woman's body, inches from the glass, did not exist there at all.

She turned slowly toward me. Her expression was not angry. It was the patient look of someone waiting for another person to stop pretending.

"You sat in my seat," she said.

I glanced down. The seat was ordinary blue plastic, scratched by years of keys and belt buckles. The route map above us flickered. We should have been between Park and Melrose. Instead, the display showed only one word in burning amber: RETURNING.

"I can move," I said.

The cyclist lifted his head then, eyes wide and wet with panic. "Don't stand up," he muttered. "That's how she checks."

The train passed through a tunnel light. For a single strobe-bright second, the woman's coat opened at the front and I saw the ruin beneath it: ribs split outward, chest hollowed clean as a berth.

I stayed in the seat. So did the cyclist. The train skipped Melrose, then Skipton, then every station after that. The city outside the windows gave way to concrete walls sweating black water.

When the announcement finally crackled overhead, it used my own voice.

"End of the line," it said. "All remaining passengers already belong here."