The train moved like breath held just below the surface. Its low hum vibrated through the bones of the carriage, steady and almost imperceptible. More rhythm than sound, more presence than noise. Outside, the world passed in dissolving layers.
Norway, then Sweden. But no hard border. Just a slow merging of landscape, a quiet shift in the light.
Forests, thick with pine rose like sleeping giants, then opened without warning into lakes, still, black, mirror-like. They caught the last threads of evening like secrets too soft to speak aloud. In the water, the sky folded back into itself, perfect and inverted. Hills floated upside-down. Trees had double roots. It was hard to tell what was reflection and what was real.
Now and then, a village blurred past. Red-painted houses. Green, damp gardens. Fences wrapped in ivy. Curtains drawn halfway closed, as if the dusk were something to be filtered rather than embraced. Smoke curled faintly from chimneys that looked too delicate for fire.
Golden light moved across the train windows. Not from inside, not from any lamp, but from the outside world gilding the glass. It cast halos where there should be none. The air inside the carriage thickened.
And then…
Chris blinked. A flash of confusion passed over his face like a short-circuited dream. His accent, all Texan resonance tempered by too many books and long thinking hours, rose into the stillness.
“Okay… how the hell did I end up here?”
His voice cut the silence but didn’t break it.
Fabian turned in his seat, slow, like someone coming up from underwater.
“I thought this was a dream,” he said quietly, mostly to himself. He rubbed his palms together absently. As if trying to verify the texture of the moment.
Across the aisle, Elin and Linn met eyes. It wasn’t recognition, it was confirmation. Something in them both said: “this again.”
Elin shrugged first. Small, almost imperceptible. Shoulders barely moved. Linn mirrored it, but hers was more calculated. A shrug that meant “I have no idea but I’ve already started parsing it.”
Chris let out a single half-laugh. Not humor. Friction.
“Well,” he said, glancing out the window, “I always wanted to see the fjords.”
Elin didn’t smile. She was still watching the landscape slide by.
“There are no fjords in Sweden,” she said dryly.
Linn turned to her. “What about Gullmarn?”
Elin frowned slightly. “Where even is that?”
“Bohuslän,” Linn said, the word folding easily into the quiet. “Never been there. But I know.”
Chris exhaled slowly and leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“Okay, enough. There should be a baseline to this. A rule. A reason. Something to pin it to. Why did it happen again?”
Elin looked around the carriage. Her gaze landed on the folded seats, the patterned upholstery, the soft overhead lighting that didn’t flicker. The soft sway of the train as it curved slightly left, following the contours of a lake she didn’t recognize.
“I’m home right now,” she said, carefully. “Or, obviously…” she paused, took in the unfamiliar timbre of the train “…not.”
Fabian leaned his head back, closed his eyes for a second, then opened them again.
“Maybe,” he said, slowly, “we’re being pulled together. By something.”
The sentence hung there. Unfinished, but trembling with implication.
All four of them fell quiet. Not a stunned silence. A listening one.
The train rolled on. Outside, the light kept folding over itself, oranges into purples, sky into lake into sky again. Inside, four people sat in the pulse of something too big to name. Each of them thinking the same thought, the same question, in slightly different words.
And somewhere deep in the hum of the rails, it almost felt like the question had already been asked.
Not to them.
But through them.
