Dark. Thick, wet dark that clung to the inside of Ethan Moreno's throat and made every breath a bargain. He woke to the sound of metal complaining, a slow groan that might have been the train or might have been the world folding. Heat pressed at the back of his skull. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He tasted copper. A single, small light bobbed ahead like a drowned star — a phone screen someone had wedged between seats. It showed a cracked face and a clock that didn't move. Smoke made the phone halo fuzzy, turned the little rectangle into a distant ship. He moved his hand. It was wrong. His fingers came away clotted and sticky, smelling like burnt sugar and iron. Blood, he realized; the taste in his mouth confirmed it. "Help—" a voice cut through the smoke, thin as glass. Not his. He couldn't see who it belonged to. He could hear it, a neighbor in thick fabric and panic. "I can't—" Ethan's own voice sounded foreign, small. He had been a mechanic at Helmsworth Transit for ten years; he could tell the difference between a seized axle and a blown fuse by ear. He could fix trains with his eyes closed. Right now his eyes wouldn't open. He felt the train lurch under him, felt the nightmare physics of a mass of steel skittering over rails, then stopping with a finality that rattled his bones. He was