WORLD OF FICTION (WOF)

The train arrived through the wall.

Brick folded around a black iron engine broad enough to fill the practice room from floor to ceiling. No rails guided it. Its wheels turned against empty air, throwing sparks that became letters before they hit the ground.

Mira tackled the candidate attendant through the storage doorway.

The engine struck the scene-shell.

Wood exploded.

Midnight spread across the corridor.

One second Toby stood beneath Errata lamps. The next, rain hit his face and the training platform extended in both directions beneath a starless sky.

The storage walls remained visible behind it, trapped under the new scene like old paint.

"Emergency seal!" Mira shouted.

The attendant pulled the alarm bar.

Nothing happened.

A sign above the platform wrote itself.

RETURN SERVICE.

ONE PASSENGER.

The train doors opened.

Paper people stepped out.

They wore coats without seams and faces folded from blank tickets. Each held a hole-puncher in one hand.

Toby backed away.

"I’m beginning to dislike public transport."

The first conductor lunged.

Mira caught its wrist, turned beneath the arm, and drove it into the platform. Her bone-white knife pinned its paper shadow to the wet tiles.

The body kept moving.

"No attached Canon," she said. "Shadow rule doesn’t hold."

The conductor punched a hole through the floor beside her hand.

Everything inside the circle vanished.

Tile. Rain. Part of Mira’s sleeve.

She rolled away.

"Do not let them mark you."

Toby tore the destination board from the wall and swung it like a club.

It struck one conductor across the face. The paper head folded sideways and remained that way while the body kept coming.

"Strong commitment to customer service."

A second figure caught Toby’s coat.

The hole-puncher closed.

Mira threw the knife.

It passed through the conductor’s wrist and pinned the tool to the platform.

Toby ripped free, leaving half his coat behind.

The train whistle screamed again.

Across the intake level, Elias’s metal tag turned hot.

He was eating alone in his room when the wall grille shouted:

RESTRICTED CANDIDATE. REMAIN IN HOUSING.

The door unlocked.

Those instructions disagreed.

Elias stood.

The black ring around his ankle remained on the floor for a full second before following.

A voice came through the corridor.

Mira, distorted by the building.

"Elias. Do not approach training storage."

He stepped into the hall.

The tag flashed red.

"Why?"

The wall answered in the same mechanical voice.

RETURN DESTINATION ACTIVE.

PASSENGER REQUIRED.

The floor tilted toward the stairwell.

Elias caught the doorframe.

Every restricted door along the corridor opened at once.

Residents looked out.

A woman with inked eyelids asked, "Is that yours?"

"I’m getting tired of that question."

The pull increased.

Elias’s feet slid.

He grabbed the continuity cord from his training belt. Mira had confiscated the rest of the equipment, but the cord remained because housing policy required an emergency anchor.

He clipped it around the bedframe.

The frame tore from the floor.

Elias and the metal bed shot into the corridor.

He hit the opposite wall.

The bed continued toward the stairs.

"So much for remaining in housing."

He wrapped the cord around a wall pipe.

The pull dragged him to his knees.

His ankle mark lagged behind.

The black ring stretched into an oval across the floor.

Pain went through his leg.

On the platform, the train’s empty destination window filled with light.

The conductors stopped fighting.

All folded faces turned toward the far end of the corridor.

Toward Elias.

Mira saw it.

"The permission is pulling him."

Toby stared at the train.

"Because the ticket has his name."

"Can you remove it?"

"It’s inside."

"Then get inside."

The train doors began closing.

Toby ran.

Mira caught the back of his shirt.

"You recognize the route."

"I recognize bad ideas."

"That was not a denial."

"No time."

He pulled free and jumped through the narrowing doors.

Mira followed.

The train interior was longer than the platform.

Rows of empty seats extended through carriage after carriage. Brass luggage racks held sealed boxes, broken weapons, nameless books, and objects wrapped in maintenance cloth.

The return permission had collected everything Route 9–Null had failed to deliver.

Toby did not look at the cargo.

He looked at the doors between carriages.

Each carried a routing symbol scratched into the glass.

His face changed.

Mira caught it.

"What?"

"Old format."

"How old?"

"Old enough."

The conductors entered behind them.

Toby slammed the first carriage door and dropped the latch.

Paper hands pressed against the glass.

Hole-punchers began cutting circles through it.

"Ticket," Mira said.

"Likely front carriage."

They ran.

Back in the Errata corridor, Elias’s bedframe reached the stairwell and lodged sideways between the walls.

The cord snapped tight.

He stopped three steps from the drop.

His right foot did not.

The ankle passed through the top stair.

The black ring remained above it.

For one sickening moment, his lower leg existed inside solid stone.

Elias screamed.

The pull from training storage continued.

He could cut the cord and be dragged toward the train.

Or remain anchored while his leg separated from its own boundary.

He chose neither.

He looped the broken end around his chest, unclipped it from the belt, and climbed down the cord hand over hand.

Toward the pull.

The ring followed in jumps.

Each time it caught up, more of his leg became solid.

He reached the next level with blood running from beneath the black mark.

A security door blocked the training corridor.

His tag flashed.

ACCESS DENIED.

Behind it, something heavy struck metal.

Elias hit the door with his palm.

"Mira!"

No answer.

He searched the frame.

During the first exercise, he had clipped the cord to himself.

Anchor, not target.

He wrapped the continuity line through the security handle, clipped the other end to his tag, and pulled.

The tag registered as restricted housing access.

The door tried to return him to his room.

The active permission tried to pull him toward the train.

The two instructions fought.

Metal shrieked.

The security door bent inward.

Elias pulled harder.

The black ring around his ankle slid six inches up his leg.

He almost released the cord.

Then the door tore from its hinges.

Midnight flooded the stairwell.

Four conductors waited on the platform.

They raised their hole-punchers.

Elias had no weapon.

He picked up the bent security door.

It weighed less inside the dead scene.

He charged.

The first punch removed a circular section near his head.

The second cut through the lower edge.

Elias drove the remaining metal into two conductors and carried them into the train.

Paper bodies folded around the door.

The third conductor reached his exposed side.

A white blade cut through it.

Dorian stood at the edge of the platform.

Medical brace locked over his right forearm. Practice sword in his left.

A security escort lay unconscious behind him.

Elias stared. "Are you allowed here?"

"No."

The fourth conductor attacked.

Dorian stepped left and cut upward. His blade split the paper body from hip to shoulder.

The halves fell.

His grey hand closed inside the brace.

Click.

An invisible cut opened through the train roof.

Rain poured inside.

Dorian looked at the brace.

"Didn’t mean that."

"Useful."

"Don’t."

They entered the train.

The doors slammed shut behind them.

The engine began moving without rails.

Elias felt the Errata fall away.

"No."

He wrapped continuity cord around a seat support and threw the free end through the broken roof.

It caught on the platform clock.

The train pulled.

The clock tore from its post.

Still attached.

The platform stretched with them instead of disappearing.

Dorian looked up through the roof.

"You anchored the train to the scene."

"I think."

"Confidence remains inspiring."

They ran forward.

Mira and Toby reached the engine carriage first.

The ticket sat beneath a glass cover beside the controls.

ELIAS VANCE.

RETURN ACCEPTED.

Toby reached for it.

Mira caught his hand.

"Trap?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"I don’t know."

"Good."

She broke the glass with the hilt of her knife.

An alarm began.

The paper conductors behind them punched through the carriage door.

Toby seized the ticket.

The world folded.

For one second, he stood alone inside a narrow maintenance corridor.

No train. No Mira.

A younger Toby knelt beside Route 9–Null’s control panel, pressing an em dash into an outgoing slot with both thumbs.

The image vanished.

He returned to the carriage with the ticket in his hand.

Mira was watching him.

"What did you see?"

"Later."

The train accelerated.

Ahead, the engine’s front window showed Elias’s housing room.

The desk.

The missing drawer.

The route intended to return its passenger there.

"With the train?" Mira asked.

"Apparently."

Toby flipped the ticket.

Instructions covered the back.

ENTRY PERMISSION UNUSED.

RETURN REQUIRES ORIGINAL AUTHORIZER OR NAMED PASSENGER.

The carriage door burst open.

Conductors poured through.

Mira met them in the aisle.

Her knife could not pin them, so she used the seats. She cut straps, kicked frames loose, and trapped paper limbs beneath falling metal.

Toby climbed onto the luggage rack.

"Elias!" he shouted.

Two carriages away, Elias heard him through the roof.

He and Dorian ran over the seats while conductors rose behind them.

Dorian’s left-hand blade held.

His right brace clicked faster with each strike.

One conductor punched a hole through the practice sword.

White light collapsed.

Dorian drove his shoulder into the creature and threw it through a window.

The grey hand completed its grip.

An invisible slash passed through three seats.

It also cut the continuity cord.

The train broke free of the platform.

Midnight began swallowing the Errata.

Elias grabbed the severed cord.

"Can you do that again?"

"I can’t do it once."

"We need the engine disconnected."

Dorian looked toward the front carriage.

Mira was fighting in the narrow aisle. Toby held the ticket above his head while paper hands reached from both sides.

Dorian removed the brace.

Mira saw him.

"No!"

His grey fingers closed.

The gold scar across his palm lit.

Dorian aimed the empty grip at the coupling between engine and passenger cars.

Nothing happened.

The conductors reached Toby.

Dorian tried again.

The invisible blade formed crooked.

It cut through the carriage floor beside his own foot.

The train bucked.

Elias caught him.

"Left."

"What?"

"Your right hand mirrors the left."

Dorian had used the intact hand during treatment to impose a boundary.

Now he raised his left hand around an imaginary hilt.

The grey hand copied it.

Delayed.

Elias seized Dorian’s left wrist and adjusted the angle toward the coupling.

Dorian almost struck him.

Then the train window filled with the housing room.

Seconds left.

"Now," Elias said.

Dorian completed the cut.

The invisible edge crossed the coupling.

The engine separated.

It crashed into Elias’s room alone.

The desk vanished beneath black iron. The wall exploded outward. The empty drawer space tore open like a mouth.

The passenger carriages remained inside the training shell.

Mira kicked the last conductor beneath a seat.

Toby reached Elias and slapped the ticket against his chest.

"Accept return."

"How?"

"Say yes."

"That sounds suspicious."

"It is."

The scene-shell began collapsing.

The platform, train, and storage corridor compressed around them.

Elias looked at Mira.

She nodded once.

His permission to decide.

"Yes."

The ticket burned through his shirt.

The dead scene spat them out.

Elias hit the training-storage floor beside Dorian. Mira landed on her damaged shoulder and rolled. Toby remained upright for one proud second before a suitcase fell from nowhere and knocked him down.

The train vanished.

The wooden scene-shell collapsed into wet ash.

Achebe entered through the ruined security door with six officers behind her.

She surveyed the room.

Dorian’s removed brace.

Elias’s bleeding ankle.

Mira on the floor.

Toby holding half a burned ticket.

Achebe looked at the unconscious escort in the corridor.

"Explain."

"No," Dorian said.

Everyone turned.

His grey arm hung open at his side.

The gold scar had gone dark.

"I’m going to medical."

He walked out before anyone stopped him.

Achebe took the burned ticket from Toby.

A routing code remained visible along the edge.

9–NULL.

Beneath it, the original authorization field had partly survived.

One name remained.

TOBIAS Q—

Toby snatched the ticket back.

Achebe caught his wrist.

The humour did not come.

Mira rose slowly.

"Toby."

He looked at the old routing code.

"I said later."

Achebe tightened her grip.

"Later has arrived."