第 001 Ch.| Astray at Midnight

Friday, March 13, 2065, 23:48.

Gu Mingye slid his student card into the pocket of his uniform and stepped out from under the cram school's rolling shutter. The shutter came down to the bottom with its usual clang. He walked down Shuyuan Street toward Shuyuan Station. Mid-March in Qingcheng, and the night wind hadn't warmed yet — still a little cold. A few convenience stores were lit along the street, the night-shift clerks bent over their restocking. A delivery rider passed him, headlight stretching his shadow out long and then pulling it back. Nothing.

He glanced down at the balance on his wristband. 87 yuan. Enough for one more ride tomorrow.

Inside the station, the last-train timetable was pasted to a lamppost, one corner curling up.

Last train 23:48 / Late service 00:20 (extended Fridays and holidays)

He looked twice. That 00:20 service had always existed — it was just that only the night-study students ever rode it. He'd been taking it every Friday since he started cram school at sixteen. Never once missed it.

The 23:48 last train ran straight through; it didn't stop at Qingcaohe Station, the closest stop to his home on foot. Only the 00:20 late service looped through two small stations almost nobody got off at, and one of them was a five-minute walk from his door. That late service was the one he was waiting for.

---

The electronic gate gave a small swallowing sound and let him through.

There weren't many people on the platform. A man in a delivery uniform leaned against a pillar scrolling his phone; a woman in nurse's scrubs sat on the bench with her eyes shut. The air carried the faint brackish smell of exhaust off the back of an air conditioner, and that other thing — hard to describe — the smell of dust pressed flat by tile that's been walked over ten thousand times.

There was one more smell.

Like the damp of the old river embankment, carried up slowly from somewhere far off, across the maglev rail. Shuyuan Station sat on the downtown stretch of the Rivermag Line, three levels underground, the tunnel following the old river channel cut back in the Qing dynasty — and once the Rivermag was built over it, the rail had been wrapped in a metal shell, so that river's smell had, in theory, been sealed away for fifty years.

Gu Mingye had never smelled it on the platform before. Tonight it had been there in the background since the moment he walked in. Maybe a drain was broken somewhere, he thought, or the wind was just coming from a different direction. Nothing.

At 23:53 the announcement said the next train was about to arrive.

At 23:53 exactly, the train arrived.

That was the last train, running five minutes late. Lately the gaps on this line tended to drag a bit, he thought. He didn't board — the last train ran straight through, didn't stop at Qingcaohe, and even if he rode it to the end he'd still have a forty-minute walk home. He let the delivery rider by the pillar take the spot; the man hurried on, the doors closed, the train pulled out.

The woman in nurse's scrubs had left at some point without his noticing. On the platform, he was the only one left.

---

The clock ticked to 00:05, 00:10, 00:15. He looked once at his phone, once at the timetable on the lamppost, once at both ends of the platform. The sound of the air conditioner's exhaust shifted key, from a hum to a hiss, like someone slowly turning down a volume dial. The smell of the old embankment was a shade heavier than before.

He knew what he was waiting for — the late service, the last train on the Rivermag that stopped at Qingcaohe. Every Friday at this hour he stood on this platform and waited. Those few minutes had never felt long.

Tonight they were longer.

The clock ticked to 00:20. No train.

00:21, 00:22, 00:23, no train.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the transit bureau's live feed. The screen flickered, dropped out, came back. Then red text appeared: Data anomaly for this service. Please await station announcement.

He'd never seen that screen. Three years of riding since he was sixteen, and never once.

The platform lights flickered.

Not the way a broken light flickers. More like someone had tapped the back of the panel — the whole row dimmed for a moment, then came back. He looked up at the lights. Then at the clock. 00:25.

At 00:30 the announcement came. The usual woman's voice, the rhythm and tone and pauses all exactly as usual.

Attention, passengers. The previous train experienced minor signal interference at the prior station. This service is delayed, estimated arrival 00:37. Please mind the gap.

00:37 wasn't on the timetable.

He looked down at it. There was no such time. The last entry read "00:20 late service," and below it "Next-day 05:30 first train," and the seven hours in between were marked, in plain official lettering, not in service.

He looked up at the platform display. The line of text on the screen read:

00:37 　→　Terminus

Where the service name, the train number, the stop information were supposed to go, every field was blank. The screen held only the one word: Terminus. A year of cram school, and he'd never once seen this line put the word "Terminus" up there by itself.

At 00:37 exactly, the train arrived.

---

It came in slowly.

Too slow to be a train braking into a station. More like an old man wheeling in the bicycle he'd known his whole life, walking the last few steps. The rails didn't give off their usual high metal whine. The whole train was muted, as if someone had turned the volume dial way down.

The light inside the carriage was yellowish, the color temperature of some old incandescent bulb from the 1980s, nothing at all like the cold white of the 2065 Rivermag.

He hesitated three seconds. Then he got on.

He had to — taxis refused night-study students at this hour, walking home was forty minutes, and his mother was waiting for him to text "home safe." Bet on one stop, he thought; see whether it stops at Qingcaohe, get off if anything's wrong.

The doors closed with a very soft "ta."

The whole carriage held only him and one old man.

---

The old man sat in the priority seat. He wore a gray suit jacket washed pale, the collar ringed with a faint stain of sweat-salt — the same era of cut as the one his Waigong wore in the photo on the memorial altar.

The old man didn't look up. His hands rested on his knees, all ten fingers clean, the nails trimmed very short.

Gu Mingye sat down three seats away. The scrolling LED sign ran its usual string, "No eating or drinking, keep quiet," and after one pass the line stopped and changed to this:

Next station　・　ㅡ

ㅡ. A single dash. Not a station name.

He blinked once. The dash was still there.

It was then that the old man spoke his first words, quietly.

"Young man, you're not someone who's meant to be on this train."

The voice wasn't loud. The tone was level, gave nothing away. Like the way his Waigong used to tell a customer at that old bookshop on Old Cheng Street, "this isn't the edition you're looking for" — purely a statement of fact.

Gu Mingye didn't look at him. But he heard it. Heard it with perfect clarity — clear enough that it didn't seem like a voice crossing the distance of several seats, but more like someone had set those words one centimeter behind his left ear and spoken them there, gently, once.

He wanted to ask something. His throat was dry; no sound came.

The train passed the first station. No announcement.

---

Past the second station, still none.

Only at the third was there a sound — not the usual string of transfer chimes.

It was something like a temple fair heard from very far away: one strike of a small gong, then half a second later a beat on a wooden fish, then half a second after that a bell. Three sounds, two gaps, lined up exactly in a row. The bell was short, and when it ended the carriage fell back into that muted quiet.

Only now did Gu Mingye turn his head and look out the window.

There were no tunnel lights outside.

Normally the underground stretch of the Rivermag had tunnel walls of metal shell with the rail set into them, a coldish blue sensor light every ten meters, the train cutting it into bar after bar of horizontal light as it slid past. Tonight none of that was outside.

It was rows and rows of small paper lanterns.

Hung on something he couldn't make out. Each lantern bore a slip of paper with frayed edges, the strokes of the writing too faint to read clearly — but he could see that the character in the very middle was the same one. The same character, pasted over and over:

過

過, 過, 過, 過 — running back toward the rear of the train, as if someone had gone along the rail and sealed every unseen inch of this night road with the same character. 過: "pass."

He didn't recognize this method of sealing. But his grandmother had once pasted something much like it, on the lintel of the kitchen door at her old house in the Old River District — a single character, red paper, black ink. Grandma said it was for "the things that shouldn't come in" to see. She never said what things.

The year Grandma died, his mother cleared out the old house and tore that paper down, and the cement wall it had covered showed a patch a little darker than the rest, as if something had been held back behind that paper for a long time. Probably the damp, his mother said, and painted over it. Gu Mingye was eleven then, standing beside her, watching, saying nothing. But he remembered that the dark mark was shaped a little like a circle, a circle with one small piece missing.

---

The announcement came, the usual woman's voice.

Next station, Platform Thirteen. Please mind the gap.

Platform Thirteen.

This line had fifteen stations in all, and not one of them had a platform numbered higher than five. A year of cram school, every Friday, and as far as he could remember the biggest transfer station on this line only went up to Platform Three. There was no thirteen.

Gu Mingye took the notebook out of his pocket, turned to that day's page, and wrote it down.

T　h　i　r　t　e　e　n

Spaced out on purpose. As if afraid that something might slip into the gaps between the characters.

The train slowed.

The old man didn't move. From the moment he'd boarded, the old man hadn't shifted his posture once.

---

The train stopped, the doors opened.

Outside was a platform.

Cement floor, tiled walls, the design exactly like the rest of the Rivermag — only the color of the tile, the white had a thread of cyan in it, like old toothpaste left out too long. The platform lights were the same cold white, but the angle of them sat a centimeter lower than it should.

The whole platform was empty.

On the wall directly across from the doors, a rectangular station sign was bolted up. White ground, black lettering: Platform Thirteen. The ink of the "thirteen" was a little darker than the rest, as if someone had just filled it in. He looked down and checked it against what he'd just written. He hadn't misread.

Across the platform was a glass wall. Beyond it lay a street he'd never seen. At the far end, past a few low houses, a roof of dark red brick tile, and under the eaves a tiny cyan oil lamp burning quietly.

That lamp was wrong.

It shouldn't be burning that color in this era. And he recognized that cyan.

His grandmother had once hung a lamp the exact same color from a hook on the outer wall of the second-floor balcony, at her old house in the Old River District. She'd said: if you see this kind of cyan light at night, don't go toward it. It's for the things that shouldn't come in to see.

The year Grandma died, he was eleven, and he'd meant to ask her one more time what that lamp was for. He never got the chance.

---

He stood up and walked to the doors.

Behind him, the old man spoke a second time:

"Go down, see it through, and come back. If you can't come back, that's a choice you made yourself."

This time the words weren't aimed at his ears. They were aimed at the place below his collarbone that had been going cold all this while. He knew the old man hadn't said it idly.

The phone in his pocket buzzed once, very faint, like it was muffled under three layers of cloth. He didn't take it out. At this hour it was probably his mother's "are you home yet." He usually texted "out, on the train" when he left cram school at 23:48. If she hadn't heard by 23:55, she'd start sending. It had been close to fifty minutes now; the phone had buzzed a few times and he hadn't kept count.

He should turn around, go back into the carriage, ride with this train — wherever it was going. He should send a line, "late service running late, almost there," so his mother would stop waiting.

But that dark red brick tile under the eaves, the slight upward curve at the edge of the roof tiles — it was the same curve as the roof of Grandma's old house.

He knew Grandma couldn't possibly be there.

He got off the train anyway.

The instant his foot touched that white-with-cyan tile, the doors closed, with the same soft "ta."

He turned back.

The old man still sat in the priority seat, posture unchanged, not looking his way. The train showed no intention of waiting at the platform for more passengers — two seconds later it pulled away, muted, slow, toward the next station that shouldn't exist.

He watched the train slide into the tunnel, where the rows of paper lanterns with their 過 characters still hung. On and on, until a curve swallowed the red light at the rear of the train.

He looked once at the patch of ground where he'd just stepped off — the Platform Thirteen sign that should have been on the wall was gone.

The tiled wall looked wiped clean, blank, nothing written on it at all.

---

He gripped the notebook, turned, and looked out beyond the glass wall.

The cyan oil lamp was still there.

Wind came in off the mouth of the street, blowing into this platform that shouldn't exist, the one he'd just stepped onto. In the wind was a smell he'd never met in his life — like very old incense, shut in a wooden box for fifty years, and then the box opened, that one instant.

The wind passed his left ear and went around it.

As it went around, there was a voice — not the old man's voice, not the woman's announcement, but a low murmur whose gender, age, and accent he couldn't place, very soft and very close, pressed to the inner curve of his left ear, as if someone were speaking a complete sentence into it.

But he couldn't catch the words.

It wasn't that he couldn't hear — the voice was close enough that he caught even the rhythm of the other one's breath. What it said seemed to be Chinese, but every word came broken into incomplete syllables, blown into his ear from different directions by the wind, and he couldn't piece the sentence back together.

It was the same kind he'd been hearing since he was fourteen, maybe once or twice a week, on the bus, in the convenience store — the kind he'd always written off as his ears being a little off.

Only this time it was closer. Close enough that, for the first time, he wanted to stop and hear what the other one was actually trying to say.

He looked down, opened the notebook, and went on writing below it.

His hand shook a little.

T　h　i　s　　i　s　　n　o　t　　t　i　n　n　i　t　u　s

---

He had just put the notebook back in his pocket when the platform lights, starting from the far end, began going out one by one.

Not the way a broken light goes out. They were being switched off by someone, in order, gently.

The speed of the darkening was the same slowness as the train coming in.

He turned to look at where the sign had been — that tiled wall was beginning to cave slightly inward. Like someone pressing it in slowly with a finger from the other side. From the seams between the tiles seeped something that wasn't water, fading another layer off the place where the sign should have been.

From over by the mouth of the street, under the cyan oil lamp, came a very soft sound, like a door being pushed open.

He knew the carriage door he'd stepped off of wasn't coming back.

He had to reach the mouth of that street before this platform finished being wiped away.

He gripped the notebook and took the first step.

---

【Ch. 001 End · Shuyuan Street, Qingcheng → Shuyuan Station】