It wasn’t the ravenous hunger that awoke her for that had been with her since the accident. There was a sound, a new sound. Water. She could hear tiny trickles of water around her.

Aleera didn’t know how long she had been in the dark with the unrelenting pressure keeping her immobile. The cold was irrelevant to her, even the lack of air was meaningless, but the weight above her was massive. She hadn’t been able to move so she slept, though fitfully. She experienced moments of startling lucidity and then she panicked. She was trapped, unable to move more than the slightest degree in her fingers and toes. What had happened? If only she could remember.

Then she would drift away again into blessed oblivion within her accursed prison.

The American railway. Travel was dangerous for her, and certainly by rail she could easily be stranded away from sanctuary if she were a passenger. So instead she elected to go as freight in the mail train heading from Spokane to Seattle.

Something had gone wrong. She was awake but the train wasn’t moving. Had they arrived at Seattle?

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